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Just how different, really, is my position from Phillips's?

In earlier formulations of my position, I could still speak of symbolic talk of God's love as expressing "a true metaphysical claim," albeit "a symbolic metaphysical claim"; and I resisted the contention of noncognitivist theories of religious language that the only function of such language is noncognitive, even while agreeing that its primary function is exactly that (The Point of Christology: 144 f.). But even then I had gone a long way toward making something like the same point that Phillips makes – -- for example, in analyzing what we mean by "the reality of God." "This reality," he says, "is independent of any given believer, but its independence is not the independence of a separate biography. It is independent of the believer in that the believer measures his life against it .... The immortality of the soul refers to the state an individual is in in relation to the unchanging reality of God" (Death and Immortality: 54 f.).

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