One can, for example, call the covenant a metaphor for the relationship of Yahweh and Israel, and in the technical sense it is. Indeed, all words concerning religion are metaphors, for no set of words can accurately encase the relationship religion posits between the infinite and the finite. (p. 91)
It always surprises me when people say things like this, because it is obviously false. The fact that a given set of words only deals with the phenomenon in a rough and approximate way doesn't in the least requier us to say that the words are all used metaphorically; they could also be used literally in a rough and approximate way. The same goes for understatement: the fact that a set of words understates some facet of the phenomenon doesn't imply that they are used metaphorically. And, indeed, if all religious statements were metaphorical, none would be meaningful. That a proposition uses a metaphor implies that it is not, in the sense in which it is taken, such that it would be true if it were a literal statement.* Thus, if I give a sentence like,
"There is a relationship between the finite and the infinite,"
and this is taken only metaphorically, so that the relationship between the two is only metaphorical, this implies that there is no relationship between the finite and the infinite. If I take only metaphorically the sentence,
"The infinite exists,"
I am committed to denying that the infinite exists; the existence of the infinite is only a metaphor. (It might be a metaphor for something else; or it might just be an ornamental metaphor, not standing for anything in particular.)
If all religious language is metaphorical, religious language is at best talking about something nonreligious in a figurative way.
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* It should be noted that this question is different from the question of whether metaphorical propositions can be true. (I've argued on a number of occasions that they can be, and that all the arguments that are usually used to argue they can't could easily be adapted to argue that literal propositions can't be true.) The truth of a metaphorical proposition doesn't depend on any literal propositions; a metaphorical proposition is true iff what is meant by the proposition obtains in reality. ('In reality', of course', is not the same as 'literally'.) But every meaningful metaphorical proposition presupposes something about its subject that is taken literally; this is one reason why we are inclined to take literal statements as more fundamental, despite the ineliminable abundance of metaphorical statements even in the most technical discourses. And note, too, that this relatively uncontroversial claim is different from the highly controversial claim that everything that can be said metaphorically can be said literally; all it entails is that something about anything that is said metaphorically can be said literally.
