of these. Though such habits of language can be useful (since in the Western world at least people are more used to thinking of God in personal, than in abstract terms), they become constricting, when there is an insistence that God is always and only (or predominantly) like this. Metaphor as a way of speaking about God McFague remarked, "theology is mostly fiction", but a multiplicity of images, or metaphors, can and should enhance and enrich our models of God. Most importantly, new metaphors can help give substance to new ways of conceiving God appropriately "for our time", and more adequate models for the ethically urgent tasks humankind faces, principally the task of caring for an ecologically fragile planet. McFague remarked that: "we construct the worlds we inhabit, but also that we forget we have done so". In this light, her work is understood as about "helping to unmask simplistic, absolutist, notions of objectivity" in relation to the claims language makes about God. And such images are usually not neutral: in McFague's understanding (and that of many feminist theologians), images of God are usually embedded within a particular socio-cultural and political system, such as the patriarchal one feminist theology critiques extensively - she asserted that "there are personal, relational models which have been suppressed in the Christian tradition because of their social and political consequences". But the 'trick' of a successful metaphor, whether in science or theology, is that it is capable of generating a model, which in turn can give life to an overarching concept or world-view, which looks like a coherent explanation of everything – looks like "reality" or "truth". In McFague's view, this is how the complex of "male" images for God has long functioned in the Christian West – but it has done so in a way that is oppressive for all but (privileged) men. So, the notion of God, as "father", "lord" or "king" now seemingly unavoidably conjures up oppressive associations of "ownership", obedience and dependency, and in turn dictates, consciously or otherwise, a whole complex of attitudes, responses and behaviours on the part of theistic believers. McFague's sources of new metaphors and models This understanding of the shifting nature of language in relation to God underpins McFague's handling of the 'building blocks' that have long been considered foundational to accounts of belief, primarily Scripture and tradition. But neither is privileged as a source of