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The God Who Is Involved
By Anne Carr

"There is today a theological insistence, rooted in interpretations of the Bible and of contemporary experience, that the God of Christian faith, while remaining God, is intimate to the joy and the pain, the victory and the defeat, the struggle of human existence, and comes to be known precisely there. "

THE doctrine of God is the most fundamental issue in Christian theology. Foundational for all other doctrines of Christian faith, it is itself intrinsically implicated in each of them. It is so basic that one can rightly say "it is the only problem there is."1 In a survey of recent theological writing, a striking similarity, amid the often conflicting variety, becomes apparent: the search for a conceptuality which, without denying the transcendence of God, clearly affirms God as involved in this world's human experience. There is today a theological insistence, rooted in interpretations of the Bible and of contemporary experience, that the God of Christian faith, while remaining God, is intimate to the joy and the pain, the victory and the defeat, the struggle of human existence, and comes to be known precisely there.

The decade of the sixties, with its debates about atheism, secularity, the "death of God," and Bishop Robinson's Honest to God inaugurated an era of intense discussion on the doctrine of God. Both the classical theistic tradition with its affirmations of God's aseity, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, impassivity, and neo-orthodoxy's biblically determined faith in God's revelation alone were subjected to criticism and reinterpretation. New formulations of the question of God emerged in the work of Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians in Europe and in the United States. Many attempted to demonstrate the reality of God in ordinary human experience and to suggest a more adequate conceptuality of God that took fuller account of experience than was available either in the supernaturalistic tradition of classical theism or in neo-orthodoxy.

The center of gravity in more recent discussion has shifted to other

Anne Carr is Associate Professor of Theology, the Divinity School, University of Chicago, where she also serves as Associate Dean. Dr. Carr is the author of The Theological Method of Karl Rahner (1977), and she has written for the Journal of Religion, Chicago Studies, Listening, and Horizons. This article continues the THEOLOGY TODAY series on classic doctrines in contemporary theology.
¹ Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row,1965), p. 1.

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issues. Christology, ecclesiology, theological and religious pluralism, and the relation of Christian salvation to movements for economic, political, and cultural liberation now dominate the theological scene. One might conjecture that the earlier reconceptualization had "solved" the problem of God, at least for the time being. Human beings remained persistently religious, new religions emerged even after the "death of God," and Christians were exercised about issues relating to church and society. And yet, the question of God-a perennial question-did not disappear. Hans Küng's massive Does God Exist? and Robert Scharlemann's tightly argued The Being of God are recent indications that the question is never even temporarily answered.² Moreover, it can be argued that some of the latent power resident in recent theological developments concerning Christological and social issues lies precisely in their indirect attempt to approach the reality of God. The question of God's involvement in the fabric of human life and history is still pursued, now within a social framework that takes account of and questions much of the Western inneritance of religious, philosophical, institutional, political, and cultural commitments.

In this essay, several illustrative examples of new approaches to the question of God will be indicated. The first section will explore some recent understandings of the source for the doctrine of God in theological anthropology. The second will indicate revised conceptualities for God that emerge from these anthropological considerations. A final section will sketch some implications for Christian understandings of God which have emerged indirectly in recent Christology and liberation theology. The connections between the direct and indirect discussions should be clear. If theologians argue persuasively for the involvement of God in the experience of human persons in their individual experience of themselves in the world, then affirmation of the presence of God in the collective struggles of human existence- religious, cultural, institutional, and political-seems to follow.

I

Theological anthropology is a broad category under which some recent work, both European and American, on the doctrine of God can be seen in its similarity. The phrase indicates efforts to discover the basis in ordinary or "secular" experience for knowledge of the reality of God. For Karl Rahner, all theology is, in an important but nuanced sense, anthropology.³ His earlier work seeks to demonstrate metaphysically that human persons, in their everyday experience of knowledge, freedom, and historicity are implicitly aware of themselves as spirit, transcendent of the world of immediate experience. Absolute being, or

² Hans Kung, Does God Exist? An Answer for Today, tr. Edward Quinn (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980); Robert P. Scharlemann, The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth (New York: Seabury, 1981).
³ "Theology and Anthropology," Theological Investigations IX, tr. Graham Harrison (New York: Seabury, 1972), pp. 28-45.

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God, is dimly known, not as an object of knowledge but as the infinite horizon within which every finite object is apprehended. The experience of freedom, like subjectivity and knowledge, is transcendental; it precedes, governs, and is present in the whole of ordinary experience. Human freedom, however, is finally a dependent freedom, at the disposal of other persons, things, and finally another which is the presence of mystery, the incomprehensible horizon of human experience. ⁴

Rahner translates his metaphysical anthropology into existential terms when he evokes those moments when one is thrown back upon oneself in guilt, fear, anxiety, or brought face to face with responsibility, fidelity, death, or knows joy or beauty or hope as real. Experience of God, he argues, even in the demythologized contemporary world, is present everywhere in everyday life, for without it no experience of the self is possible. In the experience of radical responsibility and freedom, the experience of the self, finally, God is known: "the personal history of the experience of the self is in its total extent the history of the ultimate experience of God."⁵

For Edward Scbillebeeckx, cultural and individual awareness of God appears to be replaced by faith in science, technology, and the seemingly limitless power of human freedom. He insists that faith is only possible in this context if human experience reveals a real reference to God: statements about God must say something about human persons as those about persons must say something about God.⁶ In response to contemporary atheism, he reinterprets the argument from contingency: that one is created by the living God means being "firmly fixed ... in inviolable independence," at once independent and wholly contingent. One cannot account for one's own existence. In facing the radical contingency and autonomy of self and world, one indirectly discerns a different presence which is the source of "secure existence in a deeper mystery of personal absolute freedom." This prereflective awareness or "natural affirmation of God's existence" is the basis for allowing oneself to be taken up by grace into the intimacy of God's life. The correlation between human contingency and God as the source of one's being is a fundamental thrust which leads to "secular transcendence," ethical responsibility for others and for the world.⁷

Schillebeeckx returns to this theme in reflecting on the "death of God," which he sees resulting from the "fideism" of neo-orthodoxy with

⁴ Spirit in the World, tr. William V. Dych (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968); Horer des Wortes, 2nd ed. rev. J. B. Metz (Munich: Kösel, 1963); Foundations of Christian Faith, tr. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978), pp. 24-43.
⁵ " Experience of Self and Experience of God," Theological Investigations XIII, tr. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 29; cf. "The Experience of God Today," Theological Investigations XI, tr. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1974), pp. 149-165. For criticism of Rahner's position see Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (New York: Paulist, 1976), pp. 50-51.
⁶ God the Future of Man, tr. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), p. 72.
⁷ God and Man, tr. Edward Fitzgerald and Peter Tomlinson (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969), pp. 8, 23, 25, 164, 176.

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its denial of natural theology. A new natural theology first requires legitimation of the question of God, found in the disclosure in direct human experience of the real basis and condition of possibility for secular experience itself. What is disclosed is an "underground" existential trust in life, especially "trust that the future has meaning." Such trust (or its lack) indicates a prior acceptance (or rejection) of human existence as a promise of salvation which is decided before the question of God is explicitly asked. Formal "proof" of God's existence based on contingency is only the "reflective justification" of this experience of unconditional trust.⁸

Wolfhart Pannenberg, like Rahner and Schillebeeckx, argues that anthropology can no longer be a side issue in theology but is the basis for a fundamental theology involving philosophical reflection on one's own subjectivity.⁹ In the face of atheist criticism that the classical conception of God is incompatible with human freedom, he looks for an anthropological starting point for a doctrine of God in the "problematic" character of human existence, the phenomenon of human "openness" to the world and to the future, in conjunction with the socialscientific notion of basic trust. He argues for an understanding of God as the personal origin of freedom.

"Person," as fundamental openness, is contrasted to "existent being" as something finished and complete, for it includes the reality of the future, the not yet existent, as real. Human persons are constituted in subjectivity by the gift of freedom received from others, as the social sciences amply demonstrate. Two examples are the centrality of basic trust for the formation of personality and the need of social institutions for human legitimation, as conditions for human freedom. But the freedom of others is a received freedom as well. Hence Pannenberg affirms that "the basis of freedom cannot be a being that already exists, but only a reality which reveals to freedom its future, the coming God.¹⁰

American theologians in recent decades have also developed bases for the doctrine of God in human experience. In the late sixties, Langdon Gilkey executed a phenomenology of contemporary experience in its secular contours of contingency, relativity, temporality, and autonomy. He argues that this secular symbolization fails to do justice to all the regions of lived experience which in fact reveal dimensions of intimacy, unconditionedness, sacrality. Thus it is open to the interpretation afforded by the Christian doctrine of God.¹¹

In other contexts, Gilkey explores the symbols of God as creator and preserver from the perspective of human creatureliness in its manifestation in human temporality. Temporality reflects the primordial aspect

⁸ God the Future of Man, pp. 74-75.
⁹ The Idea of God and Human Freedom, tr. R. A. Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973),pp.80-98,106.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 93; What is Man? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), pp. 28-40.
¹¹ Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (lndianapolis~ BobbsMerrill, 1969), pp. 231-470.

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of experience in which persons find themselves, without choice, immersed in the rush of temporal passage. The past is given, the present forces decisions, the future is open. Echoing Tillich, Gilkey characterizes temporal experience as both destiny and freedom, actuality and possibility. Together with this experience of radical finitude, contingency, and dependence, human persons overcome the temporal passage with mind and will in "self-transcending finitude" which, Gilkey argues, is the same thing as creatureliness in relation to God.

Both notions are required to make sense of experience and together offer the possibility of a natural theology. The enduring effectiveness of the past of temporal passage is dependent upon a power of being that does not vanish as does every entity in the process but rather brings the past into the present as its starting point. This transcendent and immanent power is the reality of God's creative providence, the source of limited human freedom. Adapting Whitehead's notion of creativity, Gilkey writes that "creative providence establishes us in and on our past, constitutes us as self-creative beings despite our dependence and lures us through new possibilities into the open future."¹²

Another argument presented in the sixties for the human basis of the experience and reality of God is that of Schubert Ogden, who employs Stephen Toulmin's work on limit-questions in morality.¹³ The notion of limit (a reason to be moral in the first place) reveals the intrinsic human drive toward the religious in its quest for reassurance. Ogden furthers Toulmin's thought by arguing that religious language is a re-presentation of the common, implicit experience of human trust in the meaningfulness of present experience and basic confidence about the future. Religious language reflects this already present trust which, threatened by some limit or boundary situation (finitude, death) finds assurance not in a moral attitude but in a fundamentally religious one.

Faith, for Ogden, is an element in the life of every person whether one is an explicit believer or not. And "existing in this trust" is affirmation of the reality of God. "The primary use or function of 'God' is to refer to the objective ground in reality itself of our ineradicable confidence in the final worth of our existence."¹⁴

A final example of the anthropological starting point for the doctrine of God is David Tracy's fundamental theology, addressed to questions of theological method in the context of contemporary pluralism.¹⁵

¹² Message and Existence: An Introduction to Christian Theology (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 81; 69-86; Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury, 1976), pp. 271-318. Cf. John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner's, 1977), pp. 59-83 for an existentially oriented treatment of temporality and the self.
¹³ The Reality of God, pp. 1-70; Stephen Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).
¹⁴ The Reality of God, pp. 37-38. In Does God Exist?, Kung develops the theme of fundamental trust on the basis of psychology, science, and ethics to ground the reasonableness of religious faith, pp. 453-477.
¹⁵ Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975).

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Arguing for a revision of Tillich's method-theology as a critical correlation of Christian texts and common human experience-Tracy analyzes the human experience of limit in science, morality, and the everyday world. Negative or boundary experiences of guilt, anxiety, sickness, recognition of one's destiny in death, disclose basic existential faith or unfaith. Conversely, positive or ecstatic limit experiences in joy, love, reassurance, and creativity are self-transcending experiences that put one in touch with a different reality of undeniable meaning and power. The "limit-to" of the everyday also discloses a "limit-of " human experience, a graciousness which bears a distinctly religious character.

Tracy suggests that "authentic religious language and experienceprecisely as that limit language re-presentative of a final dimension or horizon of meaning to our existence-is also autonomous."¹⁶, Reflection on limit experience and language discloses an ultimate that is other than the merely human. It is religious, and finally theistic. Its objective referent is what religious persons speak of as God.

II

Other examples could be added, but the positions sketched can serve as a brief indication of a wider movement in theology which seeks to ground the implicit knowledge of God in ordinary experience. The themes of dependent yet transcendent subjectivity, knowledge, autonomy and freedom, the experience of basic trust and confidence in the present and future within the context of contingency, temporality, and limit in these analyses issue in reformulations of the concept of God.

Rahner maintains the traditional notions of God's absolute transcendence of creation but interprets it as radical immediacy, an inner moment of the personal self-gift of God in incarnation and grace. His analysis of the conditions of possibility of human subjecivity, knowledge, and freedom within the historical world argues for the implicitly known presence of God as the horizon of human transcendence. This horizon nevertheless remains unknown; God is the incomprehensible, the absolute mystery, always beyond the grasp of direct human knowledge, but always present in absolute immediacy. As absolute mystery, God is understood not as that which human persons do not (yet) completely know, but is rather the inexhaustibly intelligible, experienced only as the horizon and goal of human transcendence in knowledge and freedom.¹⁷

Arguing from the "analogy of transcendence," Rahner maintains that the mystery in which human persons abide and which can be

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 108; 91-118; cf. Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 41-81, who also develops the notion of "limit" as the experience of transcendence.
¹⁷ "The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology," Theological Investigations IV, tr. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), pp. 36-73; "The Hiddenness of God," "The Incomprehensibility of God in St. Thomas Aquinas," Theological Investigations XVI, tr. David Morland (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 227-243, 244-254; "Observations on the Doctrine of God," Theological Investigations IX, pp. 127-144.

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experienced in the depths of the self-the source and goal of human personhood-must itself be personal. But God is not a person like created persons, any more than the horizon of objective knowledge is an object like other objects within the horizon. The horizon of mystery, the personal God who is creator does not merge with creation but establishes it in its autonomy. Rahner interprets Aquinas' teaching on the doctrine of creation (the real relation of creatures to God, the notional relation of God to creatures) as founding the radical autonomy (and secularity) of the world and especially of human persons and as establishing God as transcendent, outside the categorical realm of experience. Radical autonomy and dependence increase in direct (not inverse) proportion to one another. While God is in no way dependent on creation, the radical dependence of creatures grounds their autonomy. It is created personal autonomy which is the condition for the possibility for the self- communication of God, as the truly personal other, in grace.¹⁸

Schillebeeckx believes that only a revision of the concept of God, through a hermeneutics of history that retains the identity of faith through reinterpretation, will enable Christianity to remain itself in a new culture. While the old culture was oriented toward the past and its concepts of God's transcendence projected into an unchangeable, eternalized past, the new culture of a "self-made world" recognizes the primacy of the future in human temporality. Fundamental trust in life's meaning, experienced today primarily in terms of ethical responsibility for the future, means that the believer will not only connect God with a personal future but with the future of humanity as a whole. God is "the 'One who is to come,' the God who is our future." Formerly thought of as the wholly Other, God must be re-conceived as the wholly New. Such belief, however, is grounded in communication with God here and now, in confidence that God is beginning to make things new, that "hope is able now to change the course of history for the better."¹⁹ Thus God's act of creation experienced in human trust is "a commitment to the task of militantly opposing all forms of injustice ... the basis of trust that the future is man's task." While the experience of God cannot be isolated, it is nonetheless personal, intimate and so "keeps hope alive." God is at once memory, presence in absence, and the one "who goes ahead of us toward a future"; history itself is the coming of God.²⁰

For Schillebeeckx, the identity of this new concept of God with the original Christian message will only come to light indirectly in the activity of Christians themselves. Thus he unites biblical eschatology with the truth of American pragmatism: this symbol of God is a call "to transcend what we have made-war, injustice, the absence of peace, the

¹⁸ Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 78-81; " … that this radical dependence grounds autonomy ... can be experienced only when a spiritual, created person experiences his own freedom as a reality, a freedom coming from God and a freedom for God" (p. 79).
¹⁹ God the Future of Man, pp. 181, 183; cf. also pp. 1-49 on hermeneutics.
²⁰ Ibid., pp. 77, 81.

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absence of love" for the God who is to come will transform history "into a saving event in and through our freedom." The old concept of a God who intervenes from outside history irrespective of human freedom is dead.²¹

Pannenberg describes God more radically as the future, the not-yet-existent, on the basis of human freedom as openness to the world. God is known in "the actual coming about of freedom as a power over the world" in which one finds oneself and so "as a reality," known as personal insofar as one experiences God in the "liberating action which bestows freedom," in which one receives oneself. Thus Pannenberg moves from anthropology to the gifted character of freedom which, he claims, is not merely a pious or subjective interpretation of the world but is objectively evidenced in the history of religion as the record of human experience in relation to the totality of the world, "the reality of God and the gods."²²

Taking seriously the atheist criticism that human freedom is excluded by the concept of "an almighty and omniscient being thought of as existing at the beginning of all temporal processes," he argues that "freedom is the ability to go beyond what already exists." Traditional Christian theism innocently thought of God on the analogy of what exists, and linked this false analogy with the biblical God's omnipotent action in history. Such a being would render human freedom impossible and would not be God since human transcendence would remain outside its determining grasp. True biblical omnipotence is irreconcilable with the idea of God as existent being.²³ Rather God is the origin of freedom, the future which determines human experience as it is oriented forward in hope or fear. Since human "freedom consists of possibilities not yet realized," the correspondence between freedom and future means that God is already implicit as the origin of freedom, "as the power of the future, as the God whose kingdom is coming." And since freedom and personality are intimately related, God is understood as "a personal reality of a supra-human kind ... a pure act of freedom."

The idea of God as radical personal freedom does not prove the existence of God. That question will only be fully decided in the final revelation, and, even since Christ, history is still moving toward that event. But in the present, God is the one who is to come, the God of Jesus "who raises the dead and is therefore also the origin of freedom which overcomes what exists, and redeems it."²⁴

Gilkey also reworks the traditional concepts of God as creator and providential ruler in the light of a changed culture which disputes the older symbols of God's creation as an abrupt, absolute beginning of time

²¹ Ibid., pp. 184-185; 91.
²² The Idea of God, pp. 95-96, 97.
²³ Ibid., pp. 108-110.
²⁴ Ibid., pp. 111, 114, 115. Cf. also Jürgen Moltmann, The Theology of Hope tr. James W. Leitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). See David McKenzie, "Pannenberg on God and Freedom," Journal of Religion 60:3 (July, 1980), pp. 307-329 for criticism of Pannenberg's idea of God as future.

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with the world and providence as the all-determining rule of God over persons and events. Such concepts are counter to contemporary presuppositions about scientific law, human autonomy, and the promise of an open future. With human temporality as the ground of experience of God, Gilkey develops the symbol of God as creator as an expression of the absolute dependence of all creatures on the power of God. "Creation out of nothing" refers not to a first moment but to God as the source of everything. This source, however, is understood as self-limiting in its creation of autonomous freedom. God thus exhibits personal polarities of absoluteness and self- limitation, unconditionedness and reciprocity. The symbol of God's providence is not temporally distinct from creation but understood in terms of God's self-limitation which allows the created world, especially persons, to share in the divine creativity. Nevertheless, God transcends time: "as the unlimited vision of possibilities, God is infinite."²⁵ That God's being includes potentiality, relatedness, changeability, and temporality is in sharp contrast to the past theological tradition for which such attributes meant a denial of God's absoluteness.

Gilkey argues that such a portrayal is more faithful to the dynamic notion of God suggested by the Scriptures, and that it does not attribute finitude or contingency to God. This is crucial to his adaptation of process thought. "In sharing in temporality, relatedness, and change as the continuing ground of each, God transcends all three; as creator and preserver of all that is contingent and temporal, God 'is' necessarily and eternally as their source over time ."²⁶ That God is not an object, nor a person like other persons is God's mystery: real transcendence, hidden power in the world, the freedom and finally personal character of God.

Ogden's analysis of existential faith at the implicit and reflective levels of awareness as the "only really essential 'proof of God's existence' " leads him to insist that "secularity"-affirmation of the final worth of human life-is a manifestation of basic faith in God; a denial of God is a denial of the meaning of life itself.²⁷ He argues that God must be understood both as related to life in this world such that human actions make a difference to God's actual being, and as a reality which is relative to nothing, whose existence is transcendent, and thus an absolute ground to basic human confidence. The conception of God implied is the bipolar understanding of process thought. It is clearly opposed to traditional theism which, Ogden claims, in its monopolarity fails to interpret the scriptural myths of God's involvement with human persons and history and instead eliminates them.

Unlike Rahner's positive interpretation of Aquinas' distinction between the real relation of creatures to God and the notional relation of God to creation, Ogden argues that traditional supernaturalism can

²⁵ Message and Existence, p. 93; cf. Reaping the Whirlwind, pp. 248-249, 279-281 on God's self-limitation.
²⁶ Ibid., pp. 96-97.
²⁷ The Reality of God, pp. 43-45.

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be blamed for much of contemporary atheism's criticism of a fundamentally indifferent God. His approach to a new theism is Whitehead's reformed subjective principle" which takes the experiencing self, in its relational and social character, as its basis. This approach understands God both as eminently relative and strictly absolute. "God is by analogy a living and even growing God ... related to the universe of other beings" and yet as "the eminently temporal and changing One, to whose time and change there can be neither beginning nor end ... is eternal and unchangeable."²⁸

Neoclassical theism thus incorporates both God's active involvement in the world of human experience and all the metaphysical attributes-immutability, impassivity, eternity--of classical theism. This perspective coherently renders the scriptural representation of God as a truly related Self or Thou understandable at the same time that it preserves, in maintaining God's unique relation to all others, "the most truly absolute Thou any mind can conceive."²⁹ Such a concept of God, Ogden claims, more adequately bears witness to the reality of God re-presented in Jesus Christ.

Tracy, like Ogden, argues for the need for metaphysics in relation to the question of God, and that any metaphysical account meet the criteria of coherence and adequacy to experience. Although he agrees with Rahner that the experiential criterion is best met by the "turn to the subject" characteristic of the transcendental method, he rejects the classical concepts of Thomistic theism and turns to process thought as more internally coherent and more adequate to common human experience and the God of the Christian Scriptures. Here, especially in the work of Charles Hartshorne, are found those conditions of possibility of the limit experiences which are the anthropological source for knowledge of God. The notions of "substance" and "being" of traditional metaphysics founded in merely sense experience are replaced by "process," "sociality," "relation," "temporality," as more adequate to the primary experience of social and temporal selves. The process thinkers, Tracy writes, affirm the genuine value of modern secularity, and the best of them do not mistake process for progress; they are sufficiently critical of modernity. And they persuasively show that the classical tradition may have failed to understand the scriptural vision of God. "Is not the God of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures a God profoundly involved in humanity's struggle to the point where God not merely affects but is affected by the struggle? ... Can the God of Jesus Christ really be simply changeless, omnipotent, omniscient, unaffected by our anguish and achievements?"³⁰

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 59-60; cf. pp. 47-48 on the distinction between existence and actuality.
²⁹ Ibid., p. 65. The work of John B. Cobb, Jr. should also be mentioned in connection with the process view of God; see his A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965), The Structure of Christian Existence (Westminster, 1967), and God and the World (Westminster, 1969), A clear introduction is available in Cobb and David R. Griffin, Process Theology (Westminster, 1976).
³⁰ Blessed Rage for Order, p. 177.

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Tracy accepts the dipolar concept of God which disputes the classical notions of changelessness and unrelated substance as perfection and affirms change and relation of God. The dipolarity of God, as both absolute and relative, reflects the dipolarity of human persons as substance (existence) and as relative (actuality). On the basis of the human analogy, God alone is supremely perfect in both poles of reality: abstractly "God alone is absolute," concretely "God alone is relative to all other beings." "Precisely as unsurpassably temporal and social-and, in that revised sense, as changeless-God alone is God."³¹ Yet Tracy has a disclaimer about process thought's ability (thus far) to capture the radical, often extreme limit-disclosures of Scripture: God's promise, newness, liberation from social and individual forces whose evil is as radical now as in biblical times. Such aspects of the concept of God can only be found in the Christological and eschatological language of the Bible. Thus, like Gilkey, Tracy adapts a central part of process thought into his own pluralistic framework for a fundamental theology and doctrine of God.

Recent discussions in other areas of theology have similarly suggested the centrality of God's involvement in human experience and, on that basis, reformulations of the concept of God. Hans Küng's Christology, for example, is an apologetic for the decisive uniqueness of the biblical Jesus and his message of total orientation of human life toward the God whose will is human well-being. In Jesus' solidarity with humankind, especially sinners, he is God's advocate; his life, practice, and concrete program reveal a God who is for human beings. Küng's Does God Exist? develops that theme more fully. Having examined the long struggle of belief in God through the modern philosophical challenges of atheism and nihilism and concluding to the reasonableness of fundamental trust in reality, Küng argues for belief in God as a rationally justified but gifted trust. The God of Jesus Christ makes concrete and definite the abstract God of the philosophers: God is living, personal, transcendent, liberating. As Father, God cares for the lost and forsaken; as Son, God is boundless love; as Spirit, God is revealed as creative freedom for the future. The New Testament categories outreach any philosophy in expressing the character of God.³²

Where Pannenberg's reflections on the concept of God as future followed from his apocalyptically oriented Christology, Jürgen Moltmann's Christolology appeared after his fundamental reflections on eschatology and God as future, as imminence, as promise. The history of Jesus' death on the cross is understood as "God's action, even as God's suffering"; the crucifixion reveals something beyond the categories of classical theism: confrontation within God, "an inner-godly

³¹ Ibid., pp. 179, 181; 190-191.
³² On Being a Christian, tr. Edward Quinn (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 117- 462; Does God Exist?, pp. 613-702.

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stasis. ,³³ As the paradigmatic event in which God is revealed, the cross shows God as self-identifying, self-differentiating, and self-forsaking, and as triune. Jesus' death is "death in God," for the "history of Christ is the inner life of God." Thus rooted in history, faith describes ultimate reality as cruciform: the sufferings of the present are related to the suffering of God. Moltmann rejects any real distinction between the immanent and economic trinity and draws on process or panentheistic categories to show how God is involved in human history through the cross. The suffering of the Son in being forsaken and of the Father who grieves over the death of the Son issues in the Spirit which creates love and hope for oppressed humankind, "which brings the dead alive." Since all the suffering and joy of the world are taken up in this dynamism, history itself becomes the sacrament of God. Christians do not so much pray to God as in this "open eschatological process on earth," especially in the context of psychological and political oppression and liberation.³⁴

Schillebeeckx's Christology shows that in Jesus' message of the rule of God, God is seen to be for humankind in a universal love that is both present and coming: the God of "pure positivity" does not will human beings to suffer but to live; humanity's cause is God's cause. Jesus' message which gladdens and frees people appears to be rooted in his unique "Abba experience" of deep intimacy with God, the basis for his unconditional assurance that God is a caring Father who gives a future to the hopeless.³⁵ In the resurrection, God is identified with Jesus' message and praxis of self-giving for others. Schillebeeckx argues that changing historical experience is the context of the Christian interpretation of salvation or grace. As the merciful love of God, it is not merely internal or private but expressed in history in ways that are never isolated from ethical life and historical existence. He affirms a mysticalpolitical polarity of New Testament grace, both gift and task, to be interpreted today as the imperative to free those caught in the web of structural injustice. "The liberating realization of true humanity" is the "true face of God." Echoing his earlier reflections, Schillebeeckx writes, "In the end, Jesus' identity as the personal manifestation of God's all embracing love of man will be shown through man and his world."³⁶

The liberation themes which sound in Moltmann and Schillebeeckx are heightened in recent political and liberation theology. In Latin

³³ The Crucified God, tr. R, A. Wilson and John Bowden (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 190,193.
³⁴ Ibid., pp. 200-340; cf. Christopher Morse, The Logic of Promise in Moltmann's Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 114-127, for analysis and criticism of Moltmann's position. On similar, though not so radical, trinitarian themes, see Rahner, The Trinity, tr. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) and Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976).
³⁵ Jesus: An Experiment in Chrisiology, tr. Hubert Hoskins (New York: Seabury, 1979), pp. 105-271.
³⁶ Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord. tr. John Bowden (New York: Seabury, 1980), p. 845.

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America, theologians write of God from the perspective of theodicy rather than natural theology, vindication of God's justice in action rather than contemplative meaning, a God whose love in the message of Jesus is partisan, on the side of the powerless.³⁷ And in Europe, sharp criticism of traditional and transcendental metaphysics, oriented on the past or present, and of existential biblical interpretation focussed on individual decision, calls for a renewal of eschatology in which the whole of history stands under the promise of God.³⁸ Johannes Metz argues against the privatized individual experience of transcendental theology because it fails to consider seriously enough the historical and social structures of experience, and suggests the practical and narrative structure of the idea of God. The narrative history of biblical religion presents a people-and the individuals within it-as becoming subjects in the presence of God. God constitutes religious subjects, forms identity, in dramatic experiences of solidarity with or antagonism towards others. Metz affirms a political theology of God and of the subject which is at the same time a criticism of the cultures of individualism, consumerism, apathy, hatred. The dangerous memory of the God of the Christian gospel, a God of slaves not of conquerors, can similarly form subjects in authentic solidarity today.³⁹

Juan Segundo writes that Latin America is not so much confronted with the "death of God" as with the death of idols that hold it in bondage. One of these is the concept of God as absolute and independent of creatures, an impersonal abstraction contrary to the biblical understanding of God's involvement with persons in history and the personal character of Father, Son, and Spirit. Segundo interprets the Trinity as a community or society of persons which leads to both a socialized and interdependent understanding of person, and a concept of God in which liberty, personality, and creativity take precedence over a supreme being of stability, permanence, and eternal order. He sees his work as a "critical approach to the God of occidental society" in which the teaching of God's independence of history, society, and world is really a projection onto God of the central limitations, of Western society: individualism, passivity, other-worldly Christianity.⁴⁰ Gustavo Gutierrez also follows a biblical perspective, focussing on the idea of the incarnation., He argues that humanity, each person, is the temple of the living God. God is encountered in the historical process through commitment to justice. "To know God is to do justice," especially in concrete action toward the poor. This human mediation, necessary to reach God, is not merely instrumental: it is a real love for human beings

³⁷ Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads: A Latin American Approach, tr. John Drury, (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1978), pp. 35-36, 243, 166.
³⁸ Johannes B. Metz, Theology of the World, tr. William Glen-Dolpel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 98-100, 155.
³⁹ Faith in History and Society, tr. David Smith (New York: Seabury, 1980), pp. 60-69.
⁴⁰ Our Idea of God, tr. John Drury (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1974), pp. 49, 178-179, et passim.

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which avoids individualistic charity and is manifested by conversion, an option for the oppressed, a commitment to participate in the struggle for liberation.⁴¹

A final dimension of liberation theology which touches on the concept of God is Christian feminism. A critique of Christian God-language has emerged in feminist scholarship which raises the question: is God male? Feminist scholars who affirm the transcendence and immanence of God in relation to the experience of women question exclusive male language for God. While theologians have always maintained that God transcends sexuality, they have nevertheless persisted in defining God as somehow masculine, as "he." This traditional usage is criticized by feminist theologians who argue that divine patriarchy serves as legitimation for human patriarchy and inferior status for women in church and society. Some radical religious feminists insist that the Jewish and Christian traditions are intrinsically and irredeemably patriarchal, although they may maintain dynamic conceptions of God sourced in Western or Christian thought.⁴² Reformist Christian feminism criticizes dominantly male concepts of God from within the tradition itself, noting feminine characterizations of God within the Bible or suggesting nonpatriarchial and/or non-familial names for God as more faithful to its fundamental message. The psychological and social significance of this question relates not only to the experience of women, but also to cultural understandings of hierarchy, power, authority, domination, violence. The ideals of Christian feminism-mutuality, reciprocity, interdependence in human and societal relations-are seen to contrast with societal implications of a patriarchal concept of God.⁴³

IV

Moving from the anthropologically based discussion of the doctrine of God to recent Christology and liberation theology with its criticism of a privatized, individual understanding of God and human persons suggests that future work on the doctrine of God should focus on the political and social apprehension of God's reality and character in collective human existence. And in fact such work has already begun.⁴⁴ If this brief survey has highlighted common themes in the mysterious character of human experience, temporality, the future, and the historical process, human autonomy, freedom and responsibility, ultimate human dependence and limit, the need for fundamental trust, the

⁴¹ A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, tr. Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1973), pp. 189-204.
⁴² Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973); Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston: Beacon, 1979).
⁴³ Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978); Rosemary Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: Seabury,1975).
⁴⁴ See Langdon Gilkey, Reaping the Whirlwind; Schubert M. Ogden, Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979).

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reasonableness-though not strict proof-of belief in God in one's individual life, the same themes require analysis in the question of God's relation to corporate human existence, the locus of the most urgent contemporary crises. The transposition is a difficult one. Political and liberation theology have not yet achieved the technically solid theological foundations they seek, although they must be ranked among the most creative movements within the church today.

The various positions outlined here are diverse, and subject to a variety of criticism in their particular arguments, their uses of the Bible, philosophy, and the social sciences. But within this pluralism of theological understandings of the reality and concept of God, the recurrent themes argue for minimum consensus on a God who is involved in the lives of women and men while remaining transcendent as the source and goal of the human project.⁴⁵ Such a God, according to the Bible, is as intimate to the hope and anguish of public, historical life as to the joy and suffering of the individual. The language of theology remains abidingly symbolic, analogical. Its prime analogy for God, taken from the human person, is understood today not only as uniquely knowing and free, but as one whose freedom and understanding are deeply molded by cultural, political, and economic structures. Seriously polarized, divergent theological views are put forward in the secular public discussion about the relationship of God to societal human life. Clearly, one of the central tasks of theology today is to work out more fully, toward the kind of serious consensus achieved in the discussion summarized above, the meaning of God in relation to the collective struggles of our time.

⁴⁵ It should be noted that the anthropological starting point in ordinary experience is certainly not accepted by all contemporary theologians, European or American. Some key figures who represent other perspectives are Hans Urs von Balthasar who is critical of Ralmer's anthropological framework and instead proposes a theological aesthetic based on the New Testament in which Jesus is God's image or ikon; Eberhard Jüngel who is critical of Pannenberg continues the Barthian tradition of the Word as the source of all knowledge of God, locates God's being in becoming, as present in the historical conflicts of humanity; Gerhard Ebeling's formulations of relational concepts of God (holiness, glory, love) are derived from the language of prayer in relation to experience. Among the "Wittgensteinian fideists" are D. Z. Phillips and Paul Holmer who maintain that the language of theology is internal to the Christian community and its lived faith: God is known only in worship, is not inferred from experience in the world, and concepts of God, the changeless one, must not be adapted to changing human circumstances. Holmer, especially, is critical of any form of political theology. Evangelical theology, in the recent work of Carl Henry and Donald Bloesch, remains firmly committed to the Bible as the only authoritative source for knowledge of God; any correspondence between the Bible and experience is firmly excluded. Finally, forms of process theology, especially in Hartshorne and Ogden, are challenged by Robert Neville, who urges a different notion of God as the ontological creativity and unity underlying the plurality of the world.