Jewish images of God
pp. 111-123
in: Jeanine Diller, Asa Kasher (eds), Models of God and alternative ultimate realities, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
After briefly describing my epistemological approach to God as a version of soft perspectivism and philosophical realism in which one comes to know God not so much by reasoning about the Eternal but rather by interacting with God in speech and action, I note one central problem of describing God – namely, the danger of limiting God to our descriptions and possibly even becoming idolatrous. I then explore how our images of God gain their meaning, how we can assess the truth or falsity of our images of God, and how images of God gain authority within a religious community like that of the Jews, all in a way that can avoid intellectual and religious idolatry.