ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the religious-language issues of metaphor, gender, and factual meaning, starting with the issue of factual meaning. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or term that literally denotes or means one thing is applied to another thing so that an implied comparison between the some things is made. Rosemary Ruether is saying, is an "inclusiveness" that "draws upon the images and experiences of both genders." In traditional forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there is a God who is believed in and who is believed to exist. God in the Christian tradition, as in Judaism and Islam, is differently conceived from how, say, the gods of the Greek pantheon are conceived. If religious persons image God as Father, that does not mean that they must or should think that God is a male.
