wfn.org | Theologians explore the images and concepts of "God at 2000"

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Kathryn McCormick
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2000-048

Theologians explore the images and concepts of "God at 2000"

by Kathryn McCormick

     (ENS) Dazzling advances in science in recent years and the 
growing diversity of faiths living side by side are and  will be 
two of the chief influences on how people see God, according to 
the all-star line-up of theologians who gathered February 11 and 
12 in Corvallis, Oregon, to reflect on "God at 2000."

     Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, Joan Chittister, Diana Eck, 
Lawrence Kushner, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Desmond Tutu, 
representing the worlds of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, 
talked about how they see the sacred as the world enters a new 
millennium.

     The gathering, Trinity Institute's 31st national conference, 
not only packed a large auditorium on the campus of Oregon State 
University, it was beamed to nearly 300 downlink sites across the 
country and broadcast on the Internet for viewing in the U.S. and 
around the world. The conference was cosponsored by the 
Chautauqua Institution.

     Borg, professor of religion and culture at Oregon State, and 
the person who assembled the group of lecturers, began the two-
day presentation by declaring, "How we see God mattersnot 
because God wants us to get it right. It matters because how we 
see God matters to us.

     "Our ideas about God--our concepts, images and stories--can 
make God seem real or unreal, remote or near; and they shape our 
sense of the character of God and of what taking God seriously is 
about."

Need to see God again

     Explaining that he had charged each of the speakers to share 
what they had learned about God or the sacred, Borg said, "I am 
convinced that an older and very common Christian way of seeing 
God has become problematic for millions of people in our time." 
The church in North America, he added, needs to "see God again."

     As a young Lutheran, Borg said, he thought he had a clear 
idea of God, revealed in the Bible and in the creeds. God was 
"out there," a person-like being always watching to see how we 
measured up to his requirements. This God can intervene in 
earthly matters, but often--sometimes puzzlingly--chooses not to 
intervene.

     Now, after a journey through atheism to membership in the 
Episcopal Church, Borg said he has come to understand that God, 
ultimately, is ineffable, a mystery; that God is known in all the 
enduring religious traditions of the world; that God is 
transcendant, in us and around us; and that God loves everyone, 
is compassionate, and is passionate about social justice.

     "The Christian life is not about believing, not about 
requirements," he said. "But about a relationship with the one in 
whom we live and move and have our being, with the God who is 
right here as well as more than right here, with the one who is 
known by many names."

     In another talk, Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, echoed 
some of the same themes.

     "God is not the God I thought I knew in 1950," she declared. 
Growing up as a Roman Catholic, she said, "I have feared the God 
of judgment and been judgmental of others. I have used God to get 
me through life--called the 'intolerable' God's will and expected 
God to be the crutch that would make the unbearable bearable--
and, as a result, failed to take steps to change life either for 
myself or others when injustice masked itself as God's will and 
oppression as God's judgment.

     "I have, in other words, allowed God to be mediated to me 
through images of God foreign to the very idea of God."

God the puppeteer

     She talked about God as puppeteer, as potentate, as 
persecutor, and as "the mighty male to whom obedience, 
subservience and deference were the only proper response and in 
whose being women were apparent only for their absence."

     "I learned as life went by," she said, "that the God I make 
will be the God I seek, the spiritual life I live, the quality of 
my own heart.I have seen God grow, or maybe I have seen me grow 
and couldn't tell the difference." She said she has abandoned 
"God the cloud-sitter who keeps count of our childish 
stumblings."

     The God she knows now, she said, is a God of light and of 
mercy, "as close to me as the minute I'm in." The knowledge of 
that has led to other spiritual revelations.

     "Science was a great spiritual teacher for me," Chittister 
said, noting the breakthrough research that has revealed much 
about the world and of space during the last 50 years. "God was 
the God of the universe whose creating life lives in us and in 
the stars."

     The globalism evident over the past 20 years introduced a 
cognitive dissonance--"were all these others--over four-fifths of 
the world--really godless? Sprung from the Catholic ghetto, 
however good that may have been in my spiritual formation, I 
found God at work everywhere."

     And then there was ecofeminism, the growing awareness that 
both a male-centered and even a human-centered world is an 
insufficient, even warped, explanation of life if God is the 
fullness of being and no single being is the fullness of God. 
"God is not maleness magnified. God is life without end. All 
life. In everything. In everyone."

Close to other faiths

     The idea of globalization is a sobering contrast with the 
current fracturing of the human community, observed Diana Eck, 
professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard 
University and director of The Pluralism Project, which is 
studying religious pluralism in America. 

     Finding ourselves in close proximity to people of other 
faiths, she said, means Christians must think about the answers 
to two questions: How do we think about God in a world where 
people of other faiths speak of God in very different ways? How 
does a growing dialogue with people of other faiths affect our 
faith?

     A lifelong Methodist, Eck described some of her impressions 
from many journeys to India, where the practice of many faiths 
very different from her own served to expand her own ideas about 
God. In the United States, an overwhelmingly Christian nation, 
many neighborhoods--urban, suburban and rural--are seeing 
influxes now of persons of other faiths. Eck encouraged her 
audience to meet their new neighbors.

     Describing her own encounters with other faiths across the 
country, she said every service she had attended had opened her 
to revelations about her own faith and to new admiration for the 
faithfulness of others. 

     "Our task and joy," she said, "is to re-imagine God in light 
of what God has been doing in communities of other faiths," not 
easy when "we share a common world but not a common language of 
faith." We need to catch up with the dynamism of the current age, 
she added. "We can't be global with ideas that are essentially 
provincial."

     Christians in this country will have to widen their 
understanding and pay attention to others so that we might learn, 
she said.

Surrendered to God

     Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George 
Washington University, said an intimacy with a divine presence 
had been created in him at a very early age.

     "Speaking from my own humble struggling," he said, he came 
to see how surrender to God--"so difficult, so sweet"--could lead 
him to share in both God's freedom and necessity. The word 
Muslim, he noted, means "to have surrendered to God."

     A man whose early academic training focused on science, Nasr 
said knowledge seems always to mean bifurcation, "but with God 
there is no separation between the knower and the known."

     He called for a return to "the science of God.In the West, 
we have reduced metaphysics to philosophy. There is no good term 
for the science of Godthe science of the real."

     The idea that God is one, he said, is a way of integrating 
ourselves and of understanding the interrelationship of all 
things. This concept moves across many faiths.

     This interrelationship is especially important to humans 
watching others commit an environmental massacre--the use of 
nature as a commodity--at the end of the 20th century, he said. 
"The only reason we can cut trees in Oregon is because for 
100,000 years the Indians didn't cut them."

     He warned against "imprisoning God in time."

     "Anything that's not historical is not real to us," he said. 
"We take our own time too seriously" because we have lost our 
vision of God's transcendance. "Spiritual growth is to gradually 
realize that all things come from God, then return to God. All 
things are manifestations of this reality."

The greatest web site

     Lawrence Kushner, a rabbi who is currently a visiting 
lecturer at Hebrew Union College, confessed that when he was 
asked to participate in "God at 2000," he thought he had been 
invited to an email address or a new web site. And what a web 
site that would be--the server to end all servers, instantaneous 
connections with everyone and everything, all operating at 
incredible speed.

     The Internet, in fact, with its global reach, is simply a 
modern expression of the kind of connection described in 
kabbalistic myths, he said.

     Meaning, he declared, is a matter of connections. "If 
something is connected to absolutely nothing--symbolically, 
linguistically, physically, psychologically--it is literally 
meaning-less. And, if something is connected to everyone and 
everything, it would be supremely meaning-full. I suppose it 
would be God."

     What if there were a virtual reality computer game 
programmed to approximate real life? The rules for the game would 
be furnished by religious traditions, he said, and there would be 
only five rules: 

     *You cannot decide when to begin playing--someone else (not 
your parents) determines that;

          *You cannot decide when your game ends, either (the 
good news is that "dying does not mean you lose. It's what you do 
before you die that determines whether or not you win when you 
die);

          *Each player is issued apparently random, undeserved 
gifts and handicaps throughout the progress of the game ("The 
question is not whether you deserve the hand you were dealt, but 
how you choose to play it"); 

          *Points are awarded whenever you can discern the 
presence of the Creator, and then act so as to help others see 
it, too.

          *Everything is connected to everything else (Pay 
attention: the realization is often momentary, but unmistakable).

Cosmic big brother

     Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun who left her 
order after seven years, explained, "I looked at God in a 
rationalistic way, but it was hard to love somebody who remained 
so distant, who seemed a sort of cosmic big brother."

     Upon leaving the convent, she said, she had lived in a state 
of what she could describe only as grief, coupled with a complete 
lack of knowledge about how to live outside the convent. "I felt 
defeated, failed, and tired," she said, declaring that even now 
she does not pray.

     Eventually she found herself working in television, doing 
religious shows and looking at other faiths.

     "Other faiths brought me back to my own faith," she said, to 
the point where she can now describe herself as "a freelance 
monotheist."

     She has learned some interesting things. "Religion is 
natural to human beings. We are creatures who seek ecstasy, and 
we seek it everywhere.And we are creatures who fall easily into 
despair and who can easily lose faith.We need devices that 
remind us of significance in life."

     Humans are looking for the sacred dimension, which is 
ineffable, must be cultivated by opening ourselves to other ways 
of seeing and thinking, and must be found by learning to get 
beyond self-consciousness, she said. One way she found to do that 
was to immerse herself in theology, she added.

     Despite their differences, all faiths emphasize compassion, 
a respect for the sacredness of other people, she said. 
"Compassion is the test of your theology, your religious 
experience.By pouring out love on the 'other' one can get 
intimations of holiness."

Alive and kicking

     In the closing talk, Archbishop Desmond Tutu joyously 
affirmed that at the beginning of the year 2000, "God is very 
well, alive and kicking." But, he added, what kind of God?

     As he was growing up, he said, he saw God as a deity who 
needed to be impressed, so that he would react to the success, or 
achievements. "So we worked ourselves into a frazzle, seeking to 
make ourselves acceptable, lovable, etc." God was "a kind of 
spoilsport on the lookout to catch me out doing something wrong.

     "When I did find out this central truth about God (or did it 
find me?); it has grasped me and possessed me so that all my 
sermons and addresses are really about this one necessary 
fact.God loves me. Full stop."

     Describing how God chose a "rabble of slaves" to be God's 
chosen people, he said, "We should have been alerted that God's 
love bubbles over, that God was there from the beginning.

     "When we were engaged in the struggle against apartheid and 
often it seemed an unequal struggle, as the powers of  darkness 
appeared to carry all before them, it was exhilarating to 
remember that ours was a biased God, biased in favor of the weak, 
the oppressed, and the downtrodden, who had chosen to side with a 
bunch of slaves against the mighty Pharoah."

     Tutu, who headed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation 
Commission before he retired as archbishop of Cape Town, added, 
"We puny, sinful and frail ones are God's viceroys, God's stand-
ins, those who are God-carriers, sanctuaries of the most holy 
blessed and glorious trinity. That is why, to treat one such as 
if they were less than this, is not just wrong, not just immoral, 
and frequently not just painful for the victim, it is veritably 
blasphemous, for it is like spitting in the face of God."

     He recalled that, as he listened to the gruesome testimony 
during the commission hearings, "we were frequently  bowled over 
to find in those who had untold suffering inflicted on them 
unnecessarily and who by rights should have been consumed by 
bitterness and anger and a lust for revenge instead showing forth 
remarkable magnanimity and a willingness to forgive. We were 
aware then of being in the presence of something holy."

--Kathryn McCormick is associate director of the Office of News 
and Information of the Episcopal Church.