religious revolution now 227been left but the seed within. From the dismissal of the Palestinian or
Arabian setting to the claim of the transgendered character of God,
there is no stopping point. What remains aft er the scandalous particu-
larity of the plot has been dismissed as inessential is likely to be the
secular piety of the present, thinly disguised as a revisionist interpreta-
tion of the long- dead prophet’s teachings.
Th e third scandal of reason is the least remarked. However, it is the
most fundamental. It is the incoherence of the idea of God, as God is
represented, or can be represented, in the mono the isms of the ancient
Middle East. Th ere are alternatives. None of them is satisfactory.
Th e fi rst option is to conceive God as the impersonal divine. Such is
the God of Buddhism, if we resist describing Buddhism as a cosmologi-
cal atheism. It is, more generally, the God of the many forms of panen-
theism that have been proposed in the course of the history of philoso-
phy (for example, in the philosophies of Spinoza, Schelling, Bergson,
and Whitehead). God is then something impersonal, in addition to the
world. Under a spatial meta phor, he constitutes nature but exceeds it.
Under a temporal meta phor, he is the horizon of the possible or of the
future, and the message of panentheism becomes “You have not seen
anything yet.”
Such an impersonal divine stands in insoluble contradiction to the
scriptural narratives of the salvation religions. It cannot be reconciled
with the stories of God’s creation of the world or of his redemptive ac-
tivity in history. In Christianity it makes the Trinity and the Incarna-
tion more than the mysteries that orthodox theology acknowledges
them to be: conceptions without meaning, other than through radical
reinterpretation of what the message of the religion has historically been
taken to be.
Th e second option is to represent God as a person. Exploiting the
resources of the analogical imagination, we then understand relations
between God and mankind by analogy to relations among persons. We
appeal to the idea of our participation in the life of God: the anthropo-
morphic conception of God may seem to be an extension of the theo-
morphic conception of the self.
Th e limits of analogy, however, are all too plain to see. What God
does in creating the world and in redeeming it is not like what any hu-
man being can do. Moreover, God does not face the ordeal of mortality,