Here are some words from Elizabeth Johnson's new book, Quest for the Living God. Mapping frontiers in the Theology of God, (New York: Continuum, 2007).
The profound incomprehensibility of God coupled with the hunger of the human heart in changing historical cultures actually requires that there be an ongoing history of the quest for the living God that can never be concluded. Historically new attempts at articulation are to be expected and even welcomed. An era without such frontiers begins to turn dry, dusty and static.
Christianity today is living through a vibrant new chapter of this quest. People are discovering God again not in the sense of deducing abstract notions but in the sense of encountering divine presence and absence in their everyday experience of struggle and hope, both ordinary and extraordinary. New ideas about God have emerged for example from the effort to wrestle with the darkness of the Holocaust; from the struggle of poor and persecuted people for social justice; from women's striving for equal human dignity; from Christianity's encounter with goodness and truth in the world's religious traditions; and from the efforts of biophilic people to protect, restore and nurture the ecological life of planet earth. No era is without divine presence, but this blossoming of insight appears to be a strong grace for our time. (p.13-14)
A couple of things strike me about Johnson's view of things. First, she takes seriously the importance of seeking as itself a form of love for God, and a recognition that the living God remains a profound mystery of love eternal who goes on seeking the response of creation. Second, she sees such theological developments as post Holocaust Theology, feminist theology, liberation theology and many other contextual and historically specific developments in Christian theology as offering important insights from the theological and spiritual experience of those who have had to live with life circumstances very different from my own. From such articulations of the presence and absence of God I have a lot to learn about God, about human life, and about my own limited capacity for God as only one, male, middle-aged, Western, un-poor, white human being, whose own experience of God is equally valid, but mustn't be made the norm by which to judge the truth of God in Christ that others have come to discover in their very different lives.
I haven't lived under a military dictatorship, or in a country near bankrupt by corrupt centralised power - liberation theologians have. I am white, so have to listen humbly to the insights and affirmations of African and Asian theologies. As a male I need women to explore and express and explain their experience of God, and to listen to the hurt caused by an entire tradition that finds biblical warrant for marginalising female experience, excluding women from places where decisions are made and influence nurtured. Nor can I as a person whose own religious convictions make me who I am, ignore the presence in my neighbourhood, our country and our world, of others whose religious commitments are as genuinely held, felt, believed and practised, and with whom I have to live on this planet. Speaking of the planet, I am also one of those responsible for the sickness of our planet, the depletion of those important processes and resources that make this planet livable for human beings and for the rest of God's creation.
So rather than hide behind my own certainties and limited insights, I have to grow up, and be mature enough in Christ to listen to all those other voices who are also singing God's praise, praying out of the hurts and joys of their very different lives, and calling in question some of my own cherished certainties with truths that I can't simply dismiss - lest in doing so I dismiss the presence, and the seeking voice, of the living God. Being aware of the pluralist nature of Christian theology does not make me a pluralist - but it should make me a humble listener and a more humble talker when it comes to our experience of God.
Johnson's previous theological writing is provocative, and I have serious reservations about some of her proposals. But her voice is an important corrective, and a much more generous response to the diversity and vitality of global Christian thought, than those voices which want all God's children not only to sing from the same hymn sheet, but to read from the same theology books!
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