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.
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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.
