Abstract: The paper proposes that a description of religious discourse as metaphoric, rather than symbolic, offers a more effective way to explain the Christian affirmation of identity between Jesus and God—more effective because it suggests a way to maintain the realism of both the identity claim and the affirmation of Jesus’ full humanity. The proposal responds to Roger Haight’s constructive appropriation of Tillich’s and Rahner’s theology of symbol in Jesus Symbol of God. It argues that attention to the fundamental clash between the philosophical and theological grounding of Tillich’s and Rahner’s notions of symbol discloses quite different conceptions of the logic of religious predication in general and in Christology specifically, despite a number of similarities in their phenomenological characterizations of religious symbols.