caricature to suggest that all (and especially all recent) analytic philosophy of religion is
subject to these same failings, as seems to be Jantzen's and Anderson's view. On the
contrary, there are signs of such masculinist traits already starting to crack under their
own weight: the notable recent turn to the discussion of
end p.516
God-as-Trinity, for instance, or of the relationship between the human and the divine in
Christ, while also subject potentially to the distortions of the masculinist imaginary, are
nonetheless at least telling first signs of an increasing interest in communion and
relationship as philosophical categories.^22
Thus, I shall be making here some rather different suggestions from those of Jantzen and
Anderson for further feminist interrogation of, and interaction with, analytic philosophy
of religion. I believe these have greater prospects for pragmatic success in persuading the
guild that gender is already intrinsic to its operations, and thus urgently in need of the
sort of attention and clarification for which its discipline is justly famed. Gender theory
cannot then be safely left to angry women who have denounced and left the analytic
guild, or to exponents of Eastern myth and mimesis who appear to have departed from
the central concerns of the current analytic discussion. Rather, gender is, already, at the
heart of this discussion. If it be objected that this strategy is objectionably taking up the
master's tools, I can only reply that these tools are so powerful and significant already
that the demands of Realpolitik drive me to handle, redirect, and imaginatively
renegotiate their usage. This indeed is a vital first part of the task of developing a
transformed rationality. As I suggested at the start of this chapter, clarity, incisiveness,
coherence, and philosophical persuasiveness are not in themselves the feminist problem:
their valorization should not be the central cause of feminist anguish;^23 rather, it is
precisely the attempt to clarify and convict that fuels the feminist attempt to identify the
sexisms that lurk in the regnant philosophical discourse in the first place.
Let me then highlight programmatically in closing just three related areas in which a
feminist perspective nuanced rather differently from that of Jantzen's and Anderson's
might suggest a fruitful future interchange between analytic philosophy of religion and
feminist theory.
The first area concerns the notable and sophisticated developments in recent analytic
philosophy of religion in the epistemology of “religious experience,” developments that,
one might argue, already herald a disturbance or destabilization of masculinist thought
patterns. One thinks here of such diverse, but influential, approaches as (1) the appeal to
the evidence of religious experience as both the most subjective and yet also the most
definitively significant component in a “cumulative case” approach to the existence of
God (Swinburne 1979); (2) the development of nonfoundationalist appeals to “proper
basicality” in so-called Reformed epistemology, and of the significance granted there to
direct intimacy with the Holy Spirit (Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1983; Plantinga 2000);
(3) the rehabiliation of the Reidian notion of “credulity” or “trust” (in contradistinction to
a fundamental Humean skepticism) as a starting point in reflection on the cultivation of
religious affections, and the implicit acknowledgment of the importance of child
development in this epistemological move (Wolterstorff 2001); (4) the assessment of
“affectivity” as a vital factor in religious epistemology and cognitive