She then went on to earn a Master of Arts degree at Yale University in 1960 and was awarded her PhD in 1964 – a revised version of her doctoral thesis being published in 1966 as Literature and the Christian Life.

At Yale she was deeply influenced by the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, but gained an important new perspective from her teacher H. Richard Niebuhr with his Appreciation of liberalism's concern for experience, relativity, the symbolic imagination and the role of the affections.

For thirty years, she taught at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was the Carpenter Professor of Theology.

[2] For McFague, the language of Christian theology is necessarily a construction a human creation, a tool to delineate as best we can the nature and limits of our understanding of God.

[5]: 6  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.

[6] 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".

[4] 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.

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.

The experience of Jesus - his parables, table fellowship and healing ministry in particular - makes him a rich source of the 'destabilising, inclusive and non-hierarchical' metaphors Christians might profitably borrow from him as paradigmatic, a 'foundational figure'.

She used others, such as the notion of the world as God's body, an image used by the early church but which 'fell by the wayside' (according to British theologian Daphne Hampson[7]: 158 ), in her search for models 'appropriate' to our needs.

In this metaphor, God is not a distant being but being-itself, a characterization that has led some to suggest McFague's theology was a form of monism.

British theologian Daphne Hampson notes 'the more I ponder this book [Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age], the less clear I am that it is theistic'.

[9] Trevor Hart, a theologian from the Barthian tradition, within which McFague herself situated her early work, says that her approach, while it seeks to develop images that resonate with 'contemporary experiences of relatedness to God',[10] shows her to be 'cutting herself loose from the moorings of Scripture and tradition' and appealing only to experience and credibility as her guides.

[6] She insisted on a relevant theology, 'a better portrait of Christian faith for our day',<[5]: 14  and reminded us that her approach was not intended as a blueprint, but a sketch for a change in attitude.