Depicting Deity: A Metatheological Approach

A theology aims to explicate what God is like, and a metatheology investigates more fundamental issues concerning how to structure such a project and where it should begin. Approaches that ignore this more fundamental investigation risk presupposing stances that do not withstand scrutiny and perhaps would never have been endorsed if considered directly. In addition, approaches that ignore the issue of fundamentality often switch from one set of assumptions to another without noticing the change in perspective that results, giving rise to a chance of incoherence and to an approach that is theoretically disorderly and thus failing to as systematic and elegant as we would like. This work begins with the more basic question of where to begin thinking about God, where it is best to start the project of theology, in a way that offers some hope of a defensible metatheory, from which a complete theology, displaying the kind of theoretical elegance and structure we find in our best scientific and philosophical theories, can be developed.