But God is always already there, and he needed no help to get there, and in truth he didn't get there. Because again, he always automatically and necessarily is there. Scripture scholars disagree about it, but this is one possible meaning of the mysterious thing that God says in Exodus 3. I am who I am. If this is what God is, the first being, and therefore a fully actual being with no admixture of potentiality, then perhaps it won't be too hard to see why it's difficult to think of God as a person like us. To be a person is to be an individual being with a rational nature, a being who can think and act rationally. But for persons like us, thinking and acting rationally is all about actualizing potentialities. We grasp ideas, which means actualizing our potentiality to grasp them. We reason from one thing to another, which means actualizing our potentiality to think about the second thing, while perhaps also de-actualizing our potentiality to think about the first thing. We decide to do things, which means starting from not having settled on what to do to later settling on it, and so forth. If this is what being a person is, and if God is fully actual all the time, then he can't be a person. This is what philosophical problems often look like. On the one hand it seems to make sense to think something, for example, that God is a person. On the other hand it seems to make sense to reject that same thing. And the way out, at least sometimes, is to realize that there's some mistake lurking in the background somewhere, a mistake that needs to be brought to light. We need to get some new ideas on the table, ideas that will enable us to succeed in thinking of the Christian God as a personal God. So what I will propose is a certain, to mystic way of understanding language about God, I'll lay it out in three steps. First, I'll explain a three-way distinction between the univocal, equivocal, and the analogical uses of language. You may have heard this before. Second, I'll present a distinction between literal and metaphorical language. And third, I'll show how this enables us to talk and think about God. First, univocal, equivocal, analogical. Suppose I say that Socrates is human. Taken all by itself, this is not e-nivocal and it's not equivocal and it's not analogical either. It's not any of these because they apply, those three, apply only when we're using the same word more than once. But suppose instead I say that Socrates is human and that Plato is human. I just use the word human twice. And notice that I used it in exactly the same way. When I said that Plato was human, by human I meant the same thing as I meant when I said that Socrates was human. That's a univocal use of the word human. Now suppose I say that there is a bird on the bank of the Providence River, and then suppose I say that there is a bird sitting on the citizen's bank building on Westminster Street.