In the previous chapter I proposed serendipitous creativity as a metaphor more appropriate for thinking of God today than such traditional image/ concepts as creator, lord, and father. In this chapter I shall elaborate more fully and nuance more carefully that concept. It is no longer possible, I contend, to connect in an intelligible Way today's scientific, cosmological and evolutionary understandings of the origins of the universe and the emergence of life (including human life and history) with a conception of God constructed in the traditional anthropomorphic terms. However, the metaphor of creativity--a descendant of the biblical concept of creation, and directly implied in the idea of evolution itself--has resources for constructing a religiously pertinent and meaningful modern/ postmodern conception of God. In this chapter the notion of creativity is explored with respect to the profoundly serendipitous mystery implied in it; its usefulness in orienting human life today particularly in connection with contemporary ecological issues; and its implications for such traditional theological themes as the problem of evil and"God is love."The chapter concludes with a brief characterization of what human life would be like if ordered in relation to a God conceived as serendipitous creativity instead of a God defined in the more traditional anthropomorphic way.
Biblical texts,(as was noted in the prologue) have been the most influential source of Christian and other Western thinking about God. When those texts ‘were written, the earth and its immediate environment (the"heavens") were regarded as all that existed, the universe. And though this universe was doubtless immense to the humans living within it, it was minuscule by todays standards. In that historico-cultural situation it was not implausible to imagine some almighty personal being who existed before and apart from the universe and by all-powerful fiat brought it into being (as in Gen. 1). Moreover, one could imagine this superpersonal being taking up clay from the ground and forming creatures, including humans, out of it (see Gen, 2). Both of these types of creativity were well known at that time, and it is not surprising, therefore, that humans imagined the universe being brought into existence through acts of this sort. The biblical stories thus supplied an account of an ultimate origin of things and of an ultimate personal power behind all things-God-that still remains plausible to many.
In my View however, we can no longer continue thinking of God along these lines. What could we possibly be imagining when we attempt to think of God as an all powerful personal reality existing somehow before and independent of what we today call"the universe”? As far as we know personal agential beings did not exist, and could not have existed, before billions of years of cosmic evolution of a very specific sort, and then further billions of years of biological evolution also of a very specific sort, had transpired. How then can we today think of a person»like creator-God as existing before and apart from any such evolutionary developments? What possible content can this more or less traditional idea of God have for those of us who think of the universe in our modern evolutionary way according to which no life or consciousness can be imagined apart from the emergence of these very specific and quite extraordinary conditions?
The idea of creativity however (in contrast with the notion of a creator)-the idea of the coming into being through time of the previously nonexistent, the new the novel-continues to have considerable plausibility today; indeed, it is bound up with the very belief that our cosmos is an evolutionary one in which new orders of reality come into being in the course of exceedingly complex temporal developments. In my view therefore, those interested in theological reflection and construction can and should continue to work with the idea of creativity but they should no longer think of this creativity as lodged in a creator-agent (a concept no longer intelligible). There are a number of advantages to this move, though it also presents us with some serious ambiguities and problems? In this chapter 1 reflect on some of these, thus elaborating further and nuancing in certain respects what was sketched in chapter 1 about God as creativity.
I
First, let us consider briefly some features of the idea of creativity itself It might be assumed that creativity is to be thought of as a sort of force at work in the cosmos, bringing the new into being. Some of the rhetoric in my writing and speaking (including within In Face cf Mystery [Kaufman l993a]} may suggest this, This sort of thinking in effect just substitutes the notion of force for God, implying that creativity is Simply a kind of impersonal-instead of personal and agential-power. To make that sort of claim, however, presupposes that we know more (about the emergence of truly new and novel realities than we actually do. But the notion of creativity itself carries a strong note of mystery. It differs from "mystery" in that it directs attention to the coming into being of the new, whereas "mystery" (when used in a theological context refers to fundamental limits of all human knowledge (Kaufman 1993a, 54-69) and carries no such further meaning. But creativity is profoundly mysterious; as the ancient phrase creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) emphasized, the coming into being of the truly new and novel is not something that we humans understand. We can see this most vividly perhaps, when we consider the old unanswerable question, Why is there something, not nothing? As Nicholas Berdyaev put it, "Creation is the greatest mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new that had never existed before and is not deduced from, or generated by anything" (1937, 163). To regard creativity as a kind of "force" is to suggest that we have a sort of (vague) knowledge of an existing something-or-other when in fact we do not. All we really see' or understand is that new and novel realities have begun to exist in time. There is a serendipitous feature in all creativity: more happens than one would have expected, given previously prevailing circumstances, indeed, more than might have seemed possible (Kaufman 1993a, 279). In the case of evolving life we see that this occurs through chance variation and selective adaptation, but neither of these can properly be reified into "causes" or"forces" (in any ordinary sense of those words) that directly produce the new creation. Creativity happens: this is an absolutely amazing mystery--even though we may in certain cases, for example with the evolution of life, be able to specify some of the conditions without which it could not happen.
Precisely because of this close connection with the idea of mystery "creativity" is a good metaphor for thinking about God. If used properly it preserves the notion of God as the ultimate mystery of things, a mystery that we have not been able to penetrate or dissolve--and likely never will succeed in penetrating or dissolving. This aspect of the notion of creativity draws us into a deeper sensitivity to God»as»mystery than some of our religious traditions do, with their talk of God as the Creator. For this latter concept seemed to imply that we knew the ultimate mystery (God) was really a person like, agent like being, one who "decided" to do things, who set purposes and then brought about the realization. of those purposes--as a potter or sculptor creates artifacts (Gen. 2) or as a poet or king brings order and reality into being through uttering words (Gen. 1). Absent these models of creativity the biblical writers might never have generated their radical notion of creation, eventually to be elaborated in terms of the formula of create ex nihilo. With Darwin, however, we have learned that significant creativity can be thought of in other ways as well. Indeed, according to evolutionary theory these human models of agential creativity themselves came into being ("were created") as cosmic processes in the course of long stretches of time brought into being certain very complex forms of life. The most foundational kind of creativity for us today therefore, appears to be that exemplified in the evolution of the cosmos and of life, rather than that displayed in human purposive activity. Though we can describe the evolutionary model with some precision, it in no way overcomes the most profound mystery_at the root of all that is: Why is there something, not nothing? Why--and how--can the new actually come into being in the course of time? Nor does the Big Bang throw any light on these questions; it only succeeds in raising them over again in an extremely acute form.
Thinking in terms of the ultimacy of the mystery of life and the world in this way is in keeping with the concern of the tradition of negative theology (see prologue, section V) that we -not reify God in any way. that we not think that we really know what or who God is (for example, an anthropomorphic agent who makes covenants with us, takes care of us in special ways, etc.). God is, in the last analysis, utterly unknowable. As the German hymn writer Gerhard Tersteegen (d. 1769) put it: "A God comprehended [that is, successfully captured in, and thus mastered by our human concepts and images] is no God." Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, Luther, and others all understood this, though unfortunately they often compromised this insight by claims about special "experiences" of God or "revelations" from God (which, of course, gave humans a sense of profound knowledge, comfort, and certainty). In the view I am presenting here, these compromises are no longer made: God is utter mystery the mystery of creativity; speaking of God as creativity in no way diminishes the ultimacy of the mystery with which life confronts us.
The metaphor of creativity as I have been suggesting, is appropriate for naming God because (1) it preserves and indeed emphasizes the ultimacy of the mystery that God is, even While (2) it connects God directly with the coming into being--in time--of the new and the novel. I highlight the significance of this second point by calling attention to the serendipitous aspect of creativity a matter of special import when we attempt to think of God in this way. Humans, of course, are (so far as we know) the only beings that can or do take note of the creative processes and events in the world and who believe that apart from these processes we-and all else that makes up the world-would not exist at "all, Only humans, therefore, are in a position to value the creativity in the world, and particularly to value its serendipitous character. If we value our own existence, we can hardly fail to regard as serendipitous the continuous coming into being* of the new that has led to the emergence of humankind through a highly beneficial (for us) though a quite surprising and chancy sequence of events. We would not exist had there not been a quite particular succession of happenings, summarized by astrophysicist Martin Rees as follows:
For life like us to evolve, there must be time for early generations of stars to have evolved and died, to produce the chemical elements, and then time for the'Sun to form and for evolution to take place on a planet around it. This takes several billion years… The size of our universe shouldn't surprise us: its extravagant scale is necessary to allow enough time for life to I evolve on even one planet around one star in one galaxy, This is an example of an "anthropic" argument, which entails realizing that the Copernican principle of cosmic modesty should not be taken too far. We are reluctant to ` assign ourselves a central position, but it may be equally unrealistic to deny that our situation in space and time is privileged in any sense. 'We are clearly not at a typical place in the universe: we are on a planet with special properties, orbiting around a stable star. i Somewhat less trivially we are observing the universe not at random time, but at a time when the requirements for complex evolution can be met. (1997, 229~23O)
It is thus quite appropriate to remind ourselves from time to time of the serendipitously creative character of the specific trajectory of the cosmic evolutionary process that produced us humans. Characterizing our trajectory in this Way--and thinking of God in terms of the metaphor of serendipitous creativity--are further examples of what (as Rees suggests) has come to be called anthropic thinking. That is, these examples call our attention to a feature of the universe that is of special importance to us humans, and they name this feature in a wav that points out its significance not only for us humans but also for our understanding of the universe as a Whole. These ideas are not merely, of subjective human interest and import: they tell us something that is also objectively true of the cosmos within which we live. The symbol "God" has always functioned in this way to call attention to that reality believed to be of greatest importance for ongoing human life, and in this respect it is an anthropic idea (though it need not be an anthropomorphie idea, as I argue throughout this book). The concept of serendipitous creativity can perform a similar anthropic function in relation to our modern/ postmodern cosmological thinking, and for this reason I regard it as providing a useful way to bring the symbol "God" into significant connection with that thinking.
II
In our use of the word "God," we humans are attempting to direct attention to what can be called the"ultimate point of reference" of all action, consciousness, and reflection. No regressive reflection seeking to push back to an ultimate starting point, no creative action moving toward an unstructured future, no appreciative feeling of worship or devotional the orientation of the Whole life of the self can intend some reality "beyond" God (Kaufman 1995, l4). But the idea of an ultimate' point of reference is itself much more abstract than the concept of God. What more, then, should be said? In In Face of Mystery (Kaufman 1993a) and in ,this book I have taken the position, following suggestions of theologian H.N. Wieman, that God should be thought of as creativity; creativity is the only proper object of worship, devotion, and faith today the only proper ultimate point of reference for our valuing (as was argued in chapter 1). Everything other than the ultimate mystery of creativity is a finite created reality that may indeed be valued and appreciated within certain limits, but which is itself always subject to distortion, corruption, and disintegration and thus must be relativized by the creativity manifest in the coming into being and the ultimate dissolution of all finite realities--that which alone may be characterized as "ultimate."
There is a problem here, however. Creativity understood as the coming into being of the new whenever and wherever this occurs--new evils (as we humans understand them) as well as new goods--raises some difficult questions. (On this issue I depart significantly from W1eman, for whom the "creative event" is always the "source of human good.") The biblical God, of course was thought of as sometimes bringing into being what from our human perspective appear be great evils, as well as goods:"Does evil befall a city unless the Lord has done it?" asks the prophet Amos (3:6); "I make weal and create woe," says Yahweh through the mouth of Isaiah (45:7; see also Job, Jeremiah, and many other texts). In the New Testament, for the most part, God's fearful judgment and destructiveness remain despite the theme that "God is love" (as 1 John 4:8,16 put it). God is a frightening judge and destroyer as well as a forgiving father and redeemer; in this both Old Testament and New were consistently monotheistic. Thinking of God as serendipitous creativity--a mystery beyond our comprehension--is also consistently monotheistic.
However, if one takes this sort of position, can serendipitous creativity be regarded as always manifesting what is ultimately valuable for humans, a norm to be followed in all situations? Are we humans to emulate God's destructivity Gods bringing evils (as they seem, to us) into being, as well as goods? These ideas may raise serious questions for Christians as well as others, although those Who have regarded the warrior metaphor as 'apt for God (and Christ) have in the past been willing to draw these conclusions. For those who cake a radically christomorphic faith-stance, however, the creation of horrific evils can hardly be regarded as appropriate human activity. This concern has become particularly important today when the human project can no longer tolerate the destructiveness of unrestricted warfare, for we now have the power to bring all human life (as well as much other life on planet Earth) to a halt. Clearly creativity without qualification--creation of historical trajectories going in almost any direction--cannot be regarded as a norm appropriate or helpful for the guidance sf human life and activity: our human creativity in accord with the normative christomorphic images, stories, and ideas in the New Testament, must be directed .toward bringing goods 'into the world, not evils, toward healing, toward resolving disputes through compromise and mediation, toward overcoming the destructive momentums we humans have already brought into the ecological order on planet Earth and into the historical order of human affairs. The human creation of trajectories of massive destructiveness must be put out of bounds. But how can qualifications of this sort be reconciled with the claim that cosmic serendipitous creativity should be regarded as the ultimate point of reference in terms of which human existence is to be oriented, ordered, and normed?
This is not an insoluble issue. Problems arise here only if we think of serendipitous creativity in the abstract, as that creativity manifesting itself throughout the cosmos in trajectories of many different sorts, some of them in sharp tension with others,” However, when we consider that humans are neither responsible for nor can do much about most_ of what goes on in the universe, we ‘can see (remembering the christomorphic principle) that the examples of creativity that are to be regarded as normative for us be restricted to the productive creativity manifest on planet Earth and its immediate environment. Earth and its environment is really the only region of the cosmos that can be affected by our actions and projects (at least for the foreseeable future), and it is within this context that we must, therefore, seek to understand both our place in the created in order and the activities appropriate for us to engage in; productive creativity alone is fitting, for clearly there is no reason to suppose that we humans have been in some Way "authorized" (by an abstract cosmic-creativity) to engage in extensive destruction of' life and its ongoing momentums, which have taken thousands of millennia to emerge. Such a claim would manifest monstrous hubris and arrogance.
Thus, we must be quite constrictive in our thinking about our projects and our creativity: it is on a particular biohistorical trajectory that we humans have come into being, and it is this trajectory that serves as the niche in Earth's ecological web where we must live and act. Doubtless this trajectory will end at some future time, but there is no basis for arguing that it is our proper human business to bring that about: our creativity rather, should be exercised in searching out Ways to live within our ecological niche on this planet, with a minimum of destructiveness of the other lines of life that also have their homes here. This is the moral implication of our growing ecological sensitivity and consciousness in recent decades: we no longer can live basically concerned with only the human project; our knowledges and sensitivities today enable us to understand that our project needs to fit much better into the broader ecology of planet Earth than often heretofore. It is our task today therefore, to make whatever creative moves we can that will facilitate this. This does not mean that all destructive activity must be ruled out for humans; indeed, we need to destroy many of our own present patterns of action, ways of thinking, institutions, and so on, if we are to succeed in creating ecologically appropriate forms of human life on~ planet Earth. But destructiveness of this sort will be in the service of the further creative movement of the biohistorical trajectory that has brought us into being and continues to sustain us. Thus our creativity will‘be serving--rather than restricting or otherwise countering--the forward movement into the open future on planet Earth of the cosmic serendipitous creativity to which we seek to be ultimately responsible. In this Way, the seeming paradox involved in regarding cosmic serendipitous creativity as the ultimate point of reference for our human devotion, thinking, and action dissolves away. Attempts to employ this ultimate mystery abstractly as a norm for making judgments about concrete cases here on Earth will always be obscure and dubious, as were attempts in the past to invoke "Gods will” directly as justification for .particular human decisions and actions.
These considerations bring us into a position from which we can take up briefly some further concerns that Christians might have respecting the proposal that we think of God as serendipitous creativity Consider, for example, the Christian affirmation that "God is love" (1 john 4). In many respects this notion represents the epitome of Christian anthropomorphism/anthropocentrism. Do the theological moves am advocating rule out or make unintelligible this central Christian claim? The fundamental anthropomorphism of Israelis God-talk (as displayed in the Old Testament) helped prepare the Wav for using the metaphor "love" as the defining characterization of in Christian thinking and practice. Because loving, caring attitudes and behaviors are of such importance in human life, thinking of God in terms of this metaphor had-and still has-great rhetorical power: God, the very creator of the universe, is seen here as standing in an intimate loving relationship with every person, God is "our father in heaven" who will meet every human need."Even the hairs of your head are all numbered," as the words of jesus put it (Matt, 10:3O). Thus both the deep human longing for unlimited agape-love and an exceedingly powerful way of addressing that longing found significant realization in the conception of God as loving. The basic anthropomorphism of the early Christian conception of God made this thought seem both plausible and saving.
Does the move to a de-anthropomorphized God (as I am pro, posing) require us to jettison this whole way of thinking? No, it does not. What it does require is that we think through carefully the wav this human need for love is to be understood in relation to serendipitous creativity As we have been noting, it would certainly be a mistake to argue that cosmic creativity always manifests-love for all the creatures involved: that would be unintelligible, indeed absurd, in face of all we know about nature"red in tooth and claw" to say nothing of the apparent origins of the universe in a Big Bang conceived in fundamentally physicalist terms. But there is every reason to maintain--in the theological position I am sketching--that the emergence of the love that has become of such central importance to human being and well being must itself be seen as connected to the creativity that brought into being our humanity. In the processes through which our humanness was created, activity and attitudes and behaviors of the sort We call "loving" came into focus; love emerged with the human creatures who could respond to it. In our corner of the universe--that is, on the trajectory that has brought humans into being--capacities and needs for agape love gradually became important and prized (at least in some quarters). So in and through our specifically human relation to God (as Christians have claimed), loving, caring attitudes and activities have become a significant feature, and love is both given and received-unlike the relations of creativity to many other spheres of the cosmic order, each of which has its own distinctive character.
It would, of course, be improper to say simplistically and without qualification that "God is love," as Christians have sometimes done in the past; that would be to project on. every feature and dimension of the universe what we find to be true and highly significant (only?) in our distinctively human sphere. But it is far from improper to say that not only in our relation's with other humans, but also in our human relation to God (creativity) and in God's relation to us, agape love has become an important feature. In that sense, We can Brill say, “God is love," although this is not the only way in which God .should be characterized, nor is it the most fundamental or defining metaphor to use in thinking of God. That place must be reserved for the serendipitous creativity universally manifest. Of course Christians have always understood that a whole configuration of terms must be used in characterizing God ("power," "omnipresence," "eternity" "creativity" and so on), not "love" alone; indeed, to try to conceive God simply and completely in terms of the metaphor “love" would make both God and that metaphor unintelligible.
A brief word should, perhaps, be added here about the implications of all this for the concept of evil, a notion central in a number of A religious traditions. I have argued elsewhere that this concept, and the correlative concept of salvation from evil, are generated largely by a concerns about our own human wellfbeing and fulfillment, on the one hand, and about-human disaster or failure, on the other:
The framework of valuation here is [as Spinoza argued] anthropocentric--at least initially . . . The acts of generalization that occur as these complexes of terms are developed [in monotheisms), however; move toward transcendence of their anthropocentric origins. . . And with the conception of God though the name "God" initially designated, perhaps,that reality believed to be ultimately salvific of the human--there is clearly an attempt to indicate a point of reference in terms of which all else (including, of course, the human itself) can be assessed and judged .... [I]n radical monotheisms . . . the original awareness of evil as bound up with one's own pain and destruction [may become] completely concealed or even reversed`(as in, for instance, I the Calvinist triumphant willingness to be "damned for the glory of God"). (Kaufman 1996a, 87-89)
Thus, though having its biological roots in the adverse response of living organisms to pain, the theological notion of evil in monotheistic traditions actually moved far beyond all anthropocentrism to the creation of a trans-human criterion for judging everything human: all human behavior, motivations, actions, institutions, and so on, were to be assessed in light of what God was thought to will and require (however good or bad that might seem to humans); living in faith came to be understood as involving the attempt to order all of life in terms of these divine requirements. Our human»centered judgments about right and wrong, good or bad, were overruled with the emergence of theocentric faith: what God is doing and what God wills for humanity became the ultimate criterion in terms of which all judgments of value and goodness, truth and meaning, were to be made; centering life on any other reality than God was idolatrous.
Obviously these ideas can be connected fairly easily with the theological position sketched in this book. Indeed, conceiving God as serendipitous creativity--thus moving away from the anthropomorphic/anthropocentric tendencies in much traditional thinking--makes the theocentric feature of our God~talk more emphatic and austere than in most traditional views, and this is accomplished here (as just noted) without losing sight of God's loving relationship with humankind. The cosmic serendipitous creativity manifest throughout the universe is taken to be the ultimate criterion of all value and meaning, but the application of that criterion to our actual human living and dying cannot be made in these abstract terms but must be made, rather, in terms of the facticities of our human situatedness in the evolutionary/historical trajectory that has brought about and continues to sustain our human existence on Earth. Any human acts or practices, customs or institutions, that violate or are otherwise destructive of the biohistorical constraints within which humankind must live and work are to be characterized as "evil"; in contrast, what ever creatively facilitates the forward movement of the evolutionary/historical trajectory of which we are part--and is in relative harmony with the wider ecological order on Earth--is to be considered good, right, fitting.
Judgments made about values and meanings, about good and evil, continue here to have an direct bearing on and pertinence for human being and well being, but they are no longer governed by essentially anthropocentric criteria. Because they are, basically concerned with the ongoing sustainability of human existence within the web of life on planet Earth, they have a certain ecological objectivity--however difficult it may be, in specific cases, to ascertain in scientifically measurable--terms just how this is to be conceived."Evil" and "good," therefore, cannot be properly considered as merely a function of human desires and wishes.
III
Let us step back now and take note again of the enormous difference in scale. of today's vast universe as compared with the biblical one in which human God»talk began. The universe that we must take into account' today-as we attempt to think 'about God and our obligations in the world--did not come into being just a short time before humanity was created. Nor does it consist largely in what is visible to the naked human eye; most of it appears to lie beyond the reach of even our most powerful telescopes and other instruments. Thus, both temporally and spatially this universe is of an entirely different order than anything imaginable by humans 'through most of history. Women and men have existed in this universe for only a minuscule fraction of its temporal development, and human activities and actions can have effects ,only quite locally on planet Earth and its immediate environment. Our place in God's universe and our responsibilities in Gods world must thus be understood as much diminished from what our traditional stories and images suggest.
God also (and God's "eternity")--if God is to be thought of as the creativity manifest in the ongoing evolution and development of this entire vast cosmos (thus continuing central theme of the monotheistic religious traditions--will have to be conceived as much greater in scale and in mystery than anything suggested by the stories and images that informed and constituted most traditional-thinking. The kind of personal intimacy with God fostered by many of these images--especially such anthropomorphic ones as "father,""lord," and "king"--no longer seems appropriate, or even imaginable or intelligible. So our human "relationships" with God will have to be conceived in much vaguer and less vivid terms than in the piety of the past--the characterization of God as serendipitous creativity straight forwardly suggests this--and our understanding of human existence as "under God" will be experienced as much more open, much looser, much less determinate and specific. Life no longer will be thought of or experienced as dependent on our unmediated direct relation to a divine being whose character and will, and whose requirements of the human, are fairly clear and distinct. Rather, We must come to understand that how we live out our lives and take responsibility for ourselves and our activities here on planet Earth are matters that we humans ourselves must work out as carefully and responsibly as we can--normed of course (as we have noted) by the directions in which creativity appears to be moving in our part of the cosmos and by the christomorphic principle. Thus, our lives and our ethics--all of the matters bearing on how we live and think and act--will have to be oriented much more in terms of the overall context of human life here on Earth than traditional ways of thinking about God and our relation to God have suggested. Earth is our home, and it should no longer be said or thought that we are "strangers and foreigners on the earth . . . [who] are seeking a homeland . . . abetter country; that is, a heavenly one" (Heb. 11:13, 14, 16).
Our modern/postmodern world picture, taken together with the conception of God as serendipitous creativity evokes a significantly different stance in the world than that associated with the Christian symbol-system as traditionally interpreted." The childlike trust and assurance and consolation, characteristic of the conviction that throughout our lives we are cared for lovingly by a heavenly father, are no longer available. ln exchange, we humans become aware of ourselves as a unique species deeply embedded in the magnificent intricate web of life on planet Earth, with distinctive obligations and responsibilities to that web and the creativity (the coming into being of the new and the novel) manifest in it--creativity present and active throughout the cosmos and in all human cultural and religious traditions and activities. Thinking of God--as creativity undercuts the arrogant stance of much traditional Christianity vis-a-vis the natural order as a whole, as well as with respect to other religious and secular traditions. Christians may no longer consider themselves to be authorized in what they say and do by God's special revelation.
Nevertheless, important continuities with traditional Christian understandings remain, continuities significant enough to warrant considering this picture of God, the world, and the human as appropriate for Christian faith today. As was noted in chapter 1, understanding the ultimate mystery of things, God, in terms of the metaphor of serendipitous creativity manifesting itself in a variety of evolutionary and historical trajectories-instead of in terms of the anthropomorphic creator/lord/father metaphors that constituted the traditional picture of a God with largely anthropocentric purposes facilitates (more effectively than did the traditional imagery) maintaining a decisive qualitative distinction (though not an ontological separation) between God and the created order. This distinction is the basis for regarding God serendipitous creativity) as the sole appropriate focus for human devotion and worship, as 'that which alone can properly orient us in the world. All other realities, being created goods that come into being and pass away become dangerous idols that can bring disaster into human affairs when worshiped and made the central focus of human orientation. To attempt to order one's life in terms of this important distinction between God (the ultimate mystery of things) and the idols, can only be, of course, a move of faith, of a deep trust in the mystery that has brought us into being and continues to sustain us. As biohistorical beings that have emerged on one of the countless creative trajectories moving through the cosmos, humans are indissolubly part of the created order and not in any way to be confused with the creativity manifest throughout the cosmos, in all its complexity order, and beauty. We can exist only (as far as we are aware) within the boundaries and conditions of life found on the particular trajectory within the created order in which we have appeared.
Though strikingly different in important respects from some traditional Christian emphases, this understanding of God and of the human is clearly a form of radical monotheism (to use H. R. Niebuhr's term). As we have seen, it is a conception that can, be developed into a Christian interpretation of human faith and life, if the creativity that is God is brought into significant connection with the poignancy and power of the stories and character of Jesus and the early church, The reconstructions of the conceptions of God and humanity suggested here thus provide, a way for Christian faith to reconstitute itself in respects appropriate to our contemporary evolutionary/ecological sensibilities and knowledges.
Humans did not bring the World into being, and it is not We who sustain it. We did not create the evolutionary process, forever bringing into being new; unforeseeable forms of life. There is a powerful, awe-inspiring creativity manifest in our world-and indeed, in ourselves: the new the novel, the unforeseeable, the previously unheard of break' forth roundabout us and in our midst; and human life Continues to be sustained from beyond itself This serendipitous creativity provides grounds for our hope for the future. Human life can go on and, we dare to hope, will go on. And We are called to participate ever more fully and effectively in the creative transformation of our existence that will enable this to happen.
