Growing up in a fundamentalist household I was accustomed to the question, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” I would hear it at the end of every church service right before an altar call. All these years later I could still orchestrate one if I needed to. The pastor asks everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes. The pastor then spews out some words, overly generic. “Are you burdened by life?” “Do you feel like there is no way out of where you find yourself?” And my personal favorite, “If you died tonight/today/on the way home from church would you go to heaven or hell?” And then the solution was presented to whatever poor soul either felt down enough about life or was scared shitless by the possibility of burning in hell that they would raise their hand or perhaps make their way to the altar to be assisted by someone waiting on the side or in the front pews to pray with them and, if possible, lead them to Christ. The main selling point, when it wasn’t avoiding eternal damnation, lakes of fire, or any other horror from a Heironymus Bosch painting, was the promise of a personal relationship with God.
I bring up all of this because, whether or not one is a fundamentalist, one of the main tenets of Christianity is that God is in some way personal. But what if this is not the case? The farther along I move on this personal journey towards something (nameless and indescribable as it is), it seems I keep dropping more and more beliefs off to the side like some pioneering wagon leaving a trail of discarded items behind to lighten up its load. For a while now, one of those things that I have tried to leave behind (and still it keeps popping back up) is the dependency on the idea of a personal God, and, even more troublesome lately, an agential God.
There is some place for salvaging some of the idea of a personal encounter with God though, but I think it is through both the presence of the other, and in interaction with the other. First, the presence of the other. I like the idea of panentheism. God, whatever it is, can be understood as being inside/outside all things, yet not identical with all things (pantheism). Thus God still remains an elusive substance, present to us in the other, whether it be bird, ant, tree, or person. Panentheism keeps a limit on how far we go with this though, keeping us modest from proclaiming ourselves to be God.
Secondly, interaction with the other. Gordon Kaufman comments on this in In Face of Mystery much better than I (see page 333). Nonetheless, here is my take on his argument. In 1 John (see chapter 4.7-21) we are reminded “that no one has ever seen God.” I like to think about that…all this searching for something that can never be seen, never touched, so ephemeral, so vaporous, like grasping at smoke. The chapter hints at this, I think, basic truth: Whatever God is, our experience of God will be found in our relationships with the other, whatever the “other” happens to be at any given moment. It is this interaction in which, dare I say, God is in some sense is created. That energetic surge, that give and take, and most importantly, the love given back and forth is what creates the space where God is found. I guess it is appropriate that the author of 1 John bluntly states that “God is love.”
So, in this sense, can God ever be truly personal. I think, in a way, God is personal only if we create the environment within and without in which God can be manifested. God is personal, but in the sense that the possibility for God lies within us and especially within our interactions.
What are the consequences of this, then? Is God constantly being created and destroyed? Becoming incarnate and crucified? Do the possibilities and capabilities of God evolve along with us?
Showing posts with label Gordon Kaufman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gordon Kaufman. Show all posts
Monday, November 12, 2007
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Pondering "Holy" Destruction
First, some passages which are relevant to what I am thinking about these days.
“I have no words with which to portray the feelings of the heart when it receives this divine will in the guise of humiliation, poverty, annihilation…By just that which the senses lack is faith heightened, increased, and nourished; the less there is to human eyes, the more there is to the soul…Mary sees the Apostles fly, but she remains constant at the foot of the cross; she recognizes her Son in that face spat upon and bruised.”
- Jean-Pierre de Caussade
“God is not thought of as some being outside the world but rather as a particular form of creativity and ordering going on within the world, namely that serendipitous ordering which has given rise (among other things) to the evolution of life on planet Earth and the emergence of human beings, and which continues to sustain us and to move us toward a more profound humanization…And faith (or belief) in God will be interpreted essentially as commitment, in the face of the ultimate mystery of life, to this reality central to this particular vision of the world (rather than as assent to some quite dubious propositions about some cosmic person, as it so often is).”
- Gordon Kaufman
“Our falls into nothingness can be and must be trusted – we can learn to let ourselves fall, to let ourselves sink. Isn’t this what the seed does as it falls into the ground, eventually to sprout new life?”
- Matthew Fox
I’ve recently been reading Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery and also, at the suggestion of my spiritual director, Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence. I am finding Caussade to be helpful but at the same time having some difficulty “translating” what he writes to better fit my personal understanding of God. I find myself agreeing with Kaufman’s working definition of “God.”
For a while now, I’ve been at peace with Fox’s elaboration on what he identifies as the via negativa – the path towards the divine through the negative aspects of existence such as pain, suffering, isolation, aloneness, destruction, and, ultimately, death. I have found myself benefiting from being able to view these things anew and, as is Fox’s intention, to be able to trust in these things. So, as I continue to construct my personal theology, Fox’s thoughts have been securely mortared into the hodge-podge structure that it is.
But here is the sticking point and the thing that has become my obsession lately. It is the immense amount of destruction that is integral to the universe. How does this fact correspond to or shape my idea of God? Like Kaufman, I believe that any theology, if it is to be of any use, needs to have as a conversation partner the findings of the empirical sciences. This is not to say that one has to be bound to the determinism or reductionism of the sciences, but that one cannot ignore the information they provide about the workings of the universe and ourselves. So, to restate the problem again, if God is, according to Kaufman, “the serendipitous movement which we discern in the cosmic and historical processes that have created human existence,” then what are we to make of all the destruction that has been part of this creative serendipitous movement? Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the existence of destruction and death. I accept that they are necessary. But how does that necessity help modify this understanding of God. Specifically, I am concerned about the individual thing experiencing the necessary destruction.
If God is creative serendipitous movement, then does God somehow have to be found in the precise moment of destruction? Kaufman’s view, and he himself admits this, is found via reading back into cosmic and human history this movement. The problem is that this becomes a meta-utilitarian viewpoint in which the destructive presence in the cosmos is seen as beneficial precisely because it is viewed from the present. I suppose I could walk away at this point and say to myself, “O.K., I can trust this destructive presence because based on my looking back into the past and seeing the good that comes from it, I can rest knowing that any future destruction, including my own, will ultimately come to some good.” And that may be fine and workable. Nonetheless, I feel an inner urge to linger on this point and meditate upon it and explore it some more until I am fully satisfied.
What I hope to find is a way in which God is to be found in that precise instant of annihilation – that destructive moment. And I feel that it has to be something more than just a greater good coming from it in an event that occurs after the destruction. Let me give an example. If a hawk swoops down and grabs a sparrow and eats it, then obviously some benefit comes from it. The hawk is sustained to live for a while longer. But any redemptive act has to also be for the agent undergoing the suffering or destruction. There must be redemption for the sparrow. It cannot be only a posthumous benefit for something other than the victim. I am aware that certain process theologians address this issue by pointing to a redemption within God. But that only works if one accepts the process conception of God, which I am not 100% sold on. And this is not just an issue of theodicy. Rather than trying to justify God in the face of destruction, it is a search to see what implications destruction, so vital a presence, has for my always developing concept of God.
“I have no words with which to portray the feelings of the heart when it receives this divine will in the guise of humiliation, poverty, annihilation…By just that which the senses lack is faith heightened, increased, and nourished; the less there is to human eyes, the more there is to the soul…Mary sees the Apostles fly, but she remains constant at the foot of the cross; she recognizes her Son in that face spat upon and bruised.”
- Jean-Pierre de Caussade
“God is not thought of as some being outside the world but rather as a particular form of creativity and ordering going on within the world, namely that serendipitous ordering which has given rise (among other things) to the evolution of life on planet Earth and the emergence of human beings, and which continues to sustain us and to move us toward a more profound humanization…And faith (or belief) in God will be interpreted essentially as commitment, in the face of the ultimate mystery of life, to this reality central to this particular vision of the world (rather than as assent to some quite dubious propositions about some cosmic person, as it so often is).”
- Gordon Kaufman
“Our falls into nothingness can be and must be trusted – we can learn to let ourselves fall, to let ourselves sink. Isn’t this what the seed does as it falls into the ground, eventually to sprout new life?”
- Matthew Fox
I’ve recently been reading Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery and also, at the suggestion of my spiritual director, Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence. I am finding Caussade to be helpful but at the same time having some difficulty “translating” what he writes to better fit my personal understanding of God. I find myself agreeing with Kaufman’s working definition of “God.”
For a while now, I’ve been at peace with Fox’s elaboration on what he identifies as the via negativa – the path towards the divine through the negative aspects of existence such as pain, suffering, isolation, aloneness, destruction, and, ultimately, death. I have found myself benefiting from being able to view these things anew and, as is Fox’s intention, to be able to trust in these things. So, as I continue to construct my personal theology, Fox’s thoughts have been securely mortared into the hodge-podge structure that it is.
But here is the sticking point and the thing that has become my obsession lately. It is the immense amount of destruction that is integral to the universe. How does this fact correspond to or shape my idea of God? Like Kaufman, I believe that any theology, if it is to be of any use, needs to have as a conversation partner the findings of the empirical sciences. This is not to say that one has to be bound to the determinism or reductionism of the sciences, but that one cannot ignore the information they provide about the workings of the universe and ourselves. So, to restate the problem again, if God is, according to Kaufman, “the serendipitous movement which we discern in the cosmic and historical processes that have created human existence,” then what are we to make of all the destruction that has been part of this creative serendipitous movement? Let me make it clear that I am not concerned about the existence of destruction and death. I accept that they are necessary. But how does that necessity help modify this understanding of God. Specifically, I am concerned about the individual thing experiencing the necessary destruction.
If God is creative serendipitous movement, then does God somehow have to be found in the precise moment of destruction? Kaufman’s view, and he himself admits this, is found via reading back into cosmic and human history this movement. The problem is that this becomes a meta-utilitarian viewpoint in which the destructive presence in the cosmos is seen as beneficial precisely because it is viewed from the present. I suppose I could walk away at this point and say to myself, “O.K., I can trust this destructive presence because based on my looking back into the past and seeing the good that comes from it, I can rest knowing that any future destruction, including my own, will ultimately come to some good.” And that may be fine and workable. Nonetheless, I feel an inner urge to linger on this point and meditate upon it and explore it some more until I am fully satisfied.
What I hope to find is a way in which God is to be found in that precise instant of annihilation – that destructive moment. And I feel that it has to be something more than just a greater good coming from it in an event that occurs after the destruction. Let me give an example. If a hawk swoops down and grabs a sparrow and eats it, then obviously some benefit comes from it. The hawk is sustained to live for a while longer. But any redemptive act has to also be for the agent undergoing the suffering or destruction. There must be redemption for the sparrow. It cannot be only a posthumous benefit for something other than the victim. I am aware that certain process theologians address this issue by pointing to a redemption within God. But that only works if one accepts the process conception of God, which I am not 100% sold on. And this is not just an issue of theodicy. Rather than trying to justify God in the face of destruction, it is a search to see what implications destruction, so vital a presence, has for my always developing concept of God.
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