"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 himselfThis 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.
* "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 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?
