ABSTRACT
The notion that an apophatic God avoids anthropomorphism works well when one has in the sights a particular manifestation of anthropomorphic projection, namely the Cartesian/Enlightenment variety. Richard Swinburne is a happy hunting-ground for those hostile to an anthropomorphic God, in that he is so clear and explicit about adopting something like the infinity function. The apophatic God can be as straight-forward a projection of this intensely private romantic self as the Swinburnian model is of the Cartesian self. This chapter agrees with Denys Turner that modern apophatic constructions lack a well-understood and explicit ontological underpinning, but the fear is that they are motivated by poorly understood implicit and so all the more dangerous presuppositions about the human and political. The apophatic God may be the ultimate source of the cosmos and the public domain, but as with ourselves, nothing is revealed to us in this domain about God, except what God is not.
