It is the “available God” whom we have in mind when we worship or pray; it is the available referent that gives content and specificity to any sense of moral obligation or duty to obey God’s “will”; it is the available God in terms of which we speak and think whenever we use the term “God.” In this sense “God” denotes for all practical purposes what is essentially a mental or imaginative construct. This does not mean, of course, that believers directly pray to or seek to serve some mere idea or image in their minds — that would be the crassest sort of idolatry; it is rather that what their images and ideas are of is the available God, not some utterly unknowable X. (From “God as Symbol,” in God the Problem (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 85-86.) I suggested that what we today should regard as God is the ongoing creativity in the universe - the bringing (or coming) into being of what is genuinely new, something transformative;(…)In some respects and some degrees this creativity is apparently happening continuously, in and through the processes or activities or events around us and within us(…) is a profound mystery to us humans(…)But on the whole, as we look back on the long and often painful developments that slowly brought human life and our complex human worlds into being, we cannot but regard this creativity as serendipitous(…)I want to stress that this serendipitous creativity - God! - to which we should be responsive is not the private possession of any of the many particular religious faiths or systems(…)This profound mystery of creativity is manifest in and through the overall human bio-historical evolution and development everywhere on the planet; and it continues to show itself throughout the entire human project, no matter what may be the particular religious and or cultural beliefs.-Prairie view lectures (archive.bethelks.edu/ml/issue/vol-60-no-4/article/prairie-view-lectures-some-concluding-remarks/) Fred Sanders: In his later work, Kaufman used the term “creativity” as a kind of ultimate criterion, thinking of God (or “God;” I’m not good at observing the distinction) as creativity itself. Thus a writer who had confessed that he was “tone-deaf” about religious experience (“When others speak of their ‘experience of God,’ or of ‘God’s presence,’ or the profound experience of ‘the holy’ or of ‘sacredness,’ I simply do not know what they are talking about.”) and who decisively rejected “the personalistic conception of God” (“so powerfully presented by the traditional images of Christian and Jewish piety… less and less defensible in face of the issues humanity today confronts”), confessed a hope in the “God”-world matrix itself: “In the beginning was creativity, and the creativity was with God, and the creativity was God. All things came into being through the mystery of creativity; apart from creativity nothing would have come into being.” With this fundamental methodology, where does the liberal project go? Does creativity become flesh? Is there sin and atonement? Kaufman answered these questions, and the resulting system (see his definitive book, In the Face of Mystery) is obviously, openly different from traditional Christianity on every point. Kaufman’s approach to theology was explicitly not based on revelation. He was insistent that theology was to be carried out as an act of the constructive imagination, which forced the possibility of revelation out of theology, taking its place, and assigning to all the concepts and doctrines of the Christian faith a brand new content. (patheos/blogs/scriptorium/2011/08/gordon-kaufman-1925-2011-theologian-of-god-in-quotes/)
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 08:49:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015