Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language

摘要

This most recent monograph by Janet Martin Soskice, Reader in Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge, befits her reputation as a careful reader of texts from across the Christian past, both ancient and near, and an insightful thinker in her own right. As with her earlier Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Soskice insists on shaping linguistic thought along lines sketched by the self-revelation of God in Christ, known in the testimony of the prophets and apostles. As the God of Israel became 'of our kind', the metaphor of 'kinship' suitably reflects the intimacy and contingency of the divine economy. In this volume, she tackles the role of metaphor in speaking of God and God's works, with a constant eye to gender and the ways in which metaphor can help or hinder gendered life. She surveys a number of doctrines to that end: anthropology, imago Dei, creation, fellowship, Trinity, Christology, love, eschatology and so forth.