Chapter 2 -- Christology: Jesus as Norm

Christology: Jesus as Norm

 In chapter 1 we identified two significantly different Jesus-trajectories. The first began with the biblical stories of the baptism, ministry and crucifixion of Jesus; moved on through Jesus' resurrection into his subsequent rapid elevation (in the minds of his followers) to deity; and culminated in the declaration (by church councils) that he was the second person in the divine trinity-a final defining move that many churches and individual Christians down through the centuries have considered to be the only proper way to think of Jesus. The second trajectory--emphasizing Jesus' creativity--begins with the modern historical interpretation of Jesus' baptism, ministry teachings, and death; moves on into the impressive creativity of the developing acclamation of Jesus as divine (Jesus-trajectory1 and its powerful historical effects); and continues in the historical growth and influence--the ongoing creativity--of the Jesus-movement, ultimately culminating in the worldwide Christian religion and its many sorts of christological belief and reflection. Many Christians today continue to understand Jesus largely in terms of his divinity as presented in trajectory; however, many modern/postmodern Christians think of him in more humanistic terms like those suggested by trajectory2. Christians following either of these patterns of interpretation have regarded Jesus as of significant normative importance for human beings: normative in the ordering and orientation of their lives, in their thinking about God, and in their expectations concerning the future. It is important now to note that in these two trajectories the foundation of the normativity--and hence the normatively itself--is understood in profoundly different ways.

Given the culmination of Jesus-trajectory1 in the conception of God as trinity; with jesus understood as the Fully divine second person of that trinity his words and actions on earth have often been regarded as the words and actions of God incarnate--to be taken as authoritative revelations of God to humankind. (The resurrected jesus has also been thought of as continuing to reveal himself occasionally to humans in certain special circumstances, as with Paul's conversion.) Though men and women have interpreted such divine revelations from on high in various ways, for those who think of Jesus largely in the supernatural terms of Jesus-trajectory1, the reports of his words and actions are generally regarded as a kind of absolute truth, to be accepted by faithful Christians without compromise in the ordering and orientation of life. This kind of stance often issues in lives of deep conviction, powerful motivation, and great generosity and self-sacrifice; unfortunately, however, it can also underlie a fundamentalist rigidity and narrowness that is frequently very destructive in human affairs.

In sharp contrast with this understanding of Jesus’ significance, when he is understood in terms suggested by Jesus-trajectory2, his normatively takes a quite different shape. Here the dualistic conception of "this world" and some “other world"--of life on earth and life in heaven above, of nature and supernature--is gone, and everything of importance to men and women takes place the human sphere of life on Earth. This approach, as I am developing it here, does not mean that God is no longer of significance for human life and death: the reality of God--thought of as creativity--and the sharp distinction between God and the created order both remain. But this creativity--the ongoing coming into being of the novel and the transformative--is no longer lodged in a person-agent operating on the: world from beyond; it is manifest throughout the created order, from the Big Bang all the way down to and including the present.

I How is the normativity of Jesus to be understood within this second framework? A word needs to be said here about the emergence of norms and standards, values and meanings, in the evolutionary development of human existence on planet Earth. All human cultures have standards and norms of many kinds. Without them, the complex forms of human life that every culture exhibits could never have come into being or continued to exist for long. It took many thousands of years for what we today regard as distinctively human life--life including some degree of self-consciousness; the ability co make, and to carry out, deliberate choices about how activities are to be ordered; the ability to take some measure of responsibility for these choices; and so on--to emerge (be created) from a simpler form of animaliry.

Crucial in this development was the co-evolution of the human brain and our linguistic capabilities, which eventually made possible many diverse forms of symbolic behavior; indeed, the expanding use of linguistic interactions among humans may have been partly responsible for the creation of' our large and complex brains? From early on, the biological evolution and the emerging sociocultural historical development of humankind became closely interwoven, and humans became biohistorical beings. In chapter 3, we shall see in more derail that as human symbolic facility advanced, increasingly complex forms of behavior gradually developed (were created). It was behavior informed, on the one hand, by richer and more detailed remembering and, on the other hand, by the emerging ability to imagine--that is, to make present in images and other symbols what is not now being directly experienced. This gradual emergence was, of course, occurring both in individual persons and in the societies and cultures of which they were part. Given these sorts of symbolic/linguistic developments, distinctly different courses of action could be imagined as problems in living came up; and along with this imagining came desires to choose among these alternatives, to make deliberate decisions about what should be done. As this further complexifying and symbolizing--with the growing human imaginative powers--developed in everyday living, a measure of freedom was coming on the scene (being created). And to make the choices than were becoming available, if was necessary to have ways to assess the alternatives: values, norms, standards, criteria were required. The human imagination began to create these, and in due course they became central features of the developing cultures: so social mores and eventually formal laws--distinctions between socioculturally approved behavior and what was forbidden--became important dimensions of the cultural traditions to be handed on from generation to generation. The self-consciousness characteristic of our human existence today and the capacity to rake responsibility for actions and patterns of living were coming into being (gradually being created) and were beginning to be taken for granted.

Let us return now to the specifically theological issues with which we are here concerned. It is important to recognize that all these developments in the course of the emergence of human biohistorical existence (and many other developments not mentioned) were features of the processes in and through which humanity was being created--being brought into being as a distinctly new form of life. Thus, creativity--God--was involved at every point along this path. And the profound mystery of this creativity was no doubt beginning co become noticed by (at least some) humans--not only the mystery of these human developments but the mysteries of the surrounding trajectories of life on planet Earth, as well as those in the skies above and the wider universe. Today we can see that in the universe in which we live, creativity seems to be occurring virtually everywhere and in many different ways. From our human perspective, however--with our human time-scales here on Earth--this creativity (God) often seems very slow in its effects, although it occurs sometimes in and through cataclysmic, explosive events.

We humans are products of, as well as participants in, the creative evolutionary trajectory that brought biohiscorical forms of life into being, forms of life that have the distinctive powers of imagination, action, and reflection. These emerging powers enabled humans to engage--gradually--in, deliberate, self-conscious--creativity themselves; and over the last several millenia humans have created many diverse sociocultural worlds as contexts within which to carry on their lives. Our human biohistorical trajectory has not, of course, been an isolated, independent evolutionary development: it is dependent upon, and has been continuously interacting with, many (if not all) of the other evolutionary trajectories in the Web of life on Earth; and it could not exist apart from this living ecosystem that brought it into being and continues to sustain it. A major question tar confronts us humans today is this: Are we going to find a way to live effectively and fruitfully within the limits placed on us by the ecological order in which we are situated, or will we ignore these constraints and continue out exuberant exercising of the destructive potential of our creative powers, ultimately (perhaps) committing species-suicide? Unlike every other form of life that we know we humans do not simply occupy a niche in the ecological order on planet Earth: we alone are cognitively aware of the necessity to have an appropriate niche, and of the possibility that we may destroy our niche if we do nor rake proper care of it. Moreover; only with deliberate participation from us can a niche adequate for our increasingly seIf~conscious, deliberative form of life be created# the ongoing creativity in the midst of which we live--God--continuously places strong demands of this sort on our human creativity Will we respond appropriately to them?

With these concerns in mind, let us return to the question about the normatively of Jesus. In Western culture at large (and in many other places around the world) the name Jesus still has an aura of special meaningfulness, and it commands some measure of respect. When confronting a difficult decision, some people continue to ask themselves something like, what would Jesus do? For serious Christians--and also for a good many others who might not identify themselves in this way--the name of jesus still calls forth a significant image/meaning/norm/value that is regarded as important for the ordering and orienting of at least some dimensions of life. Which dimensions? Here there would be a wide diversity of answers. For some, Jesus comes up only in connection with Sunday church attendance or through linguistic habits of uttering little cries or prayers in moments of sudden terror or great joy (Jesus Christ!" "Oh, Jesus!"); but the basic ordering of life is carried on largely with reference co other standards and desires. For others, Jesus is more important: in times of thoughtful reflection on and assessment of their 1ives, Jesus may come to mind as one who is a model of how one ought to live--outgoing and caring for others, thoughtful and kind, patient and self-giving, forgiving others' offenses The stories of jesus' behaviors, practices, and sufferings may be remembered at such times: his concern for the poor and the outcast; his healings and forgiveness of sins; his refusal to resist violently (or to avoid) those who eventually crucified him; his forgiveness of his enemies from the cross; his radical teachings about love of neighbor and love of enemies; his call to followers to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34).

Why does Jesus come up for some persons in connection with these moments of self-assessment? In part it is probably because of the continuing challenge to them of his unconventional radical teachings about how we humans ought to live. But more than that, I suspect, is involved: in Jesus' ministry and above all in the events leading up to his death on the cross, we are presented with a dramatic image/story of one who appears to have trusted God absolutely and in consequence was enabled to interact with his fellow humans with love and care and to forgive even the enemies who were bringing about his death. This image and story of the human jesus, as depicted particularly in the Synoptic Gospels, has a singular power to draw men and women to itself as a model for human life. (In contrast, the picture of the divine Jesus in the Fourth Gospel and in Jesus-trajectory1 may diminish for many the normativity of jesus for ordinary day-to-day life, since that picture raises serious questions about whether it is appropriate to consider Jesus’ as a viable model for us frail humans.) In our trajectory2 approach, it is not Jesus' supposed otherworldly authority (as Son of God, second person of the trinity and so on) that gives him normative significance (as is often the case with those who think in terms of Jesus trajectory). Rather, this thoroughly human Jesus provides us with a picture of profound appeal, a picture in terms of which we may be drawn to measure and judge our own humanness and humaneness. No doubt there are many who are not particularly attracted to this human Jesus or who at best may feel quite ambivalent; and some clearly feel repulsed. But for those who find themselves drawn toward him, Jesus' story and teachings may exert a powerful normative significance, a significance that (as we shall see) can be especially appropriate and important for this present age; and he may become a model in terms of which at least some of todays women and men, like many in the past, find themselves assessing their own humanity.

In this understanding of Jesus as a challenging norm for what it means to be human--how we humans ought to live out our lives--no supernatural authority or extrahuman power (of God, of Jesus, or of an impending afterlife) is invoked to compel our attention. And we remain free to turn, if we choose, toward other ways of orienting our lives, other ways of understanding our humanity other values and meanings. In today's complex pluralistic world many diverse options (some quite trivial, others consequential and all-consuming) demand our attention. The important point to note here, is that if we decide to order our lives in terms of the Jesus-model, whether as groups (such as churches and communities and other organizations) or as individuals, it will be we who do the deciding, and we who take-or fail to take-the steps to carry out that decision. (The same, of course, is true when we decide to look for other standards and criteria for ordering and orienting our lives.) The responsibility for giving-or not giving-the image/ story of Jesus a significantly normative place in our lives and actions falls entirely on us.

This has, of course, always been the case, though the particular point I am emphasizing here may not often have been put so sharply in focus, since many in the past have been informed by claims such as Paul's that all faithful Christians have been predestined to affirm Christ as. their Lord and Savior--a claim strongly reinforced by scriptural models such as Paul's dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. Given these authoritative ideas and pictures, it is hardly surprising that the full human responsibility for the decisions and commitments of men and women to follow Jesus has frequently been played down severely in Christian history; indeed, it was virtually eliminated in the teachings of some churches? The strong convictions about God's omniscience and omnipotence in traditional Christian faith, an understanding of Jesus in the terms specified by Jesus-trajectoryl, and strong convictions about the bondage of human sinfulness and the necessity of Christ's atonement if humans are to become at all free often led to a decisive deemphasizing of the ongoing human role in Christian, orientations.

In the theological program being sketched here, however, we are not working within terms specified by Jesus-trajectoryl (or any other two-worlds conception), Hence we are in a position to give a quite positive reading, on the one hand, to the place of human decisions and actions in religious commitments and, on the other hand, to the significance of the diversity of human religious and moral options. This enables us to see more clearly the responsibility we take upon ourselves when we make such commitments. Whether the image/story of jesus is to be--or is not to be--the major guide/norm/standard in terms of which we seek to order our lives, it will be our own choice, a choice for which we humans can and must take full responsibility” Moreover, since the entire sociocultural/religious world was largely a human creation over thousands of years (as we have been observing), we humans of today must also assume hill responsibility for that. Unfortunately our human world is a seriously flawed construction, manifesting many severe evils for which we today must take responsibility This intimate interconnectedness of human action and creativity with human moral, ethical, and religious sociocultural formations and commitments, responsibilities and failures, will be taken up more fully in the next chapter.

We noted above that humans have been created as part of a biohistorical process that gradually emerged in the wider context of evolving life on planet Earth. This process enables--indeed requires--us today to hold ourselves accountable not only for our particular lives and actions but increasingly for the entire sociocultural/religious world that--over many generations--we humans have brought into being. That world is thoroughly pluralistic, and we today must begin to take responsibility for the importance of this diversity in the normative frameworks within which we humans conduct our lives, a very difficult assignment indeed. Only in this way will we be living and acting with a proper openness to, as well as accountability for, not only the religious and cultural pluralism of today's human existence but the human future as well. What is required in a commitment to the normative claims of the image/,story of jesus today is not properly understood if it does not take into account this thoroughly pluralistic character of today's global context.

In our time the various cultural streams--each of which, through most of human history has developed its own independent character and integrity over many millennia--are increasingly interacting with each other as we create a single interconnected worldwide humanity Although there have been great civilizations and empires for thousands of years, it was not until the twentieth century development of modern forms of communication and transportation that truly global economic, industrial, political, scientific, cultural, social, and religious networks and institutions could be created. The diverse historical streams that heretofore constituted human history are now increasingly becoming interconnected, and in that respect transcended. The dream of One World, a new global culture and civilization, is at hand. And yet nations and other factions around the world do not hesitate to make war instead of finding peaceful ways to settle disputes. We in America, sad to say are among ‘todays world leaders in these sorts of destructive activities. At this portentous moment, perhaps more than ever before, we need conceptions of the human and visions of history that will facilitate whatever centuries long movement there has been toward a more responsible ordering of our lives and our world, an ordering in which the integrity and significance of each tradition and community are acknowledged and the welfare and rights of every individual are respected and nurtured. New cultural patterns of association and cooperation must be developed, new institutions must be invented, new ideologies that are at once universalistic and truly pluralistic must be created.

For these sorts of things to happen, a spirit of self-sacrifice for the well-being of all of humanity--indeed the welfare of the whole network of life on planet Earth--is now needed, a spirit that can subdue the instincts for self preservation and self defense that so dominate our communal and ethnic, our national and religious, practices and instructions, as well as our personal lives. Just such a spirit of self giving, love, reconciliation, and the building of community is what the image/ story of jesus and the early Christian communities powerfully present. For those communities and individuals the defining paradigm, in terms of which both humanity and God came to be understood, was this image/story of Jesus and the new communal order of reconciliation, peace, and love that grew up around him and after his death. Even such ideals as justice, order, love, peace, freedom, and the like were not appropriated by the early Christians simply in their conventional. meanings: they were, rachel; creatively reconceived in light of the vision of the human and the humane that had become visible through the images and stories of jesus and his followers. In binding themselves to this historical figure and community, Christians nailed down their normative ideas and values in a much more definite and inescapable way than is possible for most humanisms: the image of the truly human and humane became sharper and more specific, and the radicality of the Christian ethic came into full view. Values such as love, self-giving, forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace came into focus and were made concrete in the dramatic image of the life, suffering, and death of the man on the cross and the stories of his persecuted followers. A powerfully evocative appeal in support of heavy moral demands was thus generated.

II

Up to this point in this chapter we have been considering the normative significance of our trajectory2 image/story of Jesus for the orientation and ordering of human life today. This image/story also played a significant role in the way God came to be understood by the early Christians and their successors. God's true, character and activities, they believed, had been newly revealed to humans in and through Jesus' activities and teachings, his character and his fate.

It was in the context of first-century C.E. Jewish religion, as we have noted, that Christian faith emerged (was created), and Jesus and all his earliest followers were Jews. The God of this Jewish religion/culture, thus, was the God to whom the earliest Christians were committed: the creator of the heavens and the earth, the Mighty One who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and gave them the land of Canaan, the Lord of all the world whose messiah ("anointed one") would soon be coming, as it was hoped, to overthrow the Roman rulers of Israel and establish Gods perfect kingdom throughout the earth. For a time it seemed to some that Jesus might well be that messiah. However, instead of putting together an army to overthrow the Romans, he went around healing people's diseases, forgiving their sins, and preaching the imminent coming. of the kingship of God. Apparently he gained a following fairly quickly-perhaps largely because of his success in exorcizing demons-and both the Roman and the jewish authorities were concerned that he might be about to lead an insurrection. But when they arrested jesus, he made no effort to resist them. And then he was crucified by Pilate as an insurrectionist who claimed to be "the king of the Jews"--a failed messiah, as all could see. Then came the big surprise: some of his followers began to claim some days later that Jesus had appeared to them several times since his death and burial, and they believed that God had raised him from the dead.

This claim must have been as great a shock to those who believed it as was jesus' violent execution. How and why had these things happened? How were they to be understood? What was God doing in and through this resurrection of Jesus? Perhaps Jesus was not a failed messiah at all but was instead a very different kind of messiah than anyone had expected. Some remembered that Isaiah had spoken of a"servant" of God who

was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; . . , he was despised, and we held him of no account . . . , He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, . . . he did not open his mouth . . . The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great , . . . because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin; of many and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isa. 53:3, 7, llb-12)

Perhaps jesus was this "suffering servant" through whom God was going to "make many righteous" precisely by his suffering and death. In that case his resurrection from the dead confirmed that he was indeed Gods "anointed one,” the messiah.

So Jesus' unusual characteristics and actions were likely an expression of his messianic mission. His love for and kindness to the poor; the oppressed, the outcast; his concern for the sick and disabled, his ministry of healing, and his exorcisms of evil spirits and other miracles; his eating and consorting with 'sinners' and his freedom from a legalistic view of the Torah; his teachings about love of neighbors and even of enemies: clearly this was a quite different messianic figure than had been expected. I-Ie even told his disciples not to resist persons who were harming them (Matt. 5:39), and he made no efforts to lead an insurrection against Rome; moreover; he refused to respond violently to those who arrested him, and he forbade any resistance by his closest followers. If jesus' actions and teachings were an expression of Gods kingship, then the kingdom of God that Jesus claimed was coming soon must be very different from any ever seen on earth.

Though crowds had flocked to hear Jesus and observe him heal people, his peculiar mix of attitudes, teachings, and actions was in many respects confusing. Jesus' followers must have been quite puzzled about what was really going on in and through Jesus' ministry and death. But now after his death, his life and teachings and unresisting acceptance of his crucifixion had all received divine certification by his "resurrection from the dead" (Rom, 1:4; cf; Acts 2:22-24, 32-36). So God's salvation would not involve a military overthrow of Rome; it was coming, instead, through the ministry; death, and resurrection of jesus. All of this implied that God also must be very different than had been supposed. It took some time for the followers of Jesus to work this out--that is, to create a meaningful interpretation of it--but eventually they were convinced they must say things like this: "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (John 1:18 RSV). "No one [really] knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matt 11:27). "He is the image of the invisible God" (Col. l:l5). The whole understanding of God was now being reconsidered--was being re-created--with the image/story of jesus suggesting a new conception of who God is and how God acts.

The far-reaching character of this transformation in the understanding of God that was under way among the first two or three generations of Christians after Jesus' death can be seen more clearly if we take note briefly of the depiction of God in the Hebrew Bible (the scriptures known and used by Jesus and his followers).: There are many conflicting stories and pictures; I can give only a few examples here. The Israelites first became acquainted with God (Yahweh) in connection with their escape under Moses from slavery in Egypt (probably in the thirteenth century B.C.E.). As later generations told the story of that escape, it was emphasized that Yahweh was the mighty"warrior" who made the escape possible, first through sending plagues to decimate the Egyptians and then through overpowering the military forces of Pharaoh by drowning them all in the Red Sea (Exod. 6-12). Eventually Yahweh led the Israelites into Canaan, their new home, and he demanded very brutal treatment of the enemies they conquered in that invasion. During a battle with the Midianites, for example, he commanded them to kill every male and every adult female, saving only the "young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him" (Num. 3l:18). There are many stories in the Old Testament displaying Gods bloodthirsty Cruelty; and there are many passages in the Psalms and the prophetic and historical writings that celebrate this. When Israelites (and later on jews) were in political or military trouble, they remembered these grand old stories and hoped God would soon move again to deliver them. It was a "messiah" from God of this sort that--hundreds of years later--many still hoped would be sent to deliver them from Rome.

The God of Israel was not, of course, just a bloodthirsty warrior: from the beginning of the Israelite acquaintance with him through Moses, Yahweh was also a lawgiver; and shortly after the people of Israel had escaped from the Egyptians (as the story has it), he made a covenant with them: "If you obey my voice and keep my covenant," he said through Moses, "you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples" (Exod. 19:5). The covenant to be obeyed included the Ten Commandments (a version of which is given in Exod. 20:2-17); in due course, however, God's law was understood to include most of the detailed laws to be found throughout the Torah. In a beautiful passage (which must have been written much later) it is reported that at the time the covenant was made, Yahweh characterized himself as "a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty" (Exod, 34:6»7). Gods covenantal promise was to care for the needs of the people of Israel in virtually every respect to "the thousandth generation" and the people were bound to obey God's commandments in full.

Following upon the settlement of Canaan, the understanding of God-and along with it the ongoing creation of God's character as a rnaqor feature of Israels culture”--developed in a number of important directions. I will mention only two of them here, both strongly influenced by the prophetic movement that gradually developed especially from the eighth century B.C.E. on. (1) God grew from being simply a tribal god into the all»powerful creator of “the heavens and the earth" and the creator of all life, including humans (Gen. 1:1, 11-12, 20-27; 2:7-9), Thus, the exclusive connection of God's rule and power with the activities of the Israelites eventually developed into Israel's monotheism. This reached its peak, perhaps, in some of Second Isaiah's magnificent poetry, in which, for example, Yahweh is represented as saying:

Listen to me, O Jacob, and Israel, whom I called:
I am He: I am the first, and I am. the last.
My hand laid the foundation of the earth,
and my right hand spread out the heavens;
when I summon them, they stand at attention. (48:12-13)

I am the first and I am the last;
besides me there is no god. (44:6b)

(2) The moral side of this originally quite parochial and vengeful ruler and warrior-God also developed in important ways: it became expanded with the realization (at least by the prophet Amos and his followers) that God did not confine his care only to the Israelites, but he was also involved with the other peoples roundabout:

Are you not like the Ethiopians to me,
O people of Israel? says the LORD.
Did I nor bring Israel up from the land of Egypt,
and the Philistines from Caphror
and the Ararneans from Kir? (Amos 9:7)

And God's moral sensitivity became deeply enriched as virtues such as justice, mercy and compassion became emphasized. Consider these beautiful words from three of the "eighth-century prophets":

Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice in the gate;
Let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an everflowing stream (Amos 5:15a, 24)

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and our of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me. . . .
Yet in was I who taught Ephrairn to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them,
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love. . . .

I bent down to them and fed them. . . .
My compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath. (Hosea 11:1-4, 8b-9)

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Loan 'require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)

Thus, Yahweh, the mighty warrior who originally sought bloody revenge against his and Israel's enemies and their gods, the lawgiver who regulated unbendingly the details of the Israelites' lives, was gradually being re-created. He was becoming seen as, on the one hand, the all-powerful creator and ruler of the universe, the only God there is and, on the other hand, a compassionate parent who loves and cares for his children. He loves especially the Israelites, of course, with whom he had a covenant, but their neighbors as well. This re-created Yahweh also calls for justice in the land and mercy for the poor and oppressed. In due course this ongoing transformation of the conception of God began to cut deeper. According to the prophet Jeremiah, for example, even the everlasting covenant between God and Israel is to be superseded (a prophecy later believed by early Christians to have been fulfilled with the coming of Jesus):

The days are surely coming, says the Loan, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, "Know the Load," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest . . ; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more (Jer. 31:31-34)

As the moral sensitivity and consciousness of the Hebrews deepened and softened, the vision of who God was and how God behaved was being creatively transformed in more humanizing and humane directions.

Jesus' followers--after his resurrection--continued to think of God as the creator of the world and everything in it; as all-powerful and all-knowing; as loving and merciful and just, and requiring these virtues of humans. However, their understanding of the creator's character and modes of action was changing decisively: the image/story of God's "son" Jesus was becoming the model in terms of which God was increasingly imagined (re-created); and this change has continued to be normative for much Christian thinking about God all the way down to the present. Jesus was clearly not one who exemplified worldly power or who encouraged his disciples' hopes for worldly glory On the contrary; he is reported to have said:

"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it ....
"You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; . . . Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all." (Mark 8:34-35; 10:42-44)

Although Mark's Gospel (quoted here) was written about two generations after Jesus' death, and this precise wording likely did not come from Jesus, it clearly represents very pointedly the sort of things he was remembered to have emphasized. Self-aggrandizement had no place; humility self-giving, and caring for the needs of others were central. to his teachings and ministry; and all of this was sealed dramatically with his nonviolent, unresisting acceptance of crucifixion by his enemies.

The community of followers that emerged after Jesus' death understood its mission to be a continuation of jesus' compartment and work in the world, a continuation of Gods creative transformation of humankind that was to culminate in the coming of God's full kingdom on earth. In this community the enlivening presence of Gods Spirit was experienced in powerful new ways (cf. Acts 2), and this was transforming the lives of its members. The community they formed is described as one in which "no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common" (Acts 4:32), and the needy were properly cared for. A generation later Paul was declaring that members of the community were to "walk by the Spirit," seeking to rid themselves of “immorality . . . idolatry . .. enmity strife, jealousy anger, selfishness ,,.. and the like"; and they were to bear 'the fruit of the Spirit [which] is love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, selfl control” (Gal. 5:16, 19-23 RSV). The transformation that was occurring among them seemed decisive. It was a totally new and fresh start in life. Paul characterized it as a "a new creation":

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himse1£ not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. (2 Cor. 5:17-2O)

As the Christians had come to believe, God's creative mode of action in the world--God's way of addressing the profound evils in the world--was not in keeping with the expectations of those who had hoped for a military overthrow of Rome by Gods messiah. God was a very different sort of reality than they and other jews had heretofore imagined. They were creating a new picture of God based on and exemplified in the image/ story of Jesus (though they probably did not realize this was what they were doing). This creation of a new image/ concept of God was carried furthest in the johannine writings (toward the end of the first century C.E., or even later). As We have noted, in the Gospel of john the claim is made that Jesus was not just the decisive revelation of God; he was in fact divine. In the prologue it is made clear that the Word. that "was God" and created "all things" (1:1, 3) "became flesh [in Jesus] and lived among us" (1:14); and later on Jesus is presented as saying forthrightly "The Father and I are one" John 10:30) In the First Letter of John the implications of this--both for human life and for the understanding of God--are carefully spelled out:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever, does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. . . . Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us ..., God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 john 4:7-9, 11-12, 16; emphasis added)

It is obvious that we are very far removed here from the “mighty warrior" image in terms of which God was initially introduced to the Israelites. Though that image became tempered and broadened over the following centuries, as we have seen, nothing really approaching this characterization of God as simply and straight forwardly love (agape) is to be found prior to these Johannine texts. Moreover, a very striking implication of this pronouncement is also drawn here: the writer claims that this understanding of God means that there is one overarching criterion--love--in terms of which all human life and activities should be guided and judged, and in terms of which human living in relation to God, the actuality of human faith in God, can be discerned: "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love .... If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us."

These are very strong claims indeed, transforming significantly even the ontological modality in which God was being imagined; and they are made without qualifications' of any kind-.jesus had said that we should love God with all our heart and love our neighbors -as we love ourselves (Mark 12:3Of) and that we should even love our enemies "so that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matt. 5:44-45). And Paul opened a beautiful hymn to love, ranking it above even faith and hope (1 Cor. 13:13). Although these remarks clearly commend love as of central importance to human life, they are far from identifying God as love. Love was certainly a prominent theme throughout the emerging Christian world, and a member of the johannine group drew a daring quasi-ontological conclusion from this: it is love that is the ultimate reality with which we humans have to do. Love is not just one of God's qualities; God is love--God is an activity, not a person.”

This was a very important, far-reaching new insight, The point for us to note here is how deeply the image/story of Jesus affected the religious/moral consciousness of at least some of the early Christians, how far they had moved from the understanding of God-and the consequent understanding of human life-that they had inherited. No wonder Paul declared, "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away" (2 Cor. 5:17) This does not mean that there is no longer any connection to the Jewish past: the basic outline of God as creator and governor of the world remained, along with many other matters; and both Paul and John addressed communities rooted in judaism as they reflected on the significance of the jewish figure jesus.” Nor does it mean that all Christians were in agreement about how these changes should be understood. However; during the decades following the death of Jesus, many of his followers seem to have been going through a dramatic “paradigm shift," not only in their conception of themselves and their responsibilities in the world, but in their conception of God as well.

All these developments in the understanding of God-and what God requires of humans--occurred in the first century C.E. in connection with the emergence of Jesus trajectory1. And it is important that we carry over into Jesus trajectory2 (in an appropriate way) this aspect of the story that is recounted there: a new and quite distinctive (though still anthropomorphic) way of imagining God, and consequently of humans and their relation to God, was in fact being created--most decisively in the Johnnine writings. This new understanding did not completely displace the older anthropomorphic picture, in which God is displayed as having many human moral deficiencies as well as virtues; but it opened up possibilities that would, over the coming centuries, repeatedly stimulate fresh thinking about God, We cannot explore that history here; but it is important that we note the implications of this new understanding as we consider the further extension of jesus-trajectory2 into today's world. A central question to which we must attend is the pertinence of this new vision for our God-talk today. This Johannine declaration that "God is love" opens the door to thinking of God as a kind of activity rather than a person; in that respect it suggests a conception of God similar to that with which we are working in this book (God is creativity, not a person-agent).

The Johannine writers do not take up the question of how love might have created the world. But the creation of the world surely could have been imagined as an expression of God as love: in human experience love is at the center of both creative and procreative attitudes and activities, and by extension it might be thought of as having in some way brought forth the universe. For us today however, this move cannot easily be made for two reasons: (1) As mentioned above, love is itself a thoroughly anthropomorphic concept, and we are attempting here to think of God in nonanthropomorphic terms. (2) The physical world, as we understand it today could not have been brought into being without massive physical forces, including violent events of many different sorts: exploding stars; cosmic "black holes" that swallow up everything in their vicinity; on planet Earth volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, and so on, and nature "red in tooth and claw"-all of which continue today. This violence appears to be an indispensable feature of the creativity manifest in the ‘cosmos at large. So how can we speak of the creativity (God), which has brought all of this into being, as love?

What we can say today is that all of this violence is characteristic of the creative beginnings and the ongoing underpinnings of a remarkable process in our universe, a process that has included the creation of life, and then much later the creation of agents capable of self-conscious action and (eventually) moral judgments about such matters as violence and nonviolence. This creativity manifest in our universe (God)--in the course of bringing us humans into being--has also brought us to a point where we can entertain the possibility of living in a moral order that is nonviolent and is loving; and we can deliberately choose to work toward such an order. We can educate ourselves and our children to live and act in loving nonviolent ways (however unlikely it may be that the dream of a completely nonviolent human order will ever be fully realized).The emergence of moral values, meanings, and sensitivities--together with the contexts that both require and nourish them--is just as much a product of creativity (God) as are the more ancient material aspects of the universe,_Activity attitudes, and behavior of the sort We call loving gradually came into being in and through the processes through which our humanness was being created; and--especially with jesus and his followers--they came into focus. In due course, in our human corner of the universe, capacities and needs for agape love have gradually become important and prized (at least in some quarters). Thus, in and through our specifically human interaction with creativity--with God--loving, caring attitudes and activities have become a significant feature of life. However, this creative development--like many other distinctively human characteristics--came about only in the course of human evolution and history as far as we know. It is quite unlike what has come into being in the interrelations of creativity (God) with many other spheres of the cosmic order: so the Johannine writer has really gone too far in suggesting that the God of the universe is simply love.

We humans live in worlds of symbols; and this exaggerated Johannine claim does make an important point in that connection Jesus is, after all, the principal and most dramatic symbol humans have of a truly radical ethic of caring, of giving ourselves to others in love. Indeed, it is hard to see how this radical giving of our lives for and to others could have become such a powerful idea in our human world without the story of Jesus--that is, without what has been handed down in Jesus trajectory1. Most people would not even consider such a radical demand; and only a small fraction of those who have thought about it have taken this demand for self giving seriously But the image/ concept of radical agape-love has in fact become an important ideal value to a good many people- over the centuries, and for that we have to thank (in part) the pronouncement in 1 John that God is love: the ultimate power in the universe is love. Down through the centuries Christians have received the symbols of Jesus and love-symbols most powerfully dramatized in jesus' crucifixion, on the one hand, and in the declaration that God is love, on the other--as central to the very meaning of life; and we today who inherit this tradition must decide whether we should still take this insistence on radical love seriously or not. In the last twenty centuries there have always been persons who, upon encountering the figure of Jesus and the emphasis on love, found they had to make a deliberate decision whether to commit themselves to these symbols in a radical way; this has never been an easy decision. And we today also--if we have experienced the powerful attraction of the image/ story of jesus-find we must ponder whether we are Willing to orient ourselves and our lives in terms of this vision of the human.

I suggested above that 1 John's insight that “God is love" implies that God is an activity rather than a person, and something similar to this is also what I have been suggesting in my proposal that we think of God as creativity. For the writer of 1 John, the most important feature of the Jesus-story apparently was that through it God was creating agape-love among humans; and he emphasized that point strongly with his declaration: God is love! Is that point still so important for us humans that we should continue using this anthropomorphic hyperbole in characterizing God? However beautiful this metaphor is, it expresses--when used without qualification--a thoroughly anthropocentric way of thinking about the creativity manifest throughout the vast cosmos Within which we find ourselves, a mistake that I am trying here to correct. What we can say, I think, is something like this: In this book (and in Kaufman 2004) we are exploring the proposal that we think of God as creativity, a serendipitous creativity that, in the process of bringing into existence many different forms of being and power, has also created human life; and (as Christians may well believe) in connection with this human life God has--in and with the creativity of jesus and the early Christian community--created agape-love as the central value and norm for orienting and assessing human life and actions.

III

We are now in a position to refine our concept of creativity a bit further. For the most part I have been using this notion in a very broad and general sense: to indicate any example of the bringing into being (or the coming into being) of the novel, of something new--whatever it may be, and wherever and whenever it may be. This characterization may seem to suggest that creativity occurs largely in point-instant events, anywhere and at any time. That would, however; be a misunderstanding: creativity appears most frequently in and through continuous transformative processes, some very extended--what I have called "creative trajectories" (see, e.g., ch. 1, pp. 22-23). The creativity that followed upon the Big Bang gradually became increasingly specific and distinctive, and in due course quite various. And the creativity in the ensuing evolutionary and historical processes seems always to have involved the coming into being of something new on a specific trajectory-a trajectory that had already developed in a particular way that opened it to the possibility of further creative movements in some directions but not in others.” In this book we are particularly interested in the creativity manifest in Jesus»trajectory2--that is, the particular historical trajectory that emerged in consequence of the life, ministry teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection narratives of the man Jesus of Nazareth--a trajectory that has continued to develop and expand in many ways over the subsequent centuries all the way down to the present. We have not yet considered the wider context within which this trajectory itself came into being; and to understand what was involved in that, we must briefly rake note of the pattern of creativity that brought Jesus into being. So let us now look backward in time from Jesus, taking note of the complex series of nested creative trajectories from within which he ultimately appeared (was created). We will be in a better position, then, to look forward again to the consequences of his life.

Jesus, as we have been considering him, was a unique historical figure (this general remark can be made, of course, about virtually everyone). He appeared about two thousand years ago in Palestine within what we could call the Hebrew/Jewish historico-cultural trajectory, and this was part of a wider complex of historico-cultural trajectories in the eastern Mediterranean region. These trajectories in turn were all aspects of the larger human biohistorical trajectory that had its beginnings in Africa, perhaps about five .hundred thousand years ago. We could continue, of course, to push this nested pattern of creative developments back through the biological trajectories of primates, mammals, and ultimately the beginnings of life on planet Earth, but that is not necessary for our purposes. We have reminded ourselves here of the enormous complexity and longevity of the creativity that brought forth the Middle Eastern historico-cultural trajectories that then provided the context for the appearance of Jesus and for Jesus' life and its consequences.

Most scholars are agreed that the immediate circumstance that brought forth Jesus' ministry was the preaching. of John the Baptizer out in the wilderness near the river Jordan, Jesus went to hear john, repented for his sins, was baptized, and became one of John's followers. In due course he, like john, was preaching about the imminent coming of God's kingdom on earth.” jesus, however--quite unlike John, whose hearers had to go out into the wilderness to hear him--wandered from village to village, seeking out people who were despised as sinners and bringing the good news of the coming kingdom of God directly to them (Fredriksen 2000:127-28). Jesus-trajectory1 begins, thus, with a historical account of Jesus' discipleship under John, and then Jesus' own ministry's teachings, death, and subsequent appearances; it proceeds through an account of the enormously creative consequences of jesus' elevation to deity by his followers (as the Jesus story of trajectoryl is spread far and wide by Christian missionaries); and then it broadens out in the ongoing history of the various understandings of and commitments to jesus, down through the ages to the present. Moreover, this trajectory remains open to further creative development.

We need to ask now whether this image/story of Jesus (as presented in Jesus-trajectory2) can inform, in any important ways our ,understand ing of God as creativity. As we have noted, for first-century Christians much of great importance was revealed about God in and through the image/ story of Jesus (trajectory1). Does the image/story of Jesus, as We today think about it in connection with trajectory? reveal anything new about the creativity manifest in our universe (that is, about God)? Some comments, I think, can be made about this. First, consider this example. The emergence of life on planet Earth, and eventually of humanity, does say something about the creativity manifest in our universe: in the course of some billions of years (and other necessary conditions), a very complex pattern of creativity developed on planet Earth. It was a creativity that brought into being many different sorts of living creatures (among other things). All of these creatures are, of course, quite complex; some of them--eventually including self-conscious, morally responsible creative-creatures, us humans--are extraordinarily complex. If we consider how differently and variously this mode of creativity on planet Earth has produced new forms of life in many quite diverse particular contexts, we can see that it must be enormously adaptable--a characteristic not suggested at all by the creativity in the Big Bang. The emergence of life on planet Earth, with its many distinctive species--and later the emergence of human life, with its many distinctive societies, cultures, and individuals--does tell us something about the creativity in the universe that we otherwise would not have known.

Every individual person is, of course, a vivid exemplar illustrating these points about the complexity of the creativity that has brought humans into being; in this respect, therefore, the emergence of jesus reveals nothing particularly unique. However, the image/story of jesus is unique in certain very important respects we have seen), and this uniqueness must itself be regarded as a manifestation of the creativity on planet Earth (as is every instance of earthly uniqueness), If one believes that the image/story of jesus presents a kind of definitive picture of what is normative for humans-a sense of what human life. at its best is all about, a sense of how we ought to live, for what goals we should strive, what is a truly good human life and human community-the distinctiveness of precisely these norms grounded in this story may quite properly be understood as a unique expression of creativity (God), In this respect, thus, this particular. image/ story reveals something about God (creativity) that we humans otherwise would not know: the divine creativity is involved in the creation of norms by means of which humans can (should?) order their lives.

At fittest only a very small group of followers discerned that Jesus' life, ministry teachings, and death had this kind of special importance, And they likely would have missed this point if they had not 'become convinced that jesus had been raised from the dead by God and thus certified from -on high (Rom. 1:4). With certification like that, however, the jesus-movement took hold quickly and expanded throughout the Roman Empire and beyond; and in due course the notions of Jesus as unique Son of God, unique second person of the trinity uniquely definitive revelation of God, and so on, spread around the world. These particular claims, it must be granted, about Jesus' utter uniqueness, or about his being the “image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15) and the definitive normative model of the human, have always been accepted by some to whom they were presented and refused by others. This last point is very important: only those who accepted the trajectoryl version of the image/story of Jesus were in a position to regard him as being unique and significant in this special way as God's only son--and for that reason a new revelation of God's nature and activities. From the beginning on, many others have pooh-poohed this claim, regarding it as ridiculous. And this is also the case today. What are we--with our Jesus-trajectory2 approach--to make of this set of issues inherited from trajectory thinking?

As I have suggested repeatedly creativity-a profound mystery beyond human comprehension--is seemingly involved in virtually everything that happens: large or small, beautiful or ugly, authentic or fake, true or false, good or evil. Can the specific--indeed unique--set of events found in the Jesus-story illuminate in some significant way such an all-encompassing reality as creativity?-a creativity in which everything has its origin? Though this wide creativity is the principal criterion (in the theological position sketched here) for identifying the many idolatries into which we humans fall--and that is an important function--the concept of creativity that we have been employing up to this point is too general to provide us with much specific information on anything in particular, and thus any guidance on the decisions and actions, large and small, of everyday life. In Judaism that sort of detailed guidance (as we have seen) was usually provided by the legal sections of the Torah and commentaries on those sections; but in the early decades of the Christian movement, these were largely displaced by the developing image/story of Jesus--his actions and his teachings, his crucifixion and his resurrection--all elaborated and extended in the growing Christian movement as it created Jesus-trajectory1. And in due course this christic input into the understanding of God became central to the meaning of the word “God" as it was employed by most Christians: God is a trinity (it was claimed), of which Jesus is the "second person," and God is preeminently love. Christianity's inherited monotheism was thus transformed decisively. The image/story of Jesus had revealed a great deal about God that had not been known before. How is all this to be understood in our Jesus-trajectory2 program?

I have been arguing here that God (creativity) must be understood as deeply involved in all aspects of the cosmos, including those that are of little or no significance to us humans; by the same token, of course, creativity (God) must also be seen as intimately involved with us humans, including our deepest longings, commitments, loyalties, loves. However deeply mysterious is the creativity from which everything has come, included within that "everything" must be the normative dimensions of meaning and value in the human biohistorical trajectory. Creativity (God) must be conceived, thus, to be as intimately and appropriately involved with the dimensions of the human trajectory that make life meaningful and precious as with any others-perhaps more involved in some respects, considering the intricate complexity of these features of the universe. Those respects, then, in which Jesus and love have significant normative meaning for Christians are also quite properly to be attributed to creativity (God). The normativity of the image/ story of Jesus shows itself in its powerful attractiveness to some men and women as a model for humans, catching their attention and drawing them to itself and it gives those who commit themselves to it a sense of what they can believe God (creativity) is bringing about on planet Earth--a sense of the direction in which creativity may be moving in our human World--and (as we may dare to hope) will continue to move in the future. It was, after- all, creativity (God) that brought forth Jesus as a normative model, and it was creativity that brought forth love, regarded (by Christians) as the ultimate criterion of what humans ought to become and to be. Because of the openness of agape-love to all corners-even enemies-there may be some reason to take seriously the Christian claim that love has a certain normative significance for all human existence; and one might make the claim that this particular normatively of love is grounded in nothing less than the divine creativity the creativity that has produced all humans, has produced our humanness and, indeed, our striving for humaneness.

However important these claims may be for us living on planet Earth, they do not, of course, tell us much about the creativity in the wider cosmos-the creativity that will determine the ultimate future of planet Earth and its inhabitants. We make a mistakenly anthropocentric judgment if we think these Christian concerns and activities (all of which are bound up with life on planet Earth) reveal much to us about that wider creativity in the universe at large. The most that the image/story of Jesus may be revealing to us is that the creativity on planet Earth that helped enable human life to emerge, to continue, to flourish, has also- helped enable humans to become more loving and humane. And we may well have that future creativity will help us move further down this path. In that very limited way the Jesus image/story may be telling us something very important about what God (creativity) has brought about in the human trajectory on planet Earth. All of this, of course, must be considered a matter of (Christian) faith, not knowledge. Faith and hope of this sort can motivate men and women as they seek to live out the paradigm of the human revealed in the story of Jesus, and the early Christians. In any case, commitment to Jesus and to agape-love; or failure to commit oneself to Jesus and love, is always basically a matter of human consent or decision-or better: it is a matter of the weightiness of a long sequence of historical human decisions and consents, and the deep conviction that this trajectory is a significant expression of the serendipitous creativity we call God.

With the notion of Jesus-trajectory2, I am seeking to sketch an alternative to the ministry/death/resurrection/ ascension-to»heaven story about jesus (trajectory1)-an alternative that does not presuppose the outmoded two-worlds framework of the traditional account and that fits into meaningful connection with an understanding of God as creativity We need now to look at one more important implication of this proposal. The elevation of Jesus to deity (in trajectory1), taken together with the awareness of the presence of the divine Spirit in the life of the Christian communities (see Acts 2; Gal. 5:16-6:l; -etc.), made it important for the Christian movement to create an entirely new previously unheard»of conceptual meaning for the word "trinity": that the "father son, and holy spirit" are to be understood as one God, not three. The concept of trinity that was developed holds these three together in such an indivisible interconnectedness that it is precisely in the solidarity of their togetherness (not in their independence from each other) that they are God, the God that Christians have worshiped and served. It is not necessary for our purposes here to spell out the doctrine of the trinity in any detail. I have brought it up because in and through the second motif of the trinitarian concept (the second person to use the traditional terminology), the churches have officially declared that jesus Christ is an indispensable central component of the Christian understanding of God: the second person of the trinity is fully coequal with the first and third persons in their divine reality For (most) Christians the image/story of Jesus has been a major ingredient of the meaning of the word "God."

We need to take note here of i some problems connected with this idea of God~as-trinity Given our conception of God-as-creativity is it appropriate to continue to give this kind of weight to the Jesus image/story? The story of Jesus, in the trajectory2 christology that I have been developing here, is concerned with only one very limited complex of the creativity in the universe; the creativity on planet Earth--more specifically the creativity in the human biohistorical trajectory on planet Earth. This is a far cry from the traditional trinitarian claim that the three persons of the trinity all co»inhere in each other (the doctrine of perichoresis) and are all equally involved in everything in which any one of them is involved--and thus equally involved in everything throughout the cosmos. The doctrine of the trinity may be faulted here on two counts: (1) in its lifting a human being (Jesus) up into full deity it makes the creativity throughout the universe fundamentally anthropomorphic and anthropocentric; and (2) this sort of move seems to presuppose some version of the old two-worlds cosmology. Hence, for those thinking in terms of something like a Jesus-trajectory2 christology (a move I am proposing for persons who take seriously critical historical methods and modern evolutionary ideas), it is difficult to see how anything like the traditional doctrine of the trinity can still be advocated. Most of the vast universe, as we think of it today. is in no way at all affected by jesus' life, death, and resurrection; it is only the human project and its evils, on planet Earth, to which the jesus-story--because of the healing and new life that it has brought-is pertinent.”

Some may object to this argument, holding that the idea of trinity is central and indispensable to the Christian understanding of God; and it is not, therefore, a matter of choice or consent for Christian theologians: trinity is simply what God in fact is for Christians. But that is a misleading, claim. We need to recognize that from the very beginning of specifically Christian thinking about God, all the major issues that needed addressing involved human choices. Doubtless the divine creativity was playing its part in these developments, but from our vantage point today just what that part was remains (as always) a profound mystery. What was visible to the humans participating--and continues co remain visible to us today--were the decisions these humans themselves made. It was through choices made by various followers of Jesus that the affirmations and claims that eventually developed into Jesus-trajectory1 were made; it was the choices of councils of bishops that eventuated in the understanding of what would be regarded as "orthodox" in the churches-including the doctrine of the trinity-and what would be regarded as "heresy"; and it has been repeated choices over the centuries--by bishops and popes, by congregations, by reformers of various sorts as well as other individual women and men_that have determined in every new present whether those earlier choices should still be regarded as of central importance in orienting an ordering life. Choice also determined whether they should be played down to some extent or be completely ignored or be revised and updated. This is, of course, one of the ways in which the ongoing creativity in the historico-cultural process opens up new channels of intellectual development or closes down old ones-in theology as well as in other activities. And so it must also be today with the doctrine of the trinity as well as other traditional claims. In and through ongoing reflection on the pertinence, or the irrelevance, of the image/story of Jesus for our lives and for today's world, Jesus-trajectory2 continues to develop--or perhaps dies away for us.

IV

We in the twenty-first century are the heirs of many different ways of understanding and interpreting Jesus: Which (if any) should we commit ourselves to and seek to develop further? Which should we ignore or discard? These are difficult questions, and in the past they were often answered on the basis of what was regarded as authoritative divine revelation, an option no longer open to us, as has been argued here. When the churches in the early centuries of Christianity accepted or consented to the notion of orthodoxy the range of options for Christians was significantly narrowed-though there have always been differences of opinion regarding precisely what "orthodoxy" required, and usually there were some Christians (often called heretics) who chose to reject the dominant orthodoxy. Many different options, thus, have always been available in Christian thinking about God, human it); jesus, and the world. And Jesus-trajectory2, as we receive it today,presents us with this variety of interpretations of Christian faith and of the image/story of Jesus. There cannot be any clear, obvious, and universally agreed conclusion about what the uniqueness and significance of the image/story of Jesus consists in. Already in the New Testament period there were strained arguments on this matter between different factions among the followers of Jesus, and this has continued throughout history.

Jesus trajectory2, thus, actually brings us a number of significantly different Jesuses; to which should we (as groups or as individuals) commit ourselves? Here again we are confronted with a matter of choice or at least consent: Which Jesus, if any really "grabs" us? Which makes sense to us? Which will help us grow in important new directions? Whatever We regard as of unique significance in the complex of events "surrounding and including and following' upon the man Jesus"” will largely determine the version of the Jesus-story that we choose as we seek to discern what light that story might throw on human life and death today. In chapter 4 I will take up again this matter of the variety of Jesuses available today and will indicate which of these I find most significant and why.

There is one more important theological issue that must be at least touched upon in this chapter: the traditional Christian belief in an afterlife, On this issue, as on many others, the resurrection of Jesus was determinative in the early church and through much of Christian history. Paul put it this way in a letter to the church in Corinth:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If for this life only we have hoped in Christ. we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the 116211, the first fruits of those who have died. (1 Cor. 15:12, 17, 19-20)

What Paul is saying is that an afterlife that will essentially cancel out all the problems of this life is coming for the faithful. However; in our this-worldly interpretation of Jesus and of Christian faith, there is no basis for such a claim: the conception of an afterlife presupposes the notion of an "other world” to which faithful believers go after death. Though this notion has been held by many through much of Christian history it has not been accepted by all Christians in the past (according to Paul's letter, just quoted, this disbelief goes back to the early days of the church); and there are many Christians today for whom both the traditional dualistic two worlds notion and the anthropomorphic conception of God that accompanies it are simply unbelievable. The rejection of these traditional claims is, of course, central to the theology with which we are working here. And this implies that traditional Christian eschatology must also go. We humans are simply not in a position to know what the ultimate future of our universe will be; or the ultimate future of our human world within this universe; or about some life»after-death to which some or all humans will ultimately go. We can, however, say this about the future: it certainly may be- looped that the creativity (God) that brought us into being,. and which still sustains and enhances the order of life on planet Earth, will continue--for a considerable future-the sustenance and enhancement of the biohistorical trajectory on which we humans find ourselves.

When we look back over the past in our corner of the universe observing the creativity manifest everywhere in it, we see the complex of creative trajectories that brought life into being on planet Earth--and, as part of that life, brought human existence into being; and we are drawn to acknowledge the great gifts that creativity--God!--has bestowed upon us humans, especially the gift of active participation in the creation of the human trajectory itself Love, forgiveness, hope, joy peace, justice, courage, humility moral responsibility--above all, our own human creativity--all came into being as this trajectory moved forward, creating and sustaining important cultural and religious values and meanings, dispositions and practices and institutions. In the course of these developments a context emerged within which jesus appeared, and not long after that the image/ story of Jesus-trajectory1 was created. Although the two-worlds picture that informed that story may no longer get be plausible to us, Jesus-trajectory2 supplies us with a version of the Jesus-story that is completely this-worldly. This picture can inform the desires and intentions of the many today who wish to commit (or re-commit) themselves to the powerful stream of creativity (God) that has been manifest in and through Jesus and the Jesus-movement during the last two millennia. As we all proceed into the future, we can hope this movement will gain the insight and the strength to bring new forms of "abundant life" (john 10:10) into our seriously fractured world. What this future will actually bring is, of course, unknown to us; nevertheless, Christians can commit themselves to the hope that the stream of ongoing creativity that Jesus-trajectory2 reveals to us--that mysterious creativity (God) that has brought this trajectory into being--will continue to provide a context within which we can effectively address the important problems we today face. In chapter 4 I will say something about the particular problems I have in mind here, and about the respects in which the image/story of Jesus may be of importance in addressing them.

In all of this we have been reflecting on the connection of God (creativity) with the Jesus-story and the continuing effects of that ongoing creativity The actual historicity in jesus' life of some aspects of that story is not as important an issue as the creative #cts of that life and death. In my view this way of thinking about the Jesus-event--in terms of its creativity--dissolves away the Jesus-of-history versus Christ-of-faith debate almost completely. And it allows for, and in fact plays up in a significant way, an ongoing creative spirit, a spirit that the images and stories of Jesus and the early Christians continue to inspire. Like all humans, we today live out of our historicity and what it has bequeathed to us, and we live anticipating a largely unknown future. But it is in the present, not the past or the future, that our ongoing living, thinking, deciding, and acting occur.

V

Although many today regard jesus-trajectory! as too implausible to take seriously; they may find that one of the versions of the image/ story of Jesus in trajectory1 draws them powerfully to itself and can create in their lives meaning, order, and orientation in today's pluralistic world. And they may gratefully acknowledge that God--the mystery of creativity the ultimate source of our existence in the world--continues today to be profoundly involved with us humans in our living and our dying. This observation might well lead to questions about the implications that the understanding of God and of jesus with which we are working in this hook might have for such religious practices as prayer and worship. In the past much Christian worship and prayer has presupposed an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric God, a God who "hears our prayers" and who "answers" them; and Jesus has traditionally been understood as a resurrected personal being "sitting at the right hand of God. the Father" and ruling the world as its "Lord" and "Savior" Given that context, it is not surprising that prayer-whether directed to Jesus or to God-was often thought of on the model of conversation, a conversation between living personal beings.. And worship was thought of as bowing down before, or looking up reverently toward, the creator of the universe. These practices, however, are obviously no longer appropriate for those who take. seriously the conceptions of God and of Jesus with which we have been working here.

This does not imply that there is no longer any place in our lives for worship and prayer. The God with which we are concerned here is the wondrous serendipitous creativity that has brought us humans into being within this magnificent universe--this universe that continues to be creatively transformed in new and surprising ways. It is a universe of great beauty and of overwhelming displays of power; at universe populated by many utterly diverse kinds of beings; a universe within Which, on planet Earth and possibly elsewhere) living beings in countless varieties have been created-including our own human mode of existence. This is a universe and a creativity that call forth profound feelings of awe, appreciation, and gratitude--that is, basic modes of worship and prayer. And as we contemplate the profound mystery of this creativity and the vast complex universe it has brought forth, We are moved to meditate on it at length-another mode of both public and private prayer and worship. And we may find ourselves uttering prayers and singing songs of praise and thanksgiving to this wondrous God, this serendipitous creativity and uttering prayers of contrition and penitence for matting this beautiful world by our faults and failures, our self-centeredness and greed, our sins against our fellow-humans, against the living environment in which we find ourselves, and against the creativity that has brought us forth in this magnificent world--two more modes of prayer and worship. It is important for us' humans to express our joys and our gratitude, our sorrows and our pains, our fears and our hopes, our problems and our achievements in whatever words--or whatever silent meditation--seem to us a right and proper way to acknowledge all these matters. This may lead us to one more mode of worship and prayer: our profound privilege to give ourselves over to this deep mystery of creativity--this creativity that has also, through the mission and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in life, in death, and after his death, brought into our world the practice of agape-love and shown us its profound meaningfulness and value. This deep mystery of creativity thus becomes a light enabling us to see more clearly how we ought to live and act as we move forward into the unknown future.

Preface and Chapter 1 (of Jesus and Creativity)

Quotation from Henry Nelson Wieman (1946)
"When Jesus was crucified, his followers saw that he could never carry to fulfillment the mission of the Jewish people as they conceived it .... He was not the messiah they had expected, and, so far as they could see, he was no messiah at all. The depth of devotion and the glory of the vision they had possessed made their disillusionment all the more bitter and devastating .... They reached that depth of despair which comes when all that seems to give hope to human existence is seen to be an illusion ....

After about the third day, however, when the numbness of the shock had worn away, something happened. The life--transforming creativity previously known only in fellowship with Jesus began again to work in the fellowship of the disciples. lt was risen from the dead .... What rose from the dead was not the man Jesus; it was creative power. It was the living God that works in time."

Henry Nelson Wieman (1946)

PREFACE

In the Fourth Gospel we read: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16). This much»loved sentence sums up beautifully a central theme of traditional Christian faith. But for many thoughtful Christians today sentences like this-very common in Christian speech and writing-scarcely make sense. Though they may be lovely poetry whether they tell us anything about the real world with which we must come to terms every day may seem dubious. The metaphors get so thick and heavy in this sentence that it is hard to know just what they convey. Consider some of the problems:

What does it mean to say that God "loves" the world? If one considers nature "red in tooth and claw"--as often viewed these days on television nature programs--one can hardly help wondering what kind of love this could be. We know something about human love, and We cherish that; but what can it mean to say that the creator of this vast complex universe, fourteen billion years old, loves it? Can we really apply the word"love" to such a mysterious, unknowable reality as the creator of the universe? And what can it mean to say that this creator has a"Son"? We know what it means for humans to have children and to love their children--but how can we meaningfully apply such creaturely words as "love" and 'son" to the origin of all that is? Doesn't this kind of language suggest that God is basically like some unimaginably huge and powerful human being? Does that make senses?

And one wonders whether it makes sense, any more, to declare that humans will not perish at the end of their lives. All living creatures--as we think of them today--come into being and in due course pass away. How can such an impossible exception to this fundamental characteristic of all life, as we know it, even be imagined? Where could all these billions of people be? And what could the phrase "eternal life" possibly be referring to?

If one stops to think about it, this sort of traditional Christian talk seems quite strange today indeed very problematic. It is true, of course, that many Christians say they believe all these things and more. And it is also true that these ways of thinking and speaking have been very important historically and without them we would never have heard of Jesus at all. But Christian theology has always warned of the dangers of religious language. And today many find it difficult to make sense out of much of this kind of Christian speech. This book about jesus and Christian faith is written for people who are puzzled about these sorts of things. Instead of the traditional ways of understanding Christian faith, it proposes a different option for thinking about Jesus and his significance. The world in which these early metaphors and ideas were developed was quite different from our own, and what seemed to make good sense in that world often is virtually unintelligible in hours. The language and metaphors that we find in John 3:16 were quite intelligible in the world in which John was writing; it Was powerful language, and for many generations it expressed and explained clearly the heart of Christian faith. But in the last several centuries, as our cultural and intellectual worlds have changed drastically many modern persons-including many Christians-have found it quite difficult to understand this kind of speech. How should we understand and express that faith today?

I do not attempt in this book to explain the words of John 3:16 or other similar difficult-to-understand texts. Instead, we shall-starting from the ground up, so to speak--attempt to think through and make intelligible for our modern/postmodern time and world the story of Jesus. At many points we will be using quite different language and metaphors and ways of thinking than we find in the traditional texts; and the image/story of jesus that unfolds before us will be quite different in significant ways from the traditional picture. But it will be one, I think, that many today will find freeing and illuminating, an appropriate way to understand the legacy of this figure who is at the very center of Christian faith.

Before we can take that up, I need to make a few remarks about God. Instead of continuing to imagine God as The Creator, a kind of person like reality who has brought everything into being, I have for some years been developing and elaborating a conception of God as simply the creativity that has brought forth the world and all its contents, from the Big Bang all the way down to the present. Imagining God as creativity enables Christian thinkers to be much more attuned to what the modern sciences have been teaching us about our lives and the world in which we live. It makes it possible to bridge the divide often felt between religious faith and our scientific knowledges. This idea of creativity-originally worked out in my book entitled In Pace of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Kaufman 1993)-was developed further in a recently published book, In the beginning . . . Creativity (Kaufman 2004). Since then I have come to realize that this second book is really part 1 of what is in fact a two»part set on God as Creativity. And I have written this companion book entitled jesus and Creativity (also free»standing like part 1) as Part 2 of that series. In this book a new interpretation of Jesus for today is worked out. I thought this was what I was presenting when I wrote the chapters on jesus and the trinity in In Face cf Mystery. However, in this new book I found it necessary to develop a quite different interpretation of the significance of Jesus, one that makes some important changes from my earlier christological and trinitarian reflections.

This book has four chapters. The conception of God as creativity (instead of The Creator) requires us to rethink completely the traditional way of understanding Jesus. Chapter 1, entitled "Reconceiving the Jesus-Trajectory" presents an introductory discussion of this matter. In early accounts of the Jesus»story we can detect suggestions of a kind of movement or development in the way Jesus' followers understood who he was. This movement begins with the period of jesus' ministry on earth and his crucifixion; that picture, however, became drastically changed by their belief in his resurrection; and this development finally culminated, then, in Jesus' elevation to deity That these things did not occur until after Jesus' death is clearly implied in Romans 1:4, where Paul states that Jesus"was declared to be Son of God with power . . .by resurrection from the dead." Paul is telling us that an important development in the Jesus-story--that he is "Son of God with power"--did not occur until after his death, in connection with his followers' understanding of what they called his resurrection. As we shall see in chapters 1 and 2, given this new understanding, it is not surprising that Christian thinking about Jesus moved on into quasi-divine--even fully divine!--terms sometime after his death. I call these developments Jesus-trajectory1. From today's historical, cultural, and intellectual perspectives, this picture raises many serious problems. In chapter 1, I examine this development of Jesus-trajectory1 and some of the problems it raises, and then offer a significantly different account--jesus-trajectory2, I call it--that should prove more comprehensible to many women and men today. The rest of the book then elaborates and unpacks an interpretation based on Jesus-trajectory2.

As we shall see, in Jesus-trajectoryl we are presented with a story of jesus that presupposes a dualistic understanding of the world. We humans live down here on earth-with some very real joys and achievements, but also many problems and difficulties and failures; there is, however, another world above called heaven, where God's reign is perfect and complete. In the biblical story it is from heaven that God's son Jesus came to earth, and it is heaven to which he ascended again in triumph after his death and resurrection, Many today would no longer regard this dualistic world-picture as true literally but this raises the question, then, of how the jesus-story is to be understood. Every contemporary interpretation of jesus deals with this problem in one way or another, often without explaining how these matters are being addressed. New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann was famous for having set out explicitly his program of "demythologizing" the gospel story. Bultmann, however, retains the basic dualism of the old mythic world-picture when he declares that the "other side"--some other reality outside this life, this world of our experience--is more important than anything on "this side," since it is the real foundation of life and its meaning (see Kaufman 1993:325f; Bultmann 1958). In my opinion, to retain the deep dualism of the biblical version of the Jesus-story is to remain at odds with our contemporary understanding of the world and human life in the world and therefore--in Jesus-trajectory2--I set out a version of the Jesus-story in which all the significant events are understood to have taken place here on planet Earth.

I need to make it clear right away that this book is not one more attempt to recover the historical Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity I am not a New Testament scholar, nor am I a historian of ancient Christianity. Though I have done some reading in these fields over the years, I am in no position to make a well-argued historical analysis of the beginnings of the Christian movement and must defer to other writers on these matters; nor am I in a position to judge which of the several current portraits of jesus are most historically credible. So I have attempted to avoid these highly contested technical issues as much as possible and have presented what I take to be plausible readings of the historical materials and the biblical texts char I discuss. I am a theologian trying to develop in this book an interpretation of Jesus that will be meaningful to Christians and others who today find some of the traditional claims about Jesus--such as those just mentioned about his deity-simply unbelievable, perhaps unintelligible. I hold that if we think of God as creativity (rather than as The Creator)--and in connection with this change give up the basic dualism of the Jesus-story as we have received it--we will be in a position to develop a plausible and meaningful interpretation of the significance of Jesus for today.

For many years I have maintained that if we examine carefully some of the concepts and metaphors that are often taken for granted in theological thinking (concepts such as "The Creator"), we may be able to develop new related concepts (such as 'creativity") that will enable us to think in strikingly different ways about important matters. In this book we will be working largely on conceptual matters of this sort-trying to develop metaphors and concepts char will enable Christians today (and others interested) to think more plausibly and fittingly about the significance of Jesus, Though it is necessary of course, to consider biblical materials here and to take into account some historical data, my objective is not basically to present new arguments on historical matters but rather to develop concepts that will enable us to think freshly about the story and significance of Jesus. To accomplish this it will be necessary to introduce some metaphors and concepts different from those traditionally employed, as well as to understand differently the pattern of events in the Jesus-story.

The concept of creativity--elaborated in some detail in In the beginning . . . Creativity--will be crucial in our work here. We do not know why or how creativity comes about: it is a profound mystery. The mark that identifies the occurrence of creativity is its consequence: something strikingly new, something transformative has come into being and has become a significant feature of the ongoing world. There is much creativity manifest in jesus' ministry; and his crucifixion and what was called his resurrection also proved to be exceedingly creative events: they led to the missionary activities of the disciples and others, who carried the inspiring jesus-story around the Roman Empire and beyond. And those activities in turn created a movement that eventually became worldwide, with creative social and cultural consequences of many different sorts throughout subsequent history. It is this enormously creative historical movement, beginning with jesus and the Jesus-story that I call Jesus-trajectory2. This book presents a theological reading of this distinctly different Jesus-trajectory.

Chapter 2, entitled "Christology: Jesus as Norm," follows with an analysis central for the constructive argument of this book. (Christology is reflection on the person and significance of Jesus.) I take for granted here the understanding of God as that creativity that is manifest throughout our developing evolutionary cosmos and especially manifest as we consider the evolutionary emergence of life on planet Earth and the eventual emergence of human history and historicity. This thinking opens up new ways to understand jesus' significance, on the one hand, and jesus' special relation to God (to creativity) on the other. These are understandings that do not invoke either a two-worlds cosmic framework or the traditional two-natures conception of jesus. In chapter 3 the notion of "humans as biohistorical beings"-an understanding with which We will be working throughout_is sketched. This conception enables us to bring scientific knowledge of the biological base of our humanness into intimate interconnection with our profound human concerns about social, cultural, and religious values and meanings, practices, and institutions; it thus provides us with a way to bring our basic theological concerns with jesus and God into significant interconnection with central features of today's understanding of our humanness. Finally in chapter 4 the overall theological conclusions about the significant connections of jesus with creativity (God) are summed up, and the claim is made that this christology can inspire us to address in fresh ways some of the most serious new problems that humans must today face--particularly the ecological crisis and the challenging problem of melding ourselves into one integrated human World despite the enormous pluralism and divisiveness of our long and painful histories.

This book presents an understanding of jesus' relationship to God quite different from the traditional one in which jesus is presented as Son of God, as second person of the trinity and so on. The concept of God employed here--God as creativity--is different from, though importantly related to, that found in traditional Christian faith and thinking. It both enables and requires us to ask questions about jesus' creativity and what that creativity can mean for our understanding of him and his relation to God, It is my hope that the theological proposals made in this book will enable many Christians-as well as other interested persons-to see the Christian symbol of Jesus in a new light, a light that opens up and strengthens their faith as they seek to come to terms creatively with the enormous problems we humans must today address.

One could say that it took much of my life as a theologian to write this book. In 1976, having completed my Essay an Theological Method, I decided to begin employing the idea of theology as "imaginative construction" (see Kaufman 1995) by writing a new book on christology. But when I began to think about that book, I ran into a difficult problem. As we have noted, in Christian traditions jesus Christ is usually understood as at once both divine and human, the "God-man." I had some ideas about what it is to be human; but what could it possibly mean to think of a human as divine? One would have to know what God is in order to deal with that question, and that was a big problem for me at that time (I had recently published a book entitled God the Problem [Kaufman l972j). It became obvious to me that I would be in no position to work on christology until I became much clearer on how I understood God. As it turned out, it took me about eighteen years to work through that problem: In Face of Mystery (1993)--with its presentation of God as simply creativity (rather than The Creator)--was the result. That book includes chapters sketching views on christology and the trinity chapters which at that time I believed to be consistent with thinking of God as creativity, But the story turned out to be not quite over. About ten years later, after I had spelled out the idea of God-as-creativity in a more concrete and convincing way in my recent book, In the beginning . . . Creativity, I discovered that a radically different way of thinking about Jesus was now also required. And that led to the writing of the present book--a far cry from what I would have written in 1976.

I am deeply indebted to five persons who made important contributions to this book. Dr. Adele Anderson strongly supported this project from its very beginning; she and Professor jennifer Jesse read an early version of the manuscript in its entirety and made important suggestions on how to improve it. Professor Karen King read chapter 1 with care, helped me formulate more accurately some of my biblical interpretations, and saved me from making a number of serious mistakes. I am very grateful to Michael West, editor-in-chief, for many suggestions clarifying obscurities in the text and making sure that possible misunderstandings are avoided. I am also grateful to my son, Dr. David W Kaufman, who got me out of a good many computer jams.

Chapter 1

Reconceiving the Jesus-Trajectory

From the very beginning of Christian faith, it was taken for granted that God was the ultimate point of reference in terms of which all human life--indeed, all reality--was to be understood. Christianity emerged initially within the context of first-century Judaism, a religious culture oriented and devoted to the God believed to be the creator of the world and its ongoing ruler and governor, as emphasized throughout the Hebrew Bible:

I am Yahweh, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe,
I am Yahweh, who do all these things ....

I made the earth,
and created man upon it;
it was my hands that stretched out the heavens,
. . . and I commanded all their host. (Isa. 4`5:6b-7, 12 RSV)

It was in this monotheistic religio-cultural context that Christian faith was born. Monotheistic religious orientations, as I have argued elsewhere (Kaufman 1993:ch. 6), tend to generate a three-dimensional world-picture: God is the ultimate reality in terms of which all else is to be understood; humanity is that self-conscious, confused, and inquisitive creation of God whose conflicted ongoing story--particularly in relation to God--is rehearsed, meditated on, scrutinized, interpreted, assessed, and revised; and the world is the overarching context within which this human life, with all its troubles, struggles, and triumphs, transpires. Christian faith, however--though born within this religio-cultural context, and understanding itself as a continuing monotheistic religious orientation--is four-dimensional: in its world-picture Jesus Christ is as indispensable a dimension as the other three.

From an early period it was maintained by at least some Christians (as the New Testament shows) that Jesus is of absolutely decisive significance for understanding both who or what God is and what human life is all about. Jesus was said to be, on the one hand, the definitive revelation of God, the very "image of the invisible God," as Colossians 1:15 puts it. On the other hand, it was claimed that Jesus is utterly human: "made like his brethren in every respect," as Hebrews 2:17 (RSV) declares, and the very model of human perfection, "tempted as we are, yet without sinning" (4:15 RSV). This double significance of Christ was given dogmatic definition at the Council of Chalcedon (451 c.E.), where it was affirmed that Jesus was "perfect in Godhead . . , [and] perfect in humanness, truly God and truly human ,... consubstantial with the Father in Godhead, and . . . consubstantial with us in humanness ,... two natures . . . in one Person"
(Hardy 1954:373, slightly altered). If our task here were to understand correctly the history of christology we would, of course, have to puzzle out the meanings of all this quasi-mythical language; and that would be a long and complicated assignment? In my opinion, however, Christian theology should no longer be thought of as essentially a hermeneutical task, that is, as largely interpretation of traditional material. Although one cannot do theology properly without awareness and understanding of the main Christian traditions, its central task is essentially constructive: to put together a Christian world-picture (or some important features of that picture) appropriate, in a specific context, for orienting human life, reflection, and devotion. We cannot carry out this task, of course, without paying serious attention to the traditions that have informed Christian faith in the past. However, in the course of history from the time of Jesus up to the present, great changes in and many variations of Christian faith and life have appeared, as Christians have had to adapt themselves repeatedly to new unforeseen circumstances. So our theological task today is to construct a Christian world-picture that can orient faith and life appropriately and effectively in today's rapidly changing modern/postmodern world.

I

In my recent book, In the beginning . . . Creativity (Kaufman 2004), I suggested that in our world today the traditional defining notion of God as The Creator has become for many virtually unintelligible; and I suggested that such persons might, therefore, think of God simply as creativity (a descendant of that traditional idea). “What does it mean to place our faith in God-as-creativity? And what does it mean to order our activities, lives, and worship in relation to God as so conceived? For monotheistic believers in our time, in my opinion, it is meaningful and helpful to think of creativity as the ultimate point of reference in terms of which life should be oriented; and in that book, therefore, it was argued that it is appropriate, in the widespread ordinary employment of the name God, to understand that it is creativity to which that name refers. Because the focus in that book was on these quite general concerns, very little was said there about Christian faith's other major symbol, Jesus Christ In the present book, however, I develop-in close connection with my proposal that We think of God as creativity-an interpretation of the correlative importance of Jesus, for those who wish to understand this creativity from a Christian point of view Before turning to that, we need to take note of some implications of the traditional understanding of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth, the creator of all things visible and invisible. The mark that came to distinguish God decisively from everything else was, as these phrases imply, creativity: everything other than God was created by God; God alone had self-existence, aseity. God was not thought of only as creator, however. Before the Israelites came to believe that their god Yahweh was creator of everything, they had known himé as a mighty warrior (who brought the children of Israel out of Egypt and who overpowered the Canaanites, giving their land to the Israelites); and he was also a lawgiver, ruler, judge, and so on. All of these roles helped to fill in the picture of God as an almighty but nevertheless humanlike, male-gendered being. This thoroughly anthropomorphic conception of God had clear implications for the way in which men and women should live: they were expected to obey faithfully God's commandments and his ongoing guidance (as loyal subjects of a good king would do); and they were expected to manifest grateful, loving, and Worshipful responses to God's glorious presence (as the recipients of a great benefactor's largesse should do); and so on. These matters were not just general admonitions: their meaning was spelled out in detail in the legal sections of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), and faithful Israelites (as well as, later on, their Jewish descendants) sought to order their lives in accord with these detailed holy prescriptions. By keeping the Torah (those teachings given the Israelites by God) in focus, they would order their lives in accord with God's will and would thus be oriented properly in the world. Only gradually as the glory of the Israelite God was increasingly magnified in the consciousness and devotion of his worshipers, did he become understood as the creator of all that existed. So at the time the Hebrew Bible was put together and creativity had come to be the defining mark that distinguished God from all else, he was also believed to be active in, and supervisory over, the lives of his devotees in many respects. Humans have always had laws, ideals, institutions, hopes and expectations, ways of living and ordering life socially politically economically and so on; in ancient Israel it was believed that all of these had been given by God, and they were to be obeyed as such. So God was not only the creator. God was also a ruler and mighty warrior, a lawgiver and Judge (all humanlike characterizations). And God was the Holy One, source of all meaning and value. God was actively involved in the everyday life of the Hebrew people with whom he had made a covenant and to whom he had given the Torah.

With the emergence of Christianity however--especially as it became a largely Gentile movement in the work of the apostle Paul and others, and moved beyond its jewish origins--much of this orientation of life in terms defined by the Torah was changed, as the Christian gospel (the good news" about Jesus Christ) supplanted Jewish circumcision and purity laws. The basic conception of God as the creator of the world was retained (although there was a considerable struggle in the early church about that matter), but the principal focus for the ongoing everyday ordering and orienting of human life became Jesus the Christ: his proclamation of the impending "reign of God"; his ministry of healing and caring for those whom others despised; his inclusive meal practices; his radical insistence on love for, forgiveness of, and reconciliation with not only one's friends and neighbors but one's enemies as well; his mysterious "appearances" to his disciples and others after his death. Jesus was obviously a very remarkable, charismatic figure, and it should not surprise us that what he lived and taught and endured filled the imaginations of his small group of close followers with memories and hopes, ideals and dreams of quite new possibilities for women and men. Ongoing Christian existence-discipleship to Jesus-involved a new transformed life oriented in terms drawn from the (developing) story and image of jesus, whom Christians regarded as their Lord and whom they believed would soon be seen by all to be the Lord of the world, the Son of God, indeed the very incarnation of God on earth. As Paul put it in one of his early letters (drawing on what are thought to have been words of an older Christian hymn):

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under_the earth, and every tongue should confess that _lesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5-11)

Thus, the early Christians came to understand their living relation to God the creator as mediated to them in a decisively new and distinctive way: through Jesus Christ their Lord, the very Son of God. In this new situation, obedience to the elaborate legal prescriptions of the Torah no longer provided proper orientation in life and the world; God's action in and through Jesus (that is, through the continuously developing image and story of jesus) now provided the focus and frame of orientation for life on earth: the followers of jesus were to take up ministries of reconciliation through which God was "reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:19).

In the early Christian movement Jesus was understood in a number of quite different ways, some of these very different from Paul's views just cited. All of these, however, were expressed and formulated in what we today must regard as anthropomorphic (humanlike) ideas of God and the relation of God to humans. In this book (as well as in other writings of mine) these anthropomorphic ideas are displaced by the understanding of God as simply creativity (instead of a humanlike person thought of as The Creator). Thus, God will be regarded here as that utterly amazing mystery of serendipitous creativity manifest throughout the universe from the Big Bang onward, first in cosmic and biological evolutionary developments, and then ultimately producing--in Part through the emergence of human creative activity--the human world of history culture, highly complex levels of symbolization, and elaborate technologies. When we take up this standpoint, it is no longer appropriate to think in terms of the earlier anthropomorphic conceptions. And it becomes necessary therefore, to reconsider the entire traditional christological development and understanding, conceiving it now in terms appropriate to the conception of God as creativity.

II

However awe-inspiring and beautiful the modern/ postmodern story of the steadily developing creation of the universe may be, the notion of creativity by itself--like the notion of God the creator by itself--is not sufficient for developing a conception of God that can fully and adequately orient and order human life. In Judaism, as we have observed, Gods Torah provides central guidance on how life is to be ordered in Islam similarly there is the Qur'an, also thought of as provided by God. And in Christianity there has been Jesus Christ--not a body of prescriptions and laws, but a human being who came to be thought of as the very incarnation of God on earth. These "additions"--going beyond God's fundamental relation to humans (as creator)--were indispensable for the orienting and ordering of life. Creativity as we will be thinking of it here, is that to which everything that exists is attributed--whether massive or infinitesimal, material or ideal, beautiful or ugly valuable or useless, meaningful or meaningless, good or evil, true or false, and on and on. (The negative character of some of the items in this list will be discussed in a moment.) It is important to note that reference to creativity does not explain why things exist: "creativity" is simply the name--not the explanation--of an ultimate mystery that we humans have never been able to Put aside and likely will never adequately understand: Why is there something, not nothing? Why does anything at all exist? Why has this amazing phantasmagoria we call the world come into being? The bare conception of creativity does not itself give us answers to any of these questions. It simply, affirms that everything in this vast magnificent universe, so far as we know has somehow come into being and therefore exists, and it may continue to exist for an indefinite period of time; but in no way does creativity explain why or how that has happened. Creativity--the coming into being of new realities--is an inscrutable mystery. In this respect it may seem to differ from the creative activity ascribed to the creator--God: God was thought of (anthropomorphically) as deciding to create this and that and then performing the act of creating, of bringing into being the new. That may seem to provide an answer to our question about why things exist. However, if one reflects on this matter, it will become clear that this act of God creating everything "from nothing" is no less a mystery than is bare creativity: we do not have any more knowledge about the activities of "the creator" (we have only the biblical legends) than we do of bare creativity.”

Since creativity is utter mystery to us, it cannot provide much guidance on most of the issues with which we must come to terms as we seek to orient and order our lives. For that we need stories and images, norms and standards and laws, values and meanings and criteria much more specific and definite. For Christians, from the earliest generations on, such guidance and inspiration has been found (as was just noted) in the lordship of Jesus Christ. If Christians today still find themselves looking to the image and story of jesus for such significant orientation, it is because Jesus, like Socrates or the Buddha, impresses some men and women even today as a remarkable, in certain respects very attractive, indeed a charismatic figure, one who) may still draw us to himself in a powerful way (as he did the earliest Christians and many others over the past two thousand years). Before we turn to that, however, we need to take note of an important respect in which the mystery of creativity--God--does directly provide a somewhat vague and general but important kind of orientation for human living and acting

There is a definite qualitative distinction between God and all the creatures--between creativity and everything created. This distinction is the basis for regarding God as, in the last analysis, the only appropriate focus for human devotion and worship. 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. So it is the mystery of creativity (God) to which we must turn when we seek an overall orientation in life. To attempt to order our lives with this important distinction between God and the idols in mind can only be, of course, a move of faith, of a deep trust in this mystery that has brought us into being and continues to sustain us. We humans--as beings that have emerged on one of the countless creative trajectories moving through the cosmos--are indissolubly part of the created order and (despite our own creative powers) not in any way to be confused with the mystery of 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 in the created order Within which we have emerged.

This suggests that we humans should always seek to live and act in response to the creativity going on in the world roundabout us and in our lives; for if we do not so live and act, we will soon be out of tune and out of touch with what is really happening in the world. H. Richard Niebuhr put the point well:

To discern the ways of God not in supernatural but in all natural and historic events, to respond to his intention present in and beyond and through all finite intentions, that is the way of responsibility to God. It is a way of universal responsibility because there is no action in the whole extent of actuality in which the universal intention, the meaning of the One beyond the many is not present. (Niebuhr l963:l70)

The pertinence of this notion to our concerns here-though it is expressed in anthropomorphic terms (Gods "intention")--is obvious: we should always seek to respond to the creativity that is manifest in the situation in which we find ourselves, creativity in the natural order as well as the historical orders within which we are living. But how does one discern what is truly creative in this complex world of events and actions? This will, of course, always be a judgment call in which we could be mistaken. (That is also the case with Niebuhr's more anthropomorphic formulation.) We should seek this creativity (God) not only in programs and projects to which we ourselves are committed but also in activities and events about which we are inclined to be very critical or even contemptuous. For it may be only as we open ourselves to the serendipitous creativity manifest in events and movements alien to our inclinations that we will come to deeper discernment of what is really going on in our world, and thus be enabled to respond creatively to this divine creativity instead of falling into idolatries of one sort or another. We can desire and hope, thus, that our activities and projects--our human creativity--will become blended into the creativity going on in the world roundabout us.

In this very important overarching respect, loyalty to God, the mystery of creativity and faith in this ultimate mystery provide an indispensable dimension to our orientation in life and the world.

III

As we have noted, beginning with the early period immediately after Jesus' death and"resurrection" and continuing all the way down to the present, Christians have viewed God in light of the overpowering significance (to them) of the figure of Jesus. (I put quotation marks around the word "resurrection" here because of its highly problematic meaning now to be discussed.) Cut understanding of God as creativity instead of as The Creator-that is, our nonanthropomorphic and nonanthropocentric understanding--requires that we note right away that the idea of resurrection is in question. Most contemporary historians studying this matter are convinced that it is not possible to understand how the early church came into being apart from some sort of "appearances" of Jesus to his disciples and others after his death, experiences that led them to believe God had resurrected Jesus from the dead. Some historians may feel it is important to develop a theory of the resurrection, but that is not necessary for our purposes here. Some quite dramatic events apparently occurred that rejuvenated, transformed, and reignited the faith of the followers of jesus after his death. And the important point for our purposes is that these events (as we shall See) had enormously creative consequences. Since the words 'appearances" of Jesus and "resurrection" of Jesus are the standard terms used in the New Testament to refer to these enigmatic happenings, I too will employ them when referring to these events, whatever they may actually have been. From early on (probably already during his life) Jesus was regarded by some as God's messiah (God's "anointed one"), who was expected to overcome all earthly rulers and inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. In his preaching and teaching God's kingship was central;13 and signs of its imminent coming were seen by jesus and his followers in his healings, his open table»fellowship, his respect for women, his forgiveness of sins, and other practices. It is important to note, however, that Jesus' view of how Gods kingdom would come on earth was very different from the views of those who expected a military revolt against Rome. This apparently did not become clear to his followers until after his death. Jesus' crucifixion was at first an enormous blow to the disciples, but his completely unexpected appearances shortly after the crucifixion convinced (most of?) them that he had "been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died," as Paul put it (1 Cor. 15:20) in the earliest discussion still extant of Jesus' resurrection." This resurrection of Jesus meant that he was chosen by God to bring in the New Age. According to Paul, 'jesus Christ our Lord" was 'designated Son of God in power . . . by his resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:4 RSV); "as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ .... Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and authority and every power" (1 Cor. 15:22, 24). Evidently Jesus was believed by Paul (and many of Jesus' other early followers) to be the central figure through whom God was bringing all the evil in human affairs to a final end, thus completely establishing God's righteous rule.

It is important to note that in the text just cited Paul does not present Jesus as on a level with God, but rather as the central agent through whom God's righteous kingship over all human activities was being established. What I call Jesus-trajectoryl--the historically developing elevation of Jesus to fully divine status”--is clearly under way here, but it has not yet reached its apex. It is convenient to think of this movement into deity as consisting of four distinct conceptual steps. (Doubtless it could be broken down in other ways.) The first step begins with jesus' public baptism; continues through his ministry of preaching and teaching about the coming kingdom of God, performing healings of many sorts, and showing in other ways that a New Age is at hand; and finally culminates in his crucifixion.” A second step is the emergence (after his crucifixion) of his followers' belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead and had appeared to them, thus becoming seen as the "Son of God" and their "Lord," about to bring in God's kingdom. A third conceptual step in this trajectory is the emergence of the conviction that Jesus had been elevated to heaven and that his life on earth was actually the very incarnation of God on earth, a claim clearly made in the text of the Fourth Gospel (written many years later than Paul's writings earlier quoted). In the Johannine text it is explicitly declared that the "Word" that “was God" (john 1:1), the Word through which "all things came into being" (1:3), this Word "became flesh and lived among us [as ]Jesus], and we have seen his glory" (1214). The Johannine Jesus himself declared that "the Father and I are one" (1030); and this became a central conviction, as the followers of jesus who had continued to express doubts about him and his resurrection finally became able to proclaim joyously that jesus was, as the disciple Thomas put it (according to the Fourth Gospel), "my Lord and my God!" (20:28). Finally the trajectory reaches its apex in the church's development of the doctrine of the trinity in which it is officially stated that God is a reality with "one nature" in "three persons"-Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit-all of equal divine status." We now have before us an outline of Jesus-trajectoryl as found in the New Testament and early Christian doctrinal history.” With the doctrine of the trinity Christians were trying to make it clear that they did not think of themselves as worshiping two (or three) gods, even though the phrases “God the Father" and "God the Son" seem to designate two different realities. From early on, as we have seen, God had come to be thought of as creator of all that is--and it was this that distinguished God decisively from everything else (regarded as creatures, realities created by God). This was, of course (as we noted), an incomplete characterization of God: for the early Israelites God was also thought of as Warrior, ruler, judge, lawgiver, and so on; and without God's gift of the Torah they would not have been able to orient themselves in accord with the divine will (which was hidden and inaccessible, a mystery). For jesus' followers, however, the overpowering impact of his ministry death, and resurrection-at first only on a small group of jewish women and men, then in succeeding decades becoming a largely Gentile movement-changed all of this decisively as Jesus-trajectoryl gradually became clear (i.e., was created). jesus Christ became the lens through which the creator~God was now increasingly seen; the image of the crucified messiah and his resurrection put everything in a dramatic new light, as the exalted rhetoric of a variety of New Testament authors shows clearly:

* "No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matt. 11:27). Here the hiddenness or invisibility of God is asserted, together with the exclusive revelation of God through Christ. According to Matthew this claim was made by jesus himself
* "No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known" (john 1:18 RSV). Again, God the Father is completely out of the reach of humans; but jesus "has made him known." In another johannine text this hiddenness of God is repeated, and its implications for human life are stated: "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 john 4:12).
* “I-Ie is the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15). I-Iere again, apart from jesus Christ, God the creator is "invisible": inaccessible to human perception, experience, knowledge. In the next verse, this connection of Christ with the creator is reinforced further by the declaration that he was actually God's agent in creation: "In him all things in heaven and on earth were created" (1:16), a claim also made (as we have seen) in the Fourth Gospel (john 1:3).
* "The Father and I are one" (john 10:30). I-lere we have a full unity of jesus and God, also put in jesus' mouth.

This is remarkably strong language: it claims that God had actually been basically inaccessible to men and women through most of human history but had become accessible through jesus, that is, through the complex of events surrounding and following upon the ministry and death of jesus. Surely these writers must have been aware that jews knew about and had been worshiping this very God for centuries, and that in fact it was from jews that Gentile Christians learned about God in the first place. Some Christians, such as Marcion--being thoroughly convinced that what was revealed in jesus was radically different from what was known of the jewish God-went so far as to insist that jesus had revealed a new and true God, a God who was not the creator of the present world at all. Obviously these texts just cited were written by persons who believed that a dramatically new connectedness with the jewish God had come to humankind in and through jesus, and that apart from jesus, no one really can know who or what God is and what God requires of us humans. That is, apart from jesus, God is ultimately inscrutable mystery-a mystery that had, however, been unveiled in and through the person, life, death, and resurrection of jesus.” The jewishness of Christian faith must have been known and admitted by most early Christians, but the growing sense of the revelatory and salvific importance of jesus eventually led to the conviction, widespread in the churches, that he was himself divine-one with God the Father (and thus of much greater authority than Moses or any other prophet). During the earliest Christian centuries, however, there were a good many followers who did not make these extravagant claims culminating in the doctrine of the trinity; ultimately those Christians did not prevail.

This meant, then, that for many Christians the God who was creator of the heavens and the earth had in some sense deliberately entered into human history in and through the man jesus. The God who created the world and ruled it from on high had somehow made himself incarnate. This mix of mythical and historical thinking must have been very puzzling, perhaps barely intelligible to many thoughtful persons; and throughout the early centuries the churches had to struggle to make sense of it, The creeds produced at two important councils of church bishops--in Nicea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451--have been regarded in most churches as the authoritative statements about how the complex relationship between Jesus and the creator-God was to be understood. These formulations are very ambiguous and difficult, and to some persons simply incredible or even unintelligible. In any case, however, the project we are undertaking in this book undermines central assumptions of the anthropomorphic language in which these credal formulations were expressed, so we need not pursue those problems further here.

IV

The conception of God (as I have been pointing out), which all Christian parties in these theological discussions and debates appear to have taken for granted, is anthropomorphic and anthropocentric through and through. God's resemblance to humans is very deep: God is conceived as basically like a human agent, although much more powerful in all respects than any human. It is a "God Who Acts" (as G. Ernest Wright put it in a book by that name published many years ago [Wright l952]). Thus, God has plans, makes decisions, performs actions to carry out those decisions, sometimes decides to change course and move in a different direction. God is fundamentally an agent engaged in doing things. All of this is clearly modeled on human agency. God also has feelings of many different sorts, such as anger, joy hatred, and love; God has goals and is working to achieve these goals; God speaks and otherwise communicates; and so on. As we have noted, God was thought of as a mighty warrior, a lord or king, a lawgiver, a judge, a father (who in the Christian story has a son), all of these being humanlike characteristics. This is clearly a thoroughly anthropomorphic God. Even the characteristic that most decisively distinguishes God from everything else-creativity-is modeled, in its vivid presentation in the opening chapters of the Bible, on human examples: in Genesis 2 (the earlier text) God is presented as like a potter or sculptor, taking clay from the ground and forming Adam out of it; in Genesis 1 (a later text) God creates by verbal command like a king or military officer: “Let there be light/and there was light."

Moreover, this God appears to be concerned largely with human affairs on planet Earth-an anthropocentrism also clearly visible through-out the Bible. And it all comes to a crescendo in the Christian story, where it is claimed that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life" (John 3:16)--a very powerful, precious, but strongly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric image, one so exaggerated as to suggest that the principal focus of God's activities is the plight of human beings. Many other examples of this thoroughly human-centered character of early Christian thinking about God and God's agape love for humankind could easily be cited, for this is at the center of the traditional Christian story The very idea of the incarnation-of God acting self-sacrificially to enter human history in a special way-presupposes both the anthropomorphic notion of an agent»God and the anthropocentric notion of God's special love for humankind." And the story of Jesus being resurrected after his death suggests a highly dramatic intervention of God into the human world, an act (both anthropomorphic and anthropocentric) that his followers believed certified not only their claims about the divine authorization of Jesus' ministry death, and resurrection but also their claims about God's elevation of Jesus into virtual deity Because of Jesus' obedience to God's will, as the early Christian hymn quoted above tells us, "God . . . highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:9-ll).

In my book In Face of Mystery (Kaufman 1993), I contend that such a humanlike God-however comprehensible and meaningful it may have been in past generations-is for many including myself simply no longer intelligible. And I suggest, therefore, that such persons should cease thinking of God as basically The Creator of the heavens and the earth (a kind of person-agent) and instead begin thinking of God as the mystery of creativity, manifest throughout the universe.” This creativity--believed to begin with the Big Bang and manifest also in the subsequent cosmic evolution, and later the evolution of life on planet Earth--has ordinarily not been thought of as a kind of deliberate activity of a self-conscious being: it is, rather, a profound mystery. In this modern cosmic picture, to the best of our knowledge, self-conscious creative activity does not appear in the universe before the evolutionary emergence of humankind. In the course of the creation and evolution of cultures, languages, and symbol-systems of many different sorts (over several millennia), our human creativity gradually emerged and eventually became a central instrument of human development, a development that in due course has enabled humans to transform the face of the earth dramatically” It is precisely this overall mystery of creativity (in all its cosmic, biological, and human manifestations), I am suggesting, that we should today think of as God. This notion retains the important traditional defining mark of God-creativity-but discards the anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism of its traditional formulations.

With this change in the understanding of God in mind-from God-the-creator to God-as-creativity-let us return to our reflections on the Jesus-story This change requires us to construct a version of that story quite different from Jesus-trajectory1. What I call Jesus-trajectory2 is the sequence of creative historical events beginning with Jesus' baptism, ministry death, and resurrection, and then continuing on creative through human history all the way to the present, I cannot present here a full account of that trajectory but I would like to mention some of the important points that should be considered. Looking back from our twenty-first-century standpoint, we can see that the name Jesus has come to signify an enormously creative moment in human affairs. In saying this, I am not giving expression to a Christian faith-claim about Jesus (though Christians would certainly agree with this point). I am, rather, articulating a very widespread historical judgment, The direct influence of Jesus of Nazareth on other persons, during the quite short span of his ministry up to his crucifixion, was, of course, quite limited. It was only within a relatively small and insignificant corner of the Roman Empire that he was known at all. However, the impact of his life, crucifixion, and what his followers called his resurrection on subsequent history has been phenomenal. Something truly new and significant came into the World in and through Jesus' activities, death, and what followed upon his death. In Jesus-trajectory1 we have an account of the important conceptual developments that were occurring during these events-developments that enabled the story of Jesus to spread through wider channels shortly after his death, and to grow and multiply over the centuries in many quite diverse ways. In consequence, today the name Jesus is known almost everywhere in the world. In Jesus-trajectory2 now that conceptual development (in trajectory1) is taken up as a significant moment in the account of the events that followed upon Jesus' death, but it is understood quite differently What was claimed by Jesus' early followers to be due to the creator--God's working through Jesus to save humanity from its sins and the other evils of life becomes understood, in the modern historical terms of Jesus-trajectory2, as an expression of the extraordinary creativity of the Jesus-movement as it grew and developed after his death and resurrection.

Since in this case we are not working with an anthropomorphic or anthropocentric conception of God as a conscious deliberative agent, but instead with an understanding of God as the mystery of creativity manifest throughout the cosmos, there is no place in this christology for the trajectoryl explanations and interpretations. This important shift in theological understanding should not be regarded as meaning that all talk of God-in connection with Jesus' significance-must be given up. On the contrary when we uncover events or processes that we take to be truly new or novel in history it is appropriate to identify them as creative; and this means (for the theological standpoint within which we are working) that we should not hesitate to call God to mind as we consider these processes and events and their profound mystery This does not mean, however, that these events are to be regarded as supernatural: today creative events--including extraordinarily important ones--are understood and interpreted in ordinary historical terms. And the events of Jesus' life, therefore, and the import of his activities and of what followed upon his ministry and death, are all to be presented in these terms.

As just noted, one of the most significant historical outcomes of Jesus' activities, death, and resurrection was his fairly rapid elevation after these events-in the minds of many of his followers-to divine status (Jesus-trajectory1). In Jesus-trajectory2, of course, this development is understood to indicate that Jesus had become of the highest possible order of significance to his followers; and it was this distinctive way in which they publicly proclaimed that significance that led to increasing interest in the Jesus-story throughout the wider world in which the early Christian missionaries were spreading it. That is, the claims of Jesus-traqectory1 began to be accepted far beyond their small creative beginnings, and accepted into an increasingly widespread creative movement-an example of the serendipitous character that creativity sometimes manifests. It should be obvious that this series of events, which proved to be so highly creative back in the early period when they occurred, would likely not have been regarded as significantly creative at all had they occurred in certain other quite different contexts-for example, in today's modern/ postmodern world. Creativity in history is definitely context relative. This does not mean, however, tar these events--accented as creative in jesus-trajectory2--are not really historical expressions of Jesus' creativity; it means, rather, that the historical consequences of Jesus' activities and fate have been extraordinarily complex, and they extend all the way down to the present.

Creativity is always a profound, inexplicable mystery to us humans, something we find difficult--even impossible--to account for: a new transformative reality has unexpectedly appeared; the coming into being of something truly novel has occurred. The creativity in an event or process may not be visible to us as it is happening, and whether it has been creative of good or of ills can be adjudged only as we look back on it: think of the creativity of the American Declaration of Independence; think of the writing of Hitler's Mein Karnpf think of the signing of the Magna Carta; think of the Versailles Treaty; think of the Lisbon earthquake; think of che remarkable interpretations of jesus' crucifixion. Although many creative historical events prove beneficial for humankind and may be seen by some as quite serendipitous, not all powerfully creative events have what we humans call 'good outcomes" (as some of the examples just given show). Most creative events are ambiguous in their consequences (from our human point of view). Moreover, the judgments of humans (from significantly different standpoints) about the goodness or evil of certain creative moments in history may be quite diverse and may change over time: consider, for example, the far-reaching creative consequences of the European invasion of the Americas-as seen from the Euro-American point of view and as seen from the perspective of the indigenous peoples. The notion of creativity (God) with which we are working is very widely inclusive; it needs to be nuanced and qualified in Ways not yet entirely clear. We will try to work through this complicated matter in some detail in chapter 2.

For the early followers of jesus, his elevation to divinity through crucifixion and resurrection was believed to be a "mighty act" of God, an act that revealed clearly who jesus really was, and also revealed God's deep loving care for human beings. As we have seen, this reading of what happened (as in Jesus-trajectory1) is no longer plausible for many today including many Christians. Does that mean, then, than these events reveal nothing particularly significant to us today? No, not at all. In the theological standpoint with which we are working, God is regarded as creativity; and long-extended historical creativity is apparent in these events, as Jesus-trajectory2 clearly shows, This striking creativity will be taken up in more detail in our christological reflections in the next chapter. For this christology to be acceptable today it must include a plausible historical account--as in Jesus-trajectory2--of the beginnings and the development of this creativity an account in which everything that occurred is understood (1) to have been within the human sphere on planet Earth and (2) to have been implemented (largely) through human agency-in concert, of course, with the serendipity of the divine creativity. In the first century like today it was ordinary women and men who were making the judgments about what was going on in their midst, were producing the interpretations of what it meant, and were making the decisions about what they should do in these circumstances. These specifications concerning first-century Christians, of course, are not some new invention of mine: virtually all scholars working on the historical origins of Christianity take it for granted--as they work out their understanding of these developments--that it is with ordinary human beings that they are dealing.

It should be noted--in any construction of Jesus-trajectory2--that the judgment calls of those first»century followers of Jesus may (or may not) have been the best possible that humans could have made about such matters at that time. But these followers were the ones who had experienced what they took to be appearances of jesus after his death. And it was they who in consequence announced that God had raised him from the dead and who produced the first interpretations of what this meant for humanity at large. Like all human experiences, judgments, interpretations, decisions, actions-however overpowering, useful, significant, valid these may have seemed at that point in time (and indeed have seemed to many succeeding generations), and however magnificently creative these human experiences and acts proved to be-there is no good reason to hold that they should not be subject to further examination, criticism, reformulation, or rejection, as further human judgments (further creativity) in new historical situations (such as the twenty-first century) may demand. Although the ordinary judgments displayed in Jesus-trajectory1 may have served very well those who produced them, and have continued to serve the churches through much of their history they should not be idolized, as has often happened in the past. When new times, new understandings of the world and of the human place within the world, and important new problems demand attention, new creative responses must be sought.

V

I would like now to sum up the point at which we have arrived. Jesus-trajectory1--our account of the conceptually developing Jesus-story as we see it in biblical and other early material-presupposes an understanding of God as an anthropomorphic quasi-personal agent-creator, working (sometimes miraculously) through historical events to bring the sinful human sphere on earth fully under his sovereignty. For Christians in the twenty»first century who find this story implausible, it is important to develop a reconstructed version of it--for example, Jesus trajectory2--if we are convinced that Jesus should continue to have a central place in our lives and faith. Two major changes from the cultural-intellectual environment in which the image and story of Jesus originated and developed will guide our reflections as we work out our christology in this book: (1) the rise of history in modernity as a form of knowledge of events (not simply anecdotal reporting)-knowledge based on generally accepted criteria, carefully worked-out argumentation, and plausible imaginative construction of what most likely happened at particular times and places; and (2) the quite different conception of God with which we are working here, as the mystery of creativity in the cosmos-the ongoing serendipitous creativity manifest throughout this vast universe that began to come into being fourteen billion years ago with the Big Bang.

There is no question today--after two hundred years of concentrated work on"the problem of the historical Jesus"--that it is possible to construct a reasonable (though perhaps somewhat sketchy and brief) historical account of Jesus' baptism, ministry and death. We have noted certain features of that account in this chapter and have also given some attention to the resurrection of Jesus and his elevation to divine status. Going beyond most historical accounts, however, I have pointed out what can quite properly be called the developing creativity that becomes increasingly evident as we today look at Jesus-trajectory2. Were it not for this creativity we would never have heard of Jesus at all. What are we to make of this?

The reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry leading up to his death as a dangerous rabble-rouser in Roman Palestine, is plausible historically and presents us with a Jesus in many respects still quite attractive: his forthright challenge to the conventional religion of his time; his forceful preaching punctuated with striking parables; his beautiful vision of the coming kingdom of God in which the sick are healed, the poor are cared for, and the outcast and despised are welcomed to the dinner table; his radical emphasis on love as the overarching posture within which humans should live out their lives--love of God, love of neighbor, indeed love of enemies; his unwavering conviction that he must not respond violently against those who were forcing upon him the bitter death of crucifixion; his profound hope that God was bringing in a New Age. But what are we to make of the stories of appearances of Jesus to (some of) his followers after his death, and of their developing conviction (Jesus-trajectoryl) that he was God's divine son, now sitting at the right hand of God the Father, almighty maker of heaven and earth? This conviction led in due course to the conclusion (at the Council of Chalcedon, 451 C.E.) that Jesus had "two natures," one divine and the other human, perfectly united and balanced with each other; and that he was, therefore, "perfect in Godhead . . . [and] perfect in humanness, truly God and truly human, consubstantial with the Father in Godhead, and . . . consubstantial with us in humanness" (Hardy l954:373). The human imagination is very creative indeed!

I pointed out above that creativity per se-the simple coming into being of the new anything and everything new-though quite properly regarded as a manifestation of God, should not always be regarded as good for human affairs (consider, for example, the creativity of Adolf Hitler or the Versailles Treaty or the creation of ugliness and evil). The human story at large has, obviously many examples of what we men and women cannot but regard as evil creativity. This problem, of God's creative activity bringing forth what (from a human point of view) is evil as well as what is good, is in fact very old and is taken up in the Bible.

In the book of Isaiah, for example, God is presented as saying: "I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe" (45:5-7). Amos is more pointed: "Does evil befall a city" he asks, "unless the LORD has done it?" (3:6 RSV); and job asks the same question: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" (2:10b RSV). The entirety of the Book of ]ob and many of the Psalms are concerned with this matter. It is clear that for at least some biblical writers it is not the case that all acts of God (all manifestations of creativity to use our terminology) can be regarded as either desireable or good from our human point of view. Creativity unqualified, therefore_the divine creativity as such-does not provide an adequate model of how we humans should live and what we should be trying to do. The plot thickens.

What kind of qualifications on creativity can we, or should we, make if we are to continue to use it as one of the criteria important for assessing human action? This question will be taken up later at greater length; for now only a few brief remarks can be made. We need to distinguish between (1) abstract cosmic creativity in general--the coming into being of the universe and of all sorts of realities throughout the universe--and (2) those particular instances of creativity that have appeared in and with the emergence of distinctive evolutionary and historical trajectories on planet Earth. Just as the creativity in the Big Bang is a total mystery to us-Why did this come about? Why is there something, not nothing?-so also is the mystery of the evolutionary creativity manifest throughout the cosmos: Why has creativity brought into being particular trajectory A rather than possible trajectory B? Where are these created trajectories going? Some might suppose that the notion of entropy could help us think through some of these questions, but we really do not know much about how entropy and creativity are related to-or are independent of-each other. In any case, if the universe is running down, its climactic ending is so far distant in the future that there is undoubtedly much unforeseeable, inscrutable, indeed unimaginable creativity still to come before the end is at all near. The creativity in cosmic and biological evolution is indeed a vast mystery a mystery that tells us almost nothing about how we humans should order our lives-except for the important point (noted above) that we should always keep in mind the fact that this is not a human-centered world, and that We need to beware, therefore, of thinking and acting entirely in human-centered terms.

The creativity that is of direct and specific importance to us here is, of course, that which is going on in our corner of the universe-the creativity that has, for example, produced on planet Earth the trajectory of life (itself also creative, in its own distinctive way); and still closer home, the creative trajectory that has produced mammals, primates, and finally human beings. Each of these is a distinctive creative trajectory and each is dependent on many other kinds of creative trajectories in the environment that sustain it. So We have networks of creative trajectories on planet Earth, in various ways supporting and also endangering each other. Much mystery remains here, but we are getting closer to some understanding of what is going on in our immediate environment and thus requires our attention. Although we are far from knowing what the future trajectory of human life on planet Earth will be, we are beginning to understand how this living network of creative trajectories on Earth is sustained and how it sustains us humans. And that brings us to a position from which we can begin to make some judgments about what is good creativity and what evil, at least for us human beings”-but also for the complex living networks in which we are ensconced. These remarks do not give us any final answers to our questions about creativity but they do enable us to begin to understand the kind of judgments living on Earth requires us humans to make and the kinds of creativity in which we humans need to be engaged. We must, of course, always be open to the possibility that our judgments will be overridden by the more general trajectories of creativity (God) in the Wider universe within which we live.

Let us return now to our question about the creativity of the early Christians who thought in terms of the resurrection and deity of Jesus. What in those ancient ideas remains significant for us today we who understand ourselves to be living in this world of networks of creative activity? Obviously since we are working here within the constraints of modern historical methods and are thinking in terms of a (nonanthropomorphic and nonanthropocentric) conception of God as creativity, these first-century conclusions about Jesus' resurrection and consequent elevation to deity are no longer plausible or appropriate (as we have been noting). They were, nevertheless, very creative: they were a religio-cultural achievement that had enormous effects on subsequent historical developments all the way down to the present, and they can be expected to have continuing significant effects. The first~century Christians were saying (if we may articulate their view in our twenty»first»century language) that the ultimate divine creativity-God-has participated (and continues to participate) in the human sphere in a special way through the ministry life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; and therefore jesus became a kind of criterion or model for those Christians of what human life ought to be, a model that the divine creativity made possible. Although the early Christians understood and spoke of this matter largely in mythic terms that modern Christians may no longer find useful or even intelligible, this claim about jesus' normativity in human affairs remains important to most Christians today.

Many Christians continue to think of jesus' ministry and death--and (at least some of ) the practices and beliefs of the early Christian movement as presenting important standards and models still valid in today's life and activity. They regard such themes as self»giving love (agape), forgiveness, nonviolence, generosity and the like as of continuing (perhaps universal) significance. These concerns have become especially vivid again in face of the horrors we have lived through during the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, horrors that, in many respects, may be harbingers of the situation of future humanity. This, of course, is a human judgment, but one with potentially wide significance. As we have noted, the early followers of jesus were also making major judgments that would become significantly creative and influential in the future (though they did not describe what they were believing and doing in these humanistic terms). Although the supernatural features of their judgments go far beyond what we today regard as human competence, there is no reason why we Christians should not reaffirm the aspects of those judgments that we find appropriate. Unlike the earliest Christians, however-who believed that jesus Christ or the creator»God was revealing important matters to them directly from on high-claims of divine authorization for what we humans today say about these (and other) matters no longer have any proper place in our thinking. Such claims presuppose an anthropomorphic God who makes specific "revelations" to devotees. And we today should identify all such claims as unfortunate early manifestations of the kind of arrogance Christians have too often displayed in face of those with whom they disagreed.” So in our reaffirmations today of early Christian stands, we must always make it clear that We are not taking these positions because God (or jesus, or creativity) has authorized or commanded us so to do; whatever we say about the significance of jesus for today will be on the basis of our own judgments, and it must be understood as such. Indeed, we recognize there are always other creative options, other voices, that must also be considered.

Our positions and statements will be made in light of what we see going on in our world, on the one hand, and in light of the direction in which we hope and believe the creativity in our human trajectory (God)
is today moving, on the other hand. From the point of view with which we are working here, of course, this burden of human responsibility has always been involved: each new generation, indeed each individual Christian, has had to decide (at least implicitly)--that is, has had to make judgments-about whether to be active followers of jesus or simply conventional adherents to local Christian customs. Moreover, this was also the case when Christians began to think of jesus as Son of God, true God of true God, and so on: it was they, and not some higher authority” who was making these claims. This is where the responsibility should always be placed in such matters. In the past, unfortunately Christians all too often let the powerful rhetoric of their claims drive their judgments, and they believed that their rhetoric itself had come from God. But in fact, as I have been arguing here, this was always their own human rhetoric, and we should not idolize it in any way All too often men and women-because of misunderstandings, ignorance, malfeasance, arrogance-seemingly have not been able to avoid making what later generations would call drastic mistakes. That is to be expected of us humans, and we should be grateful that we now no longer need to accept some of the claims our forebears found indisputable. All of this should, of course, make us more humble about what we ourselves have to say If we can maintain such humility that will be a significant creative achievement.

As a conclusion to this chapter and transition to the next, five points should be kept in mind. (1) A conception of God as simply the profound mystery of creativity--like a deistic conception of God as simply creator--is, by itself too vague and general to provide humans with adequate orientation for the many day-to-day decisions and actions that must be made, though it does provide a criterion for identifying idolatry. (2) In early Christianity the attractiveness and power of the images and stories in Jesus-trajectory1 became accepted as model and criterion for both the divine and the human, and were thus regarded as normative in the Christian movement. (3) Many Christians today still feel powerfully drawn toward some of these norms and standards for human living, and it is appropriate, therefore, to develop a christology today to fill in and complete the conception of God as creativity. With such a christology we can work out basic Christian norms for human life today and how it should be oriented. (4) This may also help define what proper worship today might be: not simply bowing down in awe before the alleged authority of God or Christ--or, for that matter, before the ultimate mystery of things--nor consisting largely in flights into mystic ecstasy. It should, rather, express itself in loving our neighbors and our enemies as we love ourselves, caring for the hungry and the poor, taking up "the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor. 5:18). As the supernaturalism in the Christian story fades away its radical ethical demands come into sharper focus. (5) To the extent that each of our activities draws on our human creativity there is, perhaps, a basis here for some modest claims about a significant relationship with God (the ultimate mystery of creativity) as manifest in and through this human creative activity. But of course this would be true of virtually any position we might choose to take: every instance of human devotion and action involves a giving of the self in some sort of creativity (as we shall see in chapter 3). The important issue here is not whether union with God (creativity) is possible or actual; it is, rather, the question about which trajectory (or trajectories) in the universe we should seek to be at one with in our journey on planet earth today. The story of Jesus points us toward a trajectory emphasizing the creation and sustenance of communities of love and freedom, reconciliation and peace. Is this what we choose to identify ourselves with, or do we prefer something else?