 The face value theory is a widely assumed—if not the default—approach taken to religious discourse in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Resistance to it is sometimes presented a brief aberration confined to the middle decades of the twentieth century (Mackie 1982: 2; Swinburne 1993: 88) with questionable if not anti-religious motivations (van Inwagen 2006: 156; Plantinga 2000: ch. 2, particularly in reference to Gordon Kaufman). However, as will become clear in the following sections, the opposition to face value theory is not of recent vintage and although some who disagree with face value theory may be atheists, the position is not tied to atheism.