One of my favorite theologians, Gordon Kaufman, is a Mennonite theologian teaching at Harvard Divinity School. In one of his recent books, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology, he argues that all theological language - especially language about God - is "imaginative construction," which is just a fancy way of saying "metaphor." We assign terms to the Ultimate Reality based on our experience in order to be able to think and speak about That Which Is Greater Than Ourselves. Even the term "God" does not refer to God in Godself. It is a human construct designed to give a name to that Reality. It is useful in terms of worship and theology, as well as personal piety. But it can also be dangerous. If we forget that our language about God is metaphorical, we soon begin to think that our constructs are the reality rather than signs pointing to that reality. Chaos often ensues. God becomes a straight white male or a black lesbian, an American or a Saudi, a Democrat or a Republican, poor or rich, Jewish or Hindu.
My tradition is Christian, specifically Lutheran. This tradition influences how I understand and worship the Deity. I am most comfortable with the name "God" understood as Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I understand God to be Love, the Creator and Redeemer of the universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.
That is my understanding of God in a nutshell. Yours will probably be different. What is your name for the Deity? How did you come to understand the Deity in that way?
In order to get things moving, and to have a little fun, I'll share the email my seminary classmate sent me. But first, just one little word of background.
This story is set in first-century Palestine (obviously a time machine is involved at some point before our story begins). Jesus is speaking with four famous twentieth-century Protestant theologians, each of whom developed a sophisticated and influential christology (doctrine of Christ).
In the gospel of John, in a very well-known passage no less, Jesus does something very peculiar, and it has been the subject of much conjecture ever since:
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, sir." And Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." (John 8:3-11)
What was Jesus writing? Well, this clever theologian has some idea...
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Cone found themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come
along but Jesus, and he asked the four the same Christological question, "Who do you say that I am?"Karl Barth stands up and says: You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christo-monism.
Not prepared for Barth's brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and
existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: You are the impossible possibility who brings to us children of light and children of darkness the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contingency and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships.
Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: You are my Oppressed One, my soul's shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic.
And Jesus wrote on the ground, "Huh?"