Gods after God

A n I nt r od uc t i on t o
C o n t e m po r a r y R ad ic a l T h e olo g i e s

RICHARD GRIGG
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Gods after God
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Gods after God
An Introduction to
Contemporary Radical Theologies

Richard Grigg

State University of New York Press

Published by
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© 2006 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grigg, Richard, 1955–

Gods after God : an introduction to contemporary radical theologies /
Richard Grigg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6639-6 (hardcopy : alk. paper)
1.Theology, Doctrinal—History—20th century. 2.Theology, Doctrinal—
History—21st century. I.Title.

BT28.G76 2005
230'.046—dc22
2005003761
ISBN-13 978-0-7914-6639-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 In memory of my father,
who was always willing to
debate religion with me.
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 Contents

Preface ix

1. Introduction 1

2. Immanent Be-ing: Mary Daly and Radical

Feminist Theology 13

3. Language as Divine Milieu: Mark Taylor and

Deconstruction 25

4. Sacred Nature: Ursula Goodenough, Donald Crosby,

and Religious Naturalism 37

5. God and Pragmatism I: Sallie McFague’s

Metaphorical Theology 53

6. God and Pragmatism II: Gordon Kaufman’s Project

of Theological Construction 75

7. Christ and the Tao: Stephen Mitchell on Jesus as

Zen Master 95

8. Gods and Goddesses: Naomi Goldenberg and a

New Polytheism 111

vii
viii Contents

9. The Future of Radical Theology 127

Notes 149

Bibliography 167

Index 171
 Preface

It would be hard to deny that contemporary American culture,

and to some extent the larger world, is experiencing a spiritual
revival. Seldom have there been so many paths offered to spiritual
fulfillment, a fact confirmed by a visit to the religion and spiritu-
ality section of any large bookstore or by perusing the internet.
Many of these paths are very conservative. Various fundamen-
talisms, including Hindu, Muslim, and Christian varieties, are
flourishing around the world. In the United States in particular,
what is called “evangelical Christianity,” which is powered by bib-
lical literalism, continues to grow and thrive. Furthermore, a great
many of the learned theologies set forth by professional religious
thinkers today, especially within the Christian community, are
explicitly traditional. One thinks here of perspectives such as
Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck’s “post-liberal” theology,
Anglican thinker John Milbank’s “radical orthodoxy” (“radical” in
the very opposite sense from which we shall be using the term),
and the Roman Catholic theology of the late Hans Urs von
Balthasar.1
On the other hand, one can also find devotees of liberal, or
even radical, spiritualities in contemporary society. I define a “rad-
ical” religious perspective as one in which traditional views of the
divine as a transcendent consciousness, who created the world and
intervenes within it for special purposes, along with the institu-
tional accompaniments of such views, including adherence to

ix
x Preface

sacred scriptures and traditional authorities, are abandoned. The

so-called New Age movement provides the most obvious example
of a radical religious perspective on the popular level. The New
Age concentrates upon the individual and his or her idiosyncratic
religious quest rather than upon the quest of a traditional religious
community. It allows each quester to cobble together spiritual
resources from a virtually unlimited number of traditions and even
to create resources out of whole cloth. Overlapping with the New
Age movement to greater and lesser degrees are the various god-
dess spiritualities created by radical feminist religious questers. But
whereas the New Age movement tends to flourish on a purely
popular level and to avoid systematic or philosophical reflection,
there are a host of radical feminist thinkers who have produced
carefully crafted and philosophically informed theologies (or
thealogies) of the goddess.2
But feminist theologies are not the only instances of radical
theology on the scene today.There are postmodern deconstructive
theologies, pragmatic theologies, nature theologies, and others
besides that qualify as genuinely radical. Thus, while it is some-
times supposed that conservative theologies have entirely carried
the day and that the only radical theologies worthy of note were
concocted back in the 1960s, it can well be argued that there are
numerous and diverse radical theologies on the scene today. It may
be their very diversity that makes it difficult to recognize that all
of these different theologies can indeed loosely be collected under
the single heading “radical theology” and that, thus, we can mean-
ingfully speak of a powerful current of radical theology in the
present day and age. It is the task of this book to bring some of
these radical theologies together in order to make that powerful
current more evident to the interested religious inquirer.
The book is composed of chapters on individual radical
thinkers.We shall be interested, specifically, in radical conceptions
of the ultimate, rather than in radical social and political perspec-
tives that might be tied to religious belief.Thus, there is no chap-
ter, for instance, on so-called liberation theology, since while lib-
eration theologies usually push a radical socioeconomic agenda,
they most often do so in the context of a rather traditional theism.
 Preface xi

Of course there is nothing to prevent a radical perspective on the

ultimate from being linked to a radical sociopolitical philosophy, as
we shall see in our discussion of the thought of Mary Daly.
In each chapter that follows, the attempt is made to explain
the theology under discussion as clearly as possible, so that the stu-
dent reader can make sense of what is at issue. Furthermore, at the
end of each chapter, I pose specific critical questions about each
theology and its possible practical efficacy. In other words, the
book attempts to provide an element of critique as well as of
exposition, and I hope that this critical component of the book
may be of interest not only to students, but also to theologians
themselves. And in the final chapter, I shall take on some of the
larger questions confronting the project of radical theology as a
whole and shall consider how the various theologies explored in
the previous chapters cohere with one another.
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 — — 1

Introduction

“T heology,” from the Greek theos (which means “god”)

and logos (which means “word” or “reason”) is rea-
soning and talking about God. What, then, is radical
theology? The word “radical” comes from the Latin for “root,” but
radical theology, at least as the expression is ordinarily applied, hardly
means going back to the roots of a community’s faith. Rather, it sug-
gests a decisive deviation from a particular faith community’s tradi-
tional way of talking about God. Context is all-important here. For
instance, while the assertion that God is three-in-one would be a
radical theological assertion indeed in the context of Judaism or
Islam, it counts as orthodoxy within Christianity.
Of course, some claims qualify as radical when uttered within
the context of most any tradition that focuses upon belief in God.
Take, for instance, what Harold Bloom deems the “beautiful
remark” of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza
“that whoever loved God truly should not expect to be loved by
God in return.”1 Spinoza’s abstract deity is incapable of love and is
thus radically different from the God of what I shall term tradi-
tional monotheism. I define traditional monotheism as (1) belief in
a God who is a personal, loving, transcendent being who freely cre-
ated the universe and who acts within it to reveal himself to human-
ity and to accomplish his purposes, a belief that is formed and
guided, (2) by allegiance to sacred and authoritative texts and tradi-
tions. It is sometimes supposed that traditional monotheism, the

1
2 Gods after God

belief system of the vast majority of Christians, for example, por-

trays God as an old man with a beard who sits on a heavenly
throne. Radical theology is any theology, then, that replaces this
cartoon God with something more sophisticated. But this is ludi-
crous, for traditional Christians, even the most humble, know that
God is not a physical being perched on a heavenly chair.Thus, just
as traditional Christian belief is something more sophisticated than
belief in a supernatural grandfather, so radical theology must do
something more radical than to quash an idea of God that no one
holds anyway.
In order to better understand what we shall be calling “radical
theologies,” it is helpful to consider the larger historical situation
in which such radical theologies come to birth. They are largely
the product of the modern and postmodern periods in the West.
In the so-called Middle Ages,Western society was unified around
the allegiance of the majority of its inhabitants to the Christian
church. This arrangement is often referred to as “Christendom.”
With the Renaissance, and especially with the birth of modernity,
however, the forces of secularization were unleashed and Chris-
tendom came apart. Secularization is the process through which
religion loses more and more (though never all) of its social power.
Its central place in Western society has been taken over principally
by the economic component of society. Secularization was well
underway in the seventeenth century, the century in which histo-
rians tend to see modernity really beginning.2 Why is the seven-
teenth century a watershed? Many powerful currents come
together then: the nation-state is underway; capitalism begins to
unfold; science as we know it is invented by men such as Galileo
and Newton; and the philosopher René Descartes imparts a new
focus to philosophy, an interest in knowledge and how we can
attain certainty. In this brave new world, thinkers are no longer
shackled to the tenets of Christendom.They are given permission,
as it were, to explore radical approaches to thinking about deity, a
permission that various thinkers have put to powerful use from the
seventeenth century to the present day.
We can easily find representative radical thinkers from the sev-
enteenth century through the twentieth. For a seventeenth-cen-
 Introduction 3

tury example, let us return to the brilliant philosophy of Baruch

Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza defines God as absolutely infinite
substance.This means that, in one sense at least, God is everything
that exists; indeed God is the totality of everything that can be, that
is, everything that is possible.Thus, we find in Spinoza a version of
pantheism, a term that derives from the Greek pan, which means
“all,” and theos,“god,” according to which God is the All. God has
an infinite number of attributes, but we know only two, namely,
space and thought, because we participate in only those two. We
ourselves are “modes” or modifications of God under the attrib-
utes of thought and space.
In Spinoza’s pantheism, human beings are not free, for every-
thing that happens follows necessarily from the characteristics of
God as infinite substance.We do, of course, ordinarily suppose that
we are free, but that is simply a function of our ignorance of what
causes our actions. Only God is free.Yet even God is not free in
the ordinary sense: he is not free to do x or not to do x. Rather,
he is free only in the sense that there is nothing external to him
compelling him; his actions flow necessarily from his own nature.
What should we make of Spinoza’s concept of God? Should
it really be called “God” at all, considering how different it is from
traditional monotheism? After all, Spinoza himself speaks of “Deus
sive Natura,” “God or Nature.” Perhaps, then, Spinoza’s absolutely
infinite substance can appropriately be identified with Nature as
the All, but does not really deserve the appellation God. Certainly
Spinoza’s God is not transcendent in the ordinary sense. Is Spin-
oza really best classified as an atheist? Not at all, according to inter-
preters such as the eighteenth-century poet Novalis, who dubs
Spinoza a “God-intoxicated man”!
An example of eighteenth-century radical theology is pro-
vided by those thinkers usually known as the Deists (from the
Latin deus, “god”). In English works such as John Toland’s Chris-
tianity not Mysterious: Or a treatise Shewing That there is nothing in the
Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor above it: And that no Christian Doc-
trine can be properly call’d a Mystery of 1696 and Matthew Tindal’s
Christianity as Old as the Creation of 1730 we are introduced to a
“natural religion” or religion of reason.The God here unveiled is
4 Gods after God

the watchmaker God: this deity can be shown by reason to exist

and to have set the world in motion, much as a watchmaker con-
structs a watch, but just like the watchmaker, this God leaves the
subsequent operation of his creation to its own devices. He does
not make special revelations of himself to humankind, nor does
he providentially intervene in human affairs. He is a God true
devotion to which does not require priests and ecclesiastics.
Indeed, they are positively inimical to virtuous piety.According to
Peter Gay, the Deist’s “historical significance was considerable:
they redrew the religious map of Europe.”3 On the Continent,
they influenced men such as Voltaire who could declare, in the
spirit of the stripped-down religion of Deism:“Almost everything
that goes beyond the worship of a Supreme Being, and the sub-
mission of one’s heart to his eternal commands is superstition.”4
In the United States, the Deists could reasonably claim among
their number such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson.
What motivated the Deists, in addition to the general phe-
nomenon of secularization already mentioned above? Their age
was the Age of Reason, the period of Enlightenment, which
emphasized the importance of relying on reason alone in deter-
mining what one ought and ought not to believe. Descartes had
already emphasized the need for certainty. If one decides to hold
only those religious beliefs that can be fully supported in the cold
light of mere reason, as opposed to beliefs handed down by sacred
scriptures and allegedly authoritative traditions, one might well
come up with something like Deism and its stripped-down, non-
interventionist, watchmaker God. What is more, because Enlight-
enment thinkers believed that reason, in the scientific form that
they championed, was universal, reason naturally tended to under-
mine any set of beliefs that was parochial or limited to a particu-
lar people and tradition. At least within the larger tradition of
European Christianity, the Enlightenment thinkers looked over
their shoulders at the wars of religion that had ravaged Western
Europe, and they believed that reason, as a universal instrument,
could cut away all of the parochial concerns that separated the dif-
ferent Christian confessions.
 Introduction 5

When we look for an example of a potent radical theology

of the nineteenth century, we need look no further than the
thought of the greatest Western philosopher of that century,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). For Hegel too,
like his Enlightenment predecessors, reason is key. But in his esti-
mation, reason is not simply the tool that we ought to employ in
deciding upon our beliefs, it is the very nature of reality itself:
what is real is rational; it is ultimately idea or thought. What
about physical nature, then? Nature is simply the externalization
of thought. Both human consciousness and the external world
that is the object of that consciousness are embraced in the
Absolute, Hegel’s philosophical term for God. The Absolute
encompasses both subject and object thought and that which is
thought about.
If the Absolute is God, and if all is thought, even the world of
nature, then one might be tempted to say that nature consists of
ideas in the mind of God. But Hegel’s Absolute is not a Supreme
Being who, simply on his own, thinks the world. Rather, the
Absolute is a process, and it requires human beings for its reality.
For it is through our thinking of the world that the Absolute
thinks itself and comes to self-consciousness. In his major pub-
lished works, Hegel sets out a vast and complex system of philos-
ophy, and it is in this system that the Absolute has come to its most
perfect self-knowledge. The Absolute does not exist in splendid
fullness from the beginning of time. Rather, it is the result of the
whole logical process traced out in the Hegelian system, a process
that operates by thought recognizing contradictory notions and
then overcoming them in a higher synthesis.
Now it is important to keep in mind that thinkers from
Descartes to Hegel have had specific philosophical problems that
they were pursuing and that led them to speak of God in the ways
that they did. But this does not prevent their positions from count-
ing as radical theologies.We are reminded by the great historian of
philosophy Frederick Copleston, for example, that “though it is
true that Hegel became a philosopher rather than a theologian, his
philosophy was always theology in the sense that its subject-mat-
ter was, as he himself insisted, the same as the subject-matter of
6 Gods after God

theology, namely, the Absolute or, in religious language, God and

the relation of the finite to the infinite.”5
Another nineteenth-century example, one especially perti-
nent to Americans, is the Transcendentalist movement, with Ralph
Waldo Emerson at its head. Emerson and company were influ-
enced by Hegel, however indirectly. Emerson, in particular, held
that God is an encompassing reality that any individual can intuit
within himself or herself.Though he began as a Christian, Emer-
son came to believe that the Christian tradition was wholly mis-
guided in spending so much time on the figure of Jesus Christ.
After all, each of us can have God dwell within us in the very same
way that Jesus did.
What of twentieth-century antecedents of contemporary rad-
ical theologies? The choice of examples here is an easy one:Amer-
ica in the 1960s witnessed an extraordinary interest in a movement
that was explicitly dubbed “radical theology.” At the heart of this
radical theology stood the proclamation of the “death of God.”
Already in the nineteenth century, the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche had announced that God is dead, and “we have
killed him—you and I.”6 Thus, Nietzsche in many ways stands as the
patron saint of the death of God theology of the 1960s. For Niet-
zsche, God never existed in the first place, but we are finally
approaching the cultural epoch in which it will be possible to
affirm the nonexistence of God. He acknowledges that to “kill”
God in this way has frightening consequences. What will be the
ground of our certainty about the meaning of life? From whence
shall we derive our moral codes? How can history have a definite
goal if there is no divine providence? What is truth if there is no
perfectly objective God’s eye view of the world? But ultimately
Nietzsche wants to affirm the death of God. At least for those in
whom the life force courses most strongly, it is possible to cele-
brate the death of God, for “If there were gods, how could I
endure not to be a god?”7 In other words, Nietzsche holds that
belief in God quashes human autonomy. If I believe that I am
beholden to a God, a God before whom I am a weak and miser-
able sinner, then I am a pathetic figure. The strong human being
will not only get along without God and accept his fate in a god-
 Introduction 7

less world, but he will so affirm that fate as to accept Nietzsche’s

doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, the idea that I should say
“yes” to the notion of having to live every moment of my life over
and over again in a never ending cycle.
The radical theologians of the 1960s were not all equally
influenced by Nietzsche, but his name can hardly be left out of any
account of a theological movement known as the “death of God
theology.” One death of God theologian who does draw heavily
upon Nietzsche, and perhaps the most fascinating of all of the so-
called radical theologians of the 1960s, is Thomas J. J. Altizer. Part
of Altizer’s significance lies in the fact that a number of themes in
his work of the 1960s are relevant to a form of radical theology
that is important today (the postmodern, “deconstructive” theol-
ogy that we shall investigate in chapter three).
In order to understand Altizer’s death of God theology, we
must begin with the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarna-
tion. The word “incarnation” means literally “enfleshment” (note
its relation to words such as “carnivore” and “carnage”). Christian
teaching holds that God himself took on flesh in the person of
Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. In the book of
Philippians in the New Testament, which was written in ancient
Greek, the apostle Paul approaches the Incarnation with the
notion of kenosis, or “self-emptying.” Philippians 2:5–8 advises

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.8
8 Gods after God

Christ, as the Word of God, has emptied himself in taking on flesh.

But Altizer’s radical theology seeks “a totally incarnate Word.”9
Indeed, Altizer maintains that by becoming flesh in the Christ,
God the Father has died! This is no mere metaphorical flourish for
Altizer. Rather, “God becomes incarnate in the Word, and he
becomes fully incarnate, thereby ceasing to exist or to be present
in his primordial form.”10 The death of God is “an event that has
actually happened both in a cosmic and in a historical sense.”11
Altizer learns not only from Nietzsche, but also from Hegel,
for whom dialectic is essential to thought.A dialectic is an unfold-
ing process: a thesis is negated, but that negation is in turn negated
so that we end up with a truth more encompassing than either the
original thesis or the original negation.Traditional Christian reli-
gion negates our ability to say yes to a truly this-worldly exis-
tence—here we are back to Nietzsche—but the death of God in
the Incarnation negates this negation. We are freed to affirm
worldly existence, freed even to affirm the Eternal Recurrence.
By proclaiming the death of God, Altizer imagines a religion-
less, genuinely secular theology. Indeed,“So far from being the ser-
vant of the dogmatic and institutional authority of the Church, a
truly dialectical theology will dissolve all such authority, and give
itself to an attack upon every repressive law and power that claims
a holy or a transcendent source.”12
Some of the other radical theologians, while still advocating a
secular theology, stayed a bit closer to traditional Christianity in
that they focused upon the historical Jesus. In his book The New
Essence of Christianity,William Hamilton confessed:“Most of us are
learning to accept these things: the disappearance of God from the
world, the coming of age of the world, as it has been called, the
disappearance of religion as a lively factor in modern life, the fact
that there are men who can live both without God and without
despair.”13 But Hamilton offers us “a theology of the secular based
on the lordship of Jesus.”14 What would it mean to follow Jesus
into the world and to embrace a truly worldly, yet Christian exis-
tence? This is the question that Hamilton poses in his book.While
The New Essence of Christianity hints that God may be simply
unavailable and irrelevant to us in the present historical moment
 Introduction 9

but may still be alive, Hamilton grows more radical in his later
work: “God is dead. We are not talking about the absence of the
experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of
God.”15 But while God is dead, the Christian is still a Christian,
committed as he is to following the figure of Jesus and his teach-
ing. Perhaps, says Hamilton,

Jesus Christ is best understood as neither the object nor the

ground of faith . . . but simply as a place to be, a standpoint.That
place is, of course, alongside the neighbor, being for him. This
may be the meaning of Jesus’ true humanity and it may even be
the meaning of his divinity, and thus of divinity itself.16

Hamilton never goes so far as Altizer, who argues that the death of
God means “abandoning all those moral laws which the Christian
Church has sanctioned.”17
We find a sensibility similar to Hamilton’s in Paul van Buren’s
The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. Van Buren, too, would have us
look away from God and toward the figure of the historical Jesus.
He bases his argument, however, upon the sort of careful analysis
of language and its use that characterizes that twentieth-century
school of philosophy known as “analytic philosophy.” The mean-
ing of a word is determined, say some of the analytic philosophers,
by its actual use. “Today,” asserts van Buren, “we cannot even
understand the Nietzschian cry that ‘God is dead!’ for if it were so,
how could we know? No, the problem now is that the word ‘God’
is dead.”18 We must turn away from God and focus upon the man
Jesus and his extraordinary freedom, for by following him, we shall
ourselves become free.
Perhaps the most poignant death of God theology from the
1960s is that of the Jewish thinker Richard Rubenstein. For
Rubenstein, the death of God has less to do with a general cul-
tural phenomenon articulated by Nietzsche than with a single
event that occurred in the midst of the twentieth century, namely,
Hitler’s murder of six million Jews. “Although Jewish history is
replete with disaster, none has been so radical in its total import as
the Holocaust,” says Rubenstein. “Our images of God, man, and
10 Gods after God

the moral order have been permanently impaired.”19 The whole

notion of history is radically undermined, insofar as Judaism has
always understood history in terms of a God of history who guides
human events. Rubenstein holds that, as a result of the Holocaust,
Judaism must now abandon the God of history. It would be
obscene to imagine a loving God of history willing the Holocaust
or allowing it to occur.We should turn instead to the pagan devo-
tion to nature, to that Mother Earth from which we all arose and
to which we must return in death.This approach will allow us, says
Rubenstein, to grasp our actual and proper place in the larger
scheme of things.
Is there anything left of Judaism in Rubenstein’s death of God
theology? There is indeed, for Rubenstein wants to hold onto the
symbols, myths, and rituals of Jewish life. The synagogue and its
rites remain vitally important, for human beings need rites of pas-
sage. Their psyches cannot do without powerful rituals allowing
them to confront life’s most potent challenges and to celebrate its
happiest accomplishments.
But surely the 1960s was not the last decade in which radical
theologies flourished. Indeed, as we shall see in the pages that fol-
low, a host of radical theologies continues to be articulated right
on up to our own time. Part of the point of collecting a number
of contemporary radical theologies under one set of covers is to
bring home the fact that radical theology is a potent stream of
thought that in many ways continues uninterrupted into the
twenty-first century. It is worth noting that this continuing vigor
of radical theology may seem counterintuitive to some readers,
especially those schooled in the so-called postmodernist sensibil-
ities that inform much thinking today. In the modern period, that
held sway in Western industrial cultures from the seventeenth
century into at least parts of the nineteenth, reason was set free
from tradition, and reason was viewed as universal. This made it
likely that reason-based radical theologies, unbeholden to any
particular confession, would arise in many quarters in the West
and would thrive. Furthermore, the movement of the economic
sphere into the center of the social structure helped power secu-
larization, which meant that traditional religions saw their pre-
 Introduction 11

modern dominance of society wane, another trigger for the pro-

duction of radical theologies.
But in postmodernity, despite the continued dominance of the
economic sphere, traditional religious beliefs seem to make a
comeback. Reason, especially in its scientific form, is no longer
viewed as the one infallible instrument for exploring reality.There
are a multitude of ways of knowing; why shouldn’t these include
parochial traditions and religious confessions? Parochialism is no
longer something necessarily to be avoided, but perhaps some-
thing to be celebrated. For another blow to the Enlightenment
notion of reason is the postmodernist claim that reason itself is not
really universal after all.There is no one form of reason, scientific
or otherwise, that possesses a universal standpoint and that can
therefore judge all traditions brought before it. Different historical
epochs and different cultural and religious traditions are each dif-
ferent worlds, worlds that can apparently exist unto themselves.
Each such world seems to possess its own internal criteria of what
can count as valid ways of knowing and believing. It should not be
surprising, then, that we see a revival of interest in religion in our
own postmodern day and age and that some thinkers argue that
even the most traditional religious perspectives are now safe from
radical critique.
But, as it turns out, postmodernity does not spell the end of
radical theology, or even interrupt the stream of radical theology
that has its source in the modern period. For one thing, the post-
modern revival of interest in religion, along with the sympathy for
parochial religious visions, means that a plethora of very different
pieties can exist in contemporary society, including radical, nontradi-
tional ones.Thus, we encounter a whole host of New Age spiritu-
alities and feminist spiritualities in the contemporary West, and not
simply the worldwide phenomenon of resurgent and newly
minted fundamentalisms.
Furthermore, there are two weaknesses of the postmodern
attitude sketched above that need attention. First, the postmodern
dictum may indeed be “let a thousand worldviews bloom,” includ-
ing movements such as Hindu, Muslim, and Christian fundamen-
talism. But there is something naive about this celebration. First of
12 Gods after God

all, it is not at all clear that contemporary inhabitants of the “first

world” whose mind-set is determined by postmodernism can
really embrace a fundamentalist perspective, or even a highly tra-
ditional one.20 Fundamentalisms stand in contradiction to other
elements of the postmodern mind-set, since fundamentalism by its
very nature closes down the avenues that the mind is allowed to
explore. Fundamentalist authoritarianism and postmodern free-
dom of thought and pluralism do not cohere. In addition, the pres-
ent world situation hardly suggests that what we need is a cele-
bration of religious (or national) parochialism. Such parochialisms
are currently drenching the world in blood.
Second, at least where citizens of the first world are con-
cerned, and in some cases for other inhabitants of the globe as
well, the most strident postmodern critiques of scientific reason,
and even of its universality, are overstated.We shall see in the chap-
ters that follow that one can make a case that we all posses what
Sallie McFague quite perceptively calls a “common creation story.”
It is the story of our origin as told by science, and it is a story that
all of us must pay attention to if we are to avert the kind of eco-
logical disaster that will affect the entire Earth and all of its people.
Thus, if the emergence of a postmodern mind-set in some
quarters called into question particular aspects of the modern
worldview connected with the initial appearance of radical the-
ologies, there is nonetheless no good evidence that the soil in
which radical theologies grow has been washed away by post-
modern tides.The opposite might well be the case.We now need,
more than ever, radical spiritual worldviews that can free them-
selves from destructive religious, ethnic, and national loyalties and
that can tap into the common scientific creation story. We shall
encounter strong candidates for such worldviews in the chapters
that follow.
 — —2

Immanent Be-ing:
Mary Daly and
Radical Feminist Theology

O f all the feminist theologians working in the twentieth

and twenty-first centuries, perhaps none is better known
than Mary Daly. For many years she has eloquently rep-
resented the struggle to, as she puts it, move “beyond the impris-
oning mental, physical, emotional, spiritual walls of patriarchy, the
State of Possession.”1 Raised a Roman Catholic, Daly later jour-
neyed “beyond God the father,”2 as she expressed it in the title of
her second book, and into far more radical conceptions of the
ultimate. It is these radical conceptions of ultimacy that are of
interest here. Recall one of our principles articulated in the pref-
ace: we are not exploring political and social radicality in theolog-
ical thinking, but radicality in an author’s conception of the divine.
Thus, while Daly’s later works are paradigms of radical feminism,
it is her more specifically religious and philosophical thinking that
will be our focus. At the same time, carefully crafted philosophical
oeuvres such as Daly’s cannot neatly be split asunder, putting pol-
itics and social agitation on one side and ontology and spirituality
on the other. Indeed, much of Daly’s ontology springs from her
feminism.3 Hence, we shall necessarily be making reference to her
feminism in our explorations. That feminism, and the religious
thought that goes with it, is the product of a nearly lifelong desire

13
14 Gods after God

on Daly’s part to be a philosopher. She is classically trained in both

theology and philosophy, holding six degrees, including three doc-
torates (two in theology and one in philosophy). In our investiga-
tion below, we shall see the fruits of her desire to combine “intu-
ition and arduous reasoning.”4
Just as the ultimate as Daly conceives it is not simply a single
being but is, instead, a power that permeates the entire cosmos, so
the problem of patriarchy is more than a set of occasional sexist
acts perpetrated against women. It is helpful here to employ the
conception of “world,” though Daly herself does not spend a great
deal of time using precisely this vocabulary. Prominent sociologists
such as Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann have
pointed out that human beings are unfinished animals. Unlike
other species in the animal kingdom, humans are born without a
full complement of instincts that would allow homo sapiens to
function. Hence, human societies must build their own coping
mechanisms, and in so doing they end up constructing a whole
world of meanings, a world which members of that society
occupy. From Daly’s perspective, our own world of meaning is a
constricting patriarchal grid laid over all that we encounter. Daly
does explicitly draw upon Berger’s work on world at one point:

Peter Berger speaks of three processes involved in world-build-

ing: Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being
into the world, both in the physical and the mental activity of
“men” [sic]. Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this
activity of a facticity that then confronts the original producers
as realities outside themselves. Internalization is the reappropria-
tion by “men” [sic] of this same reality, transforming it into
structures of the subjective consciousness.5

However, says Daly, echoing another feminist thinker,“it is women

who are conditioned to be the internalizers par excellence.”6
This patriarchal grid that we are socialized into as our “world”
is part of what Daly names the “Foreground,” the apparent “real-
ity” right in front of our eyes. It is devoid of connection with the
really Real, with what Daly calls Be-ing. And the Foreground
mentality is horrendously destructive:
 Immanent Be-ing 15

. . . there is a disorder at the core of patriarchal conscious-

ness which is engendered by phallocentric myths, ideologies,
and institutions. This disorder implies a state of disconnection
from Biophilic [characterized by love for living things] pur-
posefulness, exemplified in such atrocities as the worldwide rape
and massacre of women and of the Third World and the destruc-
tion of the planet itself.7

It is a disorder that results in the horrors that Daly catalogs in her

book, Gyn/Ecology:The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Indian Sut-
tee [burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre], Chinese
foot binding,African genital mutilation, European witch burnings,
and American gynecology.8
The liberatory and spiritual quest, then, must be to inhabit the
really Real, the “Background,” which Daly defines as “the Realm
of Wild Reality; the Homeland of women’s Selves and all other
Others; the Time/Space where auras of plants, planets, stars, ani-
mals and all Other animate beings connect.”9 This Background, of
course, is not just some place nor some frozen state of affairs.
Rather, it is a relation among Be-ing and the multitude of beings
that it empowers. One doesn’t just find oneself in the Background.
Rather, one must actualize one’s relation to it: “The strength
which Self-centering women find, in finding our Background, is
our own strength, which we give back to our Selves.”10 Such actu-
alization will not, as Daly sees it, be found, at least for women, by
following the pathway marked out by Christianity. The Back-
ground represents the power of life that connects the cosmos, but
the “torture cross of Christianity” is the “reversal of the Tree of
Life.”11 Apparently, women will need other spiritual and philo-
sophical resources than those of Christianity for their quest.
At the same time, Daly does not abandon all of the resources
of the Christian tradition. Of all the philosophical and theologi-
cal works that Mary Daly has studied, it is probably Thomas
Aquinas’ rigorous thought that has given her the most intellectual
pleasure. But her own quest for what she designates Be-ing has
been especially influenced, with suitable modifications, by the
twentieth-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich.12 She calls
Tillich’s work a “springboard” at one point.13 Thus, instead of
16 Gods after God

plunging directly into Daly’s account of Be-ing, let us turn first

to a brief Tillich primer.14
Tillich tells us that all of our ordinary experience is of a self
responding to a world, a subjective pole in interaction with an
objective one.When looking for ultimate reality—for what Chris-
tians call God—it is tempting to assume that God will be found
on the objective or world pole: God is one being, albeit an
extraordinary and primal one, among other beings who make up
the household of reality. But Tillich warns us against this approach.
Rather, he wants us to see God as on neither side of the polarity.
God is not a being at all, neither a self nor a part of the world; God
is being-itself, the power of being that allows beings to be.As such,
God is the “depth” of the self-world structure of being.
As finite beings, we are subject to certain basic threats, from
death to meaninglessness. Since they eliminate or undermine our
being,Tillich identifies these threats with what he calls the threat
of “nonbeing.” Nonbeing is not a thing, of course. Rather, it
describes our experience of our finitude (limitation) and our
experience of finitude’s constricting and destructive powers. The
key to genuine courage in the face of the threat of nonbeing, so
that one can affirm one’s being in spite of the threat of nonbeing,
is to tap into the power of being-itself, which is beyond the whole
structure of the finite.15 It is a roughly similar sort of courage and
a similar sort of being-itself or power of being that will guide Daly
and her fellow seekers into the Background.
But how, exactly, can one know the Background; how can one
understand the power of being? In Tillich’s theology, there is room
for both reason and revelation. Tillich does have some disparaging
words for mere “technical” reason, the sort that seeks only means,
never ends, a merely mechanical or calculative reason. But he praises
“ontological” reason, which is reason in its fullness. Ontological rea-
son mirrors the rational structure of the universe and has cognitive,
aesthetic, and practical dimensions. Galileo said that the book of
nature is written in mathematical characters. Philosophers today
wonder why it is that mathematical reasoning, which might appear
to be a subjective function of the human mind, so perfectly corre-
lates with and opens up the external world.Tillich would point to
 Immanent Be-ing 17

his notion of ontological reason: woman and man’s ontological rea-

son mirrors a rational structure in the cosmos itself.What is more,
ontological reason offers a point of contact with the ground of
being. In revelation, we make contact with the “depth” of reason.
Here we encounter what numerous philosophers through the ages
have named Being-itself, the Good itself, the Beautiful itself, and the
True itself. But peering into the depth of reason will require the use
of symbols, a fact especially relevant here because of how central
symbol and metaphor are to Mary Daly’s religious thinking.Tillich
tells us that God, or being-itself, can be grasped only through sym-
bols. After all, being-itself is not a thing; it does not possess certain
specific characteristics and lack others.Thus, a special language must
be employed if we are to talk about God at all.
Daly is adamant about the fact that Being is a verb: it is not a
static substance, but the power of being that fructifies the cosmos
and gives women their own power. She sounds very Tillichian
when she says that “‘Be-ing is the verb that says the dimensions of
depth in all verbs, such as intuiting, reasoning, loving, imaging,
making, acting, as well as the couraging, hoping, and playing that
are always there when one is really living.’”16 In her homemade
dictionary, the Wickedary, she defines Be-ing as

“v 1: Ultimate/Intimate Reality, the constantly Unfolding Verb

of Verbs which is intransitive, having no object that limits its
dynamism 2: the Final Cause, the Good who is Self-communi-
cating, who is the Verb from whom, in whom, and with whom
all true movements move.”17

Like Tillich, Daly writes about “the content of the intuition of

being [Be-ing] as experienced in existential courage.”18 We get a
further clue to Daly’s thinking about ultimate reality when she
explains that “Quintessence also is a way of Naming Be-ing the
Verb, with specific emphasis on its manifestations as source of
integrity, harmony, and luminous splendor of form.”19
It should be apparent that Daly’s version of the ultimate is
not some entity residing in a realm distant from our own lives
and the life of the natural cosmos. On the contrary, Daly’s vision
18 Gods after God

is a profoundly relational one. In one of Daly’s inimitable phrases,

it might well be designated a “Nag-Gnostic pantheism.”20 The use
of the word “nag,” ordinarily a disparaging word directed at a
woman, is a good example of how Daly turns around such terms
and holds them high as banners proclaiming women’s power and
self-esteem. The word “Gnostic” refers to that ancient religious
group that claimed to have a special, higher knowledge—“gnos-
tic” comes from the Greek word for knowledge—a knowledge of
ultimate reality and how to unite oneself with it. “Pantheism” is
particularly important here, for it is the view of God’s relation to
the world that sees God not as a separate being but as the All that
embraces everything that is, including physical reality.
In their interconnection and concern with the cosmos, Daly’s
“Spinsters” engage in “Spinning,” which can be defined as “Dis-
covering the lost thread of connectedness within the Cosmos and
repairing this thread in the process.”21 There is perhaps a hint of the
Jewish notion of tikkun here, which means to help in the healing
of God’s cosmos. But women’s active, productive interconnection
is not just with the cosmos, but also with the very Be-ing that ani-
mates that cosmos:“Breathing in harmony with the Elements, we
become Con-creators of the Expanding Presence of Be-ing.”22
This Spinning, and indeed the whole process of women
claiming their relation to Be-ing, entails the act of Centering, of
configuring oneself around the power of one’s true selfhood. Says
Daly, “Self-Centering Spinsters whirl around the axis of our own
be-ing, and as we do so, matter/spirit becomes more subtle/sup-
ple.”23 The motif of interconnection with the larger cosmos is not
abandoned here: “Journeying centerward is Self-centering move-
ment in all directions. It erases implanted pseudodichotomies
between the Self and ‘other’ reality, while it unmasks the unreality
of both ‘self ’ and ‘world’ as these are portrayed, betrayed, in the lan-
guage of the fathers’ foreground.”24 Now the so-called postmod-
ernist philosophers are particularly hard on the notion of the “cen-
tered self,” the idea that there can be some stable, self-identical
selfhood (as we shall see in Mark C.Taylor’s analysis of the break-
down of selfhood), but, as will become apparent later, Daly is her-
self particularly hard on the postmodernists. In addition, as the
 Immanent Be-ing 19

foregoing quotation indicates, Daly’s notion of the centered self is

not at odds with the idea of the self as dispersed in relationships,
indeed relationships with the whole of the universe.
It will be recalled that Tillich argued that speaking of the ulti-
mate requires the use of symbols. Though she shies away from
New Age-style goddess talk, Daly is quite willing to countenance
the “Goddess as Metaphor” or symbol.25 She holds that “Goddess is
a metapatriarchal [i.e., beyond patriarchy] Metaphor for the Be-
ing in which we live, love, create, and are.”26 Goddess is the “Quin-
tessential Female symbol of the integrity, harmony, vitality, and
luminous splendor of the Universe.”27 Of course there can be
many names for Goddess. Isis (an ancient Egyptian goddess), for
example, “superlatively manifests Quintessence.”28
If we return to the point made above that Be-ing is intimately
connected with women’s selfhood, then we should not be sur-
prised that Goddess language too is intimately connected with the
self. Hence, it is possible to speak about the “Goddess within.”29
The Goddess and the “creative spirit of an individual” are not gen-
uinely distinct.30
Especially given the importance of symbol and metaphor in
her work, the content of what Daly wishes to say cannot be dis-
connected from how she chooses to say it. She is fully aware of the
significance of what theologians would traditionally call
“method,” though that term sounds a little stuffy and constricting
when it comes to Daly’s work. Consider the following typical pas-
sage from her work and note its experimentation with language
and the energy that that experimentation produces:
. . . Fates do not simply foretell that which appears to be
inevitable. Nor is Fateful Fore-making simply “directing” things
in the present to some pre-fixed goal. Fates act out of deepen-
ing be-ing in the past and present, participating in the Tidal
Timing of biophilic creation. This is the calling of women as
Weirds, as Norns, as Muses, as Augurs, as Websters, as Spider
Women/Spinsters, and as called by a thousand other names.The
diversity of creative forecasting casts women further through the
Pyrospheres.The Foresight of Fates gives purpose to Wandering,
focus to Wondering. It forearms women and forges the future.31
20 Gods after God

This way of writing is part of Daly’s conviction not just that ordi-
nary language is inadequate to communicate what needs to be said
about women and Be-ing, but also that it is imperative to trans-
gress the “boundaries between intuitive and rational modes of
knowing and writing.”32 There must be a “synthesis of abstract rea-
soning and symbolic thinking and expression.”33 The casual reader
may be unable to avoid noting Daly’s claim to “intuitive/immedi-
ate/symbolic” knowing.34 It is that kind of knowing, akin to a
poetic sensibility, through which one claims to be put in direct
touch with Be-ing, a kind of knowing that would not be strange,
for example, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other “Transcen-
dentalists.” And readers will immediately recognize Daly’s com-
mitment to “Metapatriarchal Metaphor,” that is “words that func-
tion to Name Metapatriarchal transformation and therefore to
elicit such change.”35
But the importance of hard-edged philosophical reason in
Daly’s work should not be overlooked either. With a nod to
Tillich’s discussion of ontological reason, she can say, for example,
“‘Realizing’ functions adjectivally, to describe the power of reason.
As a consequence of Realizing her realizing reason, a woman par-
ticipates in the actualization of the structure of the universe, and
she participates ever more fully in the source of this structure—
Powers of Be-ing.”36 Recall that ontological reason is that form of
human reason that mirrors the rational structure of the cosmos
itself.
As a result of her commitment to a potent, even ferocious
brand of reason, she chooses to reject the “alienating, simplistic,
mind-muddying ‘mystical’ categories of new age ‘spirituality.’”37
Indeed, she can speak of the “massively passivizing effects of the
therapeutic establishment or of ‘New Age’ style ‘Goddess’ spiritu-
ality.”38 But, where, exactly, is Daly’s brand of rigorous reason evi-
dent? It is sometimes lost behind the more poetic and fanciful
character of her prose. I would suggest that there are at least three
ways in which Daly’s rigorous reasoning comes into play in her
work. First, she displays potent analytic powers in her dissection of
the world of partriarchy and all that is connected with the “Fore-
ground.” After all, this kind of critique requires using reason to
 Immanent Be-ing 21

think beyond the very cultural framework in which one has been
raised and trained to think. Second, Daly’s use of an intuitive way
of knowing is not without its own rational rigor: it is never a
merely subjective sort of intuitive approach to the world, but
rather an expansive intuition that looks to the connection of the
self with the entire cosmos; it is not undisciplined in the sense of
self-serving but, rather, is woman-and-universe-serving. Third,
there is a powerful coherence in Daly’s work. While here oeuvre
may not represent a systematic theology or philosophy in the tra-
ditional sense, there is a consistent dynamic, focusing on women
and their relation to Be-ing, that runs throughout Daly’s work.
We cannot leave the discussion of “method” in Daly’s work
without considering something alluded to above, namely, her
rejection of what is usually called “postmodern” philosophy. For
one thing, Daly is convinced that postmodern feminists have given
themselves over to a group composed almost entirely of male fig-
ures, men such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.39 Thus, these
would-be feminists have been bamboozled.The theologian Sheila
Greeve Davaney has criticized Daly and other feminist theologians
for not facing up to the nihilism dictated by the postmodern
mind-set. Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, which means “nothing”)
is a philosophy of disciplined pessimism that sees no ready sources
of meaning in the world nor any basis for hope in a perfected
human future. Feminist thinker and goddess devotee Carol P.
Christ has replied that feminist theologians “are no nihilists
because we believe that feminism has the potential to better the
world.”40
At this point we should note the role of meta-narrative in
Daly’s thinking and in postmodern philosophy. In his book The
Postmodern Condition, French philosopher Jean François Lyotard
supplies what has become a well-known dictum about postmod-
ernism: the postmodern attitude is characterized, says Lyotard, by
“incredulity toward meta-narratives.”41 A narrative, of course, is a
story, and the prefix “meta” means beyond.A meta-narrative, then,
is a big story that goes beyond and encompasses all of the other
stories that we and our societies tell. Christianity is a meta-narra-
tive in that it claims to tell a story encompassing all of the stories
22 Gods after God

of the human race; its story ranges from the creation of the cos-
mos to the return of Christ and the consummation of that whole
cosmos. The meaning of every human life is to be found in this
story, according to Christians. Secular philosophies can also
attempt meta-narratives. Marxism, for example, tends to the claim
that it can explain the whole of world history and all the sorts of
conflicts that characterize it by reference to its own theory of eco-
nomics and class struggle.
So-called postmodern thinkers tend to reject the possibility of
such meta-narratives, just as Lyotard’s dictum suggests. For the post-
modernists, the “center cannot hold,” as the poet W. B. Yeats
famously put it, and we are left with a plethora of individual narra-
tives. Different cultures, different families, different individuals—
they all have their own unique stories, and there is no one overar-
ching story that could put them all neatly together. Daly, however,
seems to have a bit of the modernist, as opposed to the postmod-
ernist, in her, in that she employs radical feminism as something akin
to a meta-narrative. Radical feminism can, for her, explain not only
sexism, but also racism, ageism, and a host of other oppressive forces.
And it can generate the vast and encompassing spiritual vision that
we have been exploring.There is nothing beyond the web of cos-
mos and Be-ing that Daly’s narrative describes. This is not a criti-
cism of Daly—perhaps postmodernism is an oppressive dead end for
contemporary thought and action—but only to suggest that while
both Daly’s thought and that of the postmodernists could be
dubbed radical, she does not fit neatly into the postmodern camp.

Having briefly surveyed Mary Daly’s radical theology, what

questions or problems come to mind? Let us pose three questions
indicative of points of entry for possible critique of Daly’s impres-
sive work. First, a male inquirer is inevitably led to ask,“Can men
be ‘saved’ too?” That is, is the deliverance from the oppressive
structures of patriarchy something that only women can manage?
After all, Daly sees an intimate connection between Be-ing-itself
and the being of women.There appears to be an ontological con-
nection between women and that Background cosmos that repre-
sents Daly’s brand of salvation.
 Immanent Be-ing 23

Second, what role does concrete community play in Daly’s

vision of deliverance? In one sense, her description of the lives of
spiritually liberated women indicates community with the whole of
the universe. But ought there to be actual organized feminist
churches devoted to Be-ing and its role in women’s lives in order
for Daly’s message genuinely to take root and engage significant
numbers of women? Daly’s journey sometimes seems, paradoxically,
a solitary quest at the same time that it talks about connection.
The third question is closely related to the second: Through
her powerful prose and wordplay, does Daly construct her own
idiosyncratic world? Does she end up living too much on the
moon, as one of her own favored images would have it? Melissa
Raphael has put it this way:
The abandonment with which wild women justifiably express
the exhilaration of being, of retrieving a sense of self that might
withstand the patriarchal assault can be an experience some-
thing akin to what Christians call ‘grace.’ But spiritual feminism
must not abandon the world to patriarchy. Religious feminism
must hold the line. . . .42

Of course, with such criticisms, we are perhaps violating our own

dictum that we shall concentrate on the theologian’s (or thealo-
gian’s) notion of ultimacy and its radicality, rather than upon the
social and political dimensions of his or her thought.
This page intentionally left blank.
 — —3

Language as Divine Milieu:

Mark Taylor and Deconstruction

D
econstruction has been one of the most talked about
intellectual perspectives of recent times. Our account of
deconstruction and theology will center on the desire for
mastery, the desire to be master of our own fates, and the impossi-
bility of that mastery according to deconstruction. It is an account
that will begin with a description of the notion of the modern and
the postmodern, will move to a cursory glance at the work of
Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructive theory, and will then
explore American theologian Mark C. Taylor’s seminal work on
theology and deconstruction. The reader should be forewarned
that this will be the most intellectually challenging chapter in our
whole undertaking, due to the inherent complexity and unusual,
sometimes outrageous, vocabulary of deconstructive theory.1
The heyday of the modern period was the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, centuries characterized by an extraordinary
confidence in reason. Recall that, during the seventeenth century,
Descartes went on his search for absolute certainty, and that that
celebration of reason known as the Enlightenment came to full
flower in the eighteenth century. Modernity actually sought a
twofold mastery via reason: an internal mastery, that is, of the self,
and an external mastery, that is, of the external world. The quest
for internal mastery is for a “centered self,” a self perfectly unified
around reason as its hub. Emotions, inclinations, thoughts, memo-

25
26 Gods after God

ries, and all of the other sundry components of the self are firmly
mastered by reason. But reason could also aspire to a mastery of
the external world, namely, through knowing the world, as in sci-
entific knowledge. It is important to keep in mind that, in the
modern period, reason was considered thoroughly universal: the
rational perspective on the world of an eighteenth-century Ger-
man should be, in theory, exactly that of a Chinese thinker, if both
thinkers employed reason properly. One’s knowledge was not lim-
ited by a particular cultural vantage point. Hence, reason could
master the world by offering something like a God’s eye view
upon it.
As a matter of fact, there was a theological component to both
the quest for internal mastery and the quest for external mastery.
The perfectly centered, unified self was the self as it stands before
God, the essence of the self as grasped in the mind of God. The
centered self is the self as God intended it to be. And the external
mastery was indeed a matter of human reason as a reflection of
God’s unlimited reason and of the rational structure through
which God created the world, without particular vantage point or
cultural perspective.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we get two
powerful pointers to the postmodern period, two thinkers who,
while still to some extent rooted in modernity, anticipate the
postmodern.The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
(d. 1900), whom we encountered in the introduction, powerfully
called into question what I have called the external mastery
attempted by reason. For Nietzsche, there is no God—recall his
claim that God is dead and that you and I have killed him—and
hence no objective God’s eye view of reality. Rather, for Niet-
zsche, all of our ideas are mere fictions. What counts as truth,
then? Just those fictions that prove useful for our purposes, which
serve that motivating force that Nietzsche calls our “will to
power.”The great Enlightenment confidence in a universal reason
and the mastery of the world it could accomplish crumbles in
Nietzsche’s philosophy.
If Nietzsche struck a powerful blow against the external mas-
tery, the most important blow against the internal form of mastery,
 Language as Divine Milieu 27

the notion of the rationally centered self, was delivered by the

famous inventor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (d. 1939).
Freud is well known, of course, for emphasizing the importance of
the unconscious dimensions of the psyche and their powerful role
in motivating our behavior. Hence, he announces proudly,“human
megalomania will have suffered its . . . most wounding blow from
the psychological research of the present time which seeks to
prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but
must content itself with scanty information of what is going on
unconsciously in its mind.”2 The self is not its own master, it is not
centered. Rather, it is pushed off center by powerful unconscious
forces beyond the reach of reason.
Nietzsche may still have been too enamored of the powers of
the self to be fully and radically postmodern, and Freud perhaps
had too much invested in his image of himself as a scientist to
qualify as entirely postmodern. But when we come to the con-
temporary thinker Jacques Derrida, we are in the presence of a
fully postmodern theorist. Suppose that we approach Derrida
through a consideration of language and how it mediates our sense
of reality. How do I come to know other people? Through their
language in the broadest sense: their words, their gestures, their
behaviors, and so on. But how do I know myself ? I might be
tempted to say,“I just am myself!” In other words, where my own
self-consciousness is concerned there is no mediation, no gaps; I
am just self-identical with myself. But Derrida insists that this is
not the case. In reality, he holds, I know myself only by reflecting
about myself in language. I am mediated to myself linguistically.
And now the snake has entered the garden, as it were, for there can
be no more illusion of pure self-presence, of perfect identity. Once
we acknowledge the ubiquity of language, we come up against
one of Derrida’s most telling phrases: we are always beholden to
the “detour of the sign.”3
The detour of the sign is at least twofold. First, language never
presents us with the thing in itself, the referent of the sign, but
always only with the sign of the thing. But not only that: signs
involve an eternal detour, for signs point only to other signs.When
I look up a sign in the dictionary, for example, it does not present
28 Gods after God

me with the referent of the sign, the actual entity I seek, but
defines the sign in terms of other signs, which in turn are identi-
fied in terms of other signs, and so on ad infinitum. This move-
ment and lack of fixed center in language is errant; it is at the heart
of the “erring” that figures in the title of the book by Mark C.Tay-
lor to be analyzed below.
Notice how all of this undoes both the internal and the exter-
nal mastery. The internal mastery is undone insofar as the self is
“de-centered.” Language is not an instrument under my control
through which I communicate my personal center; rather the self
is itself beholden to language. The self is mediated to itself, it is
what it is, via language. Far from being a harmonious entity fully
under the control of my reason, the self is little more than the acci-
dental intersection of various linguistic forces. Rather than having
a fixed center out of which I master my every thought and action,
I am the product of the warp and woof of language and of the var-
ious language traditions in which I grow up. As for the external
dimension, Derrida tells us that there is no “transcendental signi-
fied,” that is, an immovable signified or referent to which signs
point and which would fix all language in a secure grid and
immobilize it so that we could cognitively master the world.4
If a grasp of the role of language is the key to overcoming the
temptation to mastery, the fullest divestment of mastery comes in
the form of language that we call “writing.” When I speak, I can
still harbor the illusion that language is my instrument and that it
is fully under my control. Plato believed, for example, that in face-
to-face speech with another person, I can always correct misinter-
pretations on his or her part of what I am trying to say. But once
language is in the form of writing, it is set free from the time and
context of my speaking. Writing is the most disseminative of
undertakings in that the individual subject loses control of lan-
guage and its meaning disseminates, it proliferates, in myriad direc-
tions. And this opens the possibility of deconstructive reading
strategies. For now writing can always mean something more than,
or even something that contradicts, what any author had in mind.
In other words, a deconstructive reading of a text is one in which
the meaning intended by the author is taken apart—decon-
 Language as Divine Milieu 29

structed—and we are allowed to see the many other directions the

meaning of the text can take.
Mark Taylor gives us a clear example of a deconstructive reli-
gious perspective in his Erring: a Postmodern A/Theology. Now
Jacques Derrida himself actually asserts that deconstruction
“blocks every relationship to theology.”5 But Taylor sees a way to
be more consistently deconstructive than Derrida and thus to
make deconstruction productive for theology. Note, for example,
that a familiar deconstructive ploy is to uncover the binary oppo-
sitions that produce meaning in a text. In traditional Western texts,
one set of terms is always privileged and the second set always lives
off that privileged set: God trumps world, spirit trumps matter,
male trumps female, eternity trumps time, being trumps becom-
ing, and so on.These binary oppositions produce a text’s perspec-
tive on reality. If deconstruction were merely to reverse these
terms and put the preeminent terms in second place, something
like theology might indeed be simply undone. Then one would
simply play off world against God, time against eternity, and
becoming against being. But Taylor notes:
In place of a simple reversal, it is necessary to effect a dialectical
inversion that does not leave contrasting opposites unmarked
but dissolves their original identities. Inversion, in other words,
must simultaneously be a perversion that is subversive. Unless
theological transgression becomes genuinely subversive, nothing
fundamental will change.What is needed is a critical lever with
which the entire inherited order can be creatively disorganized.6

That is to say,Taylor wants to employ a “dialectic,” a strategy that

keeps thought moving and does not stop with a simple reversal of
the binary hierarchies. Then the whole binary structure can be
undone. It is then possible to engage in an a/theological thinking
that is neither simply a theology (a philosophy of belief in God)
nor an atheology (a philosophy of atheism).The four main topics
that Taylor will take us through are God, the self, and its constitu-
tive relation to God, history as where self and God meet, and the
Book, which tells the divinely guided story of self in history before
God. But he will take us through each of these four topics twice.
30 Gods after God

As I shall interpret those two journeys, the first is still under the
spell of the modern desire for mastery, whereas the second has
broken free and represents a genuine deconstructive a/theology, a
strategy of release.
We begin with the death of God in its modern form. That
modern form is a quest for mastery inasmuch as it slays God in
order to aggrandize the authority of the self.This humanistic athe-
ism is also an attempt to deny death, in that by killing God, the
causa sui (cause of itself), the self hopes to take over that self-creat-
ing, self-grounding role.
But the self as we have known it, a center of perfect self-iden-
tity and presence, can hardly survive without God. God is the
supreme instance of presence and identity, the Creator in virtue
of which my own identity can be guaranteed. Hence, Derrida
points out that from Augustine to Hegel “God is the name of the
element of that which makes possible an absolutely self-present
self-knowledge.”7
But history too is tied to God. As the twentieth-century the-
ologian H. R. Niebuhr put it:“To be a self is to have a God, to have
a God is to have a history, that is, events connected in a meaning-
ful pattern; to have one God is to have one history.”8 Taylor is surely
correct to assert that “. . . the conviction that a temporal course of
events is plotted along a single line, which extends from a definite
beginning, through an identifiable middle, to an expected end, is
linked to particular notions of God and self.”9 In the Christian tra-
dition, for example, history is understood and held together by
divine action. God moves and unifies history by taking it from the
creation of the world and of Adam, to the “hinge of history”—the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—and on, finally, to the
return of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
Not only that, but the inevitable theme of mastery enters in: the
human attempt to find a pattern in events, to write history
(whether via belief in God or by some other route) is the attempt
to master the mere seriality of existence—the fact that history is in
reality without pattern, that it is simply “one damn thing after
another.” By attempting to build immortal cultures and patterns of
meaning, history is in fact one more attempt to deny death.
 Language as Divine Milieu 31

What, fourthly, of the Book? Every book is supposed to be an

imitation of the divine Book, the ultimate and eternally fixed and
complete narrative in the divine mind, a narrative believed to be
reflected in the Bible . But since every new book is in addition to
the Book that it imitates, it shows the incompleteness of the
Book. When Taylor talks about the “closure” of the book, those
human books that imitate the divine one, he means “both the clo-
sure that constitutes the book [for a book to have a particular
vantage point on the world, it must embrace some perspectives
and close off others] and the closure that subverts the book”10
“Through its closure, the book seeks to end the free play and
unending erring of writing by fixing meaning.”11 If deconstructive
a/theological reading is to be productive, it will once again have
to set itself against mastery, for the book attempts to exclude oth-
erness and freeze meaning.
We now move into Taylor’s deconstructive a/theology proper,
and look again at the four topics of death of God, self, history, and
book. In Taylor’ rereading, the death of God becomes writing.Tra-
ditionally, the meaning of a word is that which it signifies.The sig-
nified (the meaning of the word) grounds and thus lends weight to
the signifier (the sign or word itself). In this sense, God becomes the
ultimate “transcendental” signified, that is, a fixed signified (mean-
ing) and referent (the actual reality the signified describes) outside
the flux of language. But the truth of the matter is that conscious-
ness deals only with signs—recall the “detour of the sign”—and
“writing inscribes the disappearance of the transcendental signi-
fied.”12 Writing, with its endless stream of signs pointing to other
signs, never gets outside language to some transcendental signified.
Thus, it is that we turn to the death of God as writing. In this death
of God, God the Father dies and becomes fully the Word, writing.
“The death of the father opens the reign of the word that is
embodied in scripture.”13 Writing does indeed inscribe “the disap-
pearance of the transcendental signified.”14 But the death of God
and the disappearance of the transcendental signified is hardly the
total breakdown of meaning: “As a play of differences that estab-
lishes the relationships that constitute all that is and is not, writing
is no thing and yet is not nothing.”15 Borrowing a phrase from
32 Gods after God

Hegel,Taylor can describe writing as “the arising and passing away

that does not itself arise and pass away.”16 “Scripture,” he goes on to
say, “is the divine milieu, and the divine milieu is writing. The
milieu embodied in word and inscribed in it by writing is divine
insofar as it is the creative/destructive medium of everything that is
and all that is not.”17 Again, “This play of differences or differential
web of interrelation is universally constitutive. . . .Writing is ‘orig-
inary’ . . . inasmuch as it ‘grounds’ or ‘founds’ the differences that
form and deform identity.Though the divine milieu is never sim-
ply present or absent, it is the medium of all presence and absence.”18
It is through language, that is, that all of our meanings arise, yet lan-
guage itself is not some substantial entity. God, the substantial meta-
physical entity is dead, but the free play of meaning, its undoing dis-
semination, continues in that nonsubstantial divine milieu. As we
shall see as we move on to self, history, and book, to give up the
hopeless quest for mastery and allow ourselves to be borne by the
free play of meaning can be an exercise in liberation.
What of the postmodern self? We saw that the modernist self,
in its quest for mastery, attempted to slay God the Father, but the
modernist self could not itself stand without God. But the post-
modern death of the self opens up a new, relational self. Think
about the subject-predicate structure of language and our notion
of the human subject. The subject is seen as primary. But it is
impossible to grasp the subject in any way other than through the
use of predicates (qualities that we attach to the subject).We know
who Janice is only by being able to use predicates: “Janice is tall,”
“Janice is virtuous,” “Janice is smart,” and so forth. What is more,
“the predicates whose interaction constitutes the subject are them-
selves thoroughly relational.”19 The words used as predicates only
have meaning insofar as they refer to other words. “The subject,”
Derrida reminds us, is inscribed in language and is a “function of
the language.”20 The mastery of interiority (some essential “inside”
with which I identify myself) over exteriority (what is outside the
self) here collapses; the ability of some fixed internal essence that I
identify with myself to master what is outside it breaks down,
because the self itself is constituted by relation with what is exte-
rior, as the need to use predicates shows. Says Taylor:“The inscrip-
 Language as Divine Milieu 33

tion of the subject within this tissue of relations results in the col-
lapse of the absolute opposition between interiority and exterior-
ity. If the subject is not self-centered but is a cipher for forces that
play through it, there can be no sharp opposition between inward-
ness and outwardness.”21
As in Buddhist philosophy, nothing has a substantial self-
enclosed identity, for it is what it is just in relation to other things.
For Taylor, the self is such a relational phenomenon: “the self is
‘primordially’ relational.”22 “Always bearing otherness within itself,
the subject can be neither enclosed or confined. Inasmuch as
unbound subjectivity is intersubjective . . . subjects are inevitably
communal . . . communal subjectivity irrevocably negates much of
what has been believed to be distinctively human.”23
The abandonment of the attempt to master and control the
self ’s interiority and to release the self for communal subjectivity
is liberative, according to Taylor. It means release from anxious
striving.24 “When desire forsakes the prospect of complete satisfac-
tion, it opens the possibility of delight. . . . Delight is the inversion
of satisfaction. . . . Delight . . . is nonpossessive.”25 In this postmod-
ern dispossession of the self, something is always gained as well as
lost.The final word, then, on the result of this contemporary death
of the self is “anguished joy.”26
The opening of what has been history in the past can occur
just as God can become writing and the self communal:“The time
and space of graceful erring are opened by the death of God, the
loss of self, and the end of history.”27 Think about how bondage to
history can become transformed into graceful erring. “The utter
guilt of man appears to be the inverse image of the complete holi-
ness of God (and vice versa).The translation of guilt into the lan-
guage of religion marks the appearance of sin.When one believes
that the human drama is played out before an ideal spectator
whose omniscient gaze penetrates every secret, guilt deepens and
becomes sin.”28
By contrast,“When becoming no longer needs to be validated
by reference to past or future but can be valued at every moment,
one has broken (with) the law. Such Transgression does not breed
guilt and sin. In this case, lawlessness proves to be inseparable from
34 Gods after God

grace—grace that arrives only when God and self are dead and
history is over.”29 When one learns to live in the moment, in other
words, and to abandon the notion of history as a rigid, determin-
istic narrative in which one’s life must be played out (and a narra-
tive in which we are always guilty of sin before a perfect, omnis-
cient God) we are free.
We are left, finally, with the book: The unending play of sig-
nification and interpretation can never be brought to an end, since
everything is already interpretation—there is no truth, in the sense
of some Archimedean point.30 “Because of the inescapability of
equivocality [i.e., of many possible meanings], there can be no such
thing as proper or literal meaning.”31 One more time in Taylor’s
deconstructive program, mastery goes by the wayside:“When it no
longer seems necessary to reduce manyness to oneness and to
translate the equivocal as univocal [one definite meaning], it
becomes possible to give up the struggle for mastery and to take
‘eternal delight’ [Blake].”32

One’s first critical response to Taylor’s book might be to say

that it is just too complex and cerebral to be of any practical spir-
itual import. Does Taylor really expect people to approach the
quest for meaning in life armed with the sometimes stupefyingly
complicated, if not convoluted, logic of deconstruction? But per-
haps we can defend Taylor on this count by noting the difference
between a spiritual path and the theoretical analysis of that path.
Consider an analogy. Picking up a glass of water and taking a sip
seems a supremely simple act. But if we had to explain all of the
principles of physics and anatomy and neurology that make that
act possible, most of us would be at a loss. Similarly, liberating one-
self by orienting ones’s sense of reality by the divine milieu that is
language might be a spiritual path that is walkable without know-
ing all of the details into which Taylor wishes to delve: he is pro-
viding us with a theoretical analysis of the act as opposed to a sim-
ple description of the act.
Be that as it may, one might still object that the divine milieu
itself, quite apart from theoretical analysis of it, is too abstract for
our real spiritual needs. Real spirituality requires concrete symbols
 Language as Divine Milieu 35

and rituals to integrate our vision of the ultimate into our daily
lives. Is something such as the divine milieu that is writing rich
and suggestive enough to produce such symbols and rituals?
Furthermore, is the kind of liberation that Taylor describes
really the liberation that most of us seek? He promises us, in
essence, freedom from the quest for mastery and an end to our
anxious flight from death. But, of course, this particular liberation
turns out to be one that follows upon the death of God and self,
and the undoing of history and book. It is “anguished joy,” a kind
of happy nihilism (“nihilism,” from the Latin nihil, nothing, is a
philosophy of nothingness, in that it suggests that there are no pre-
given meanings, moral principles, or infallible guides in human
life). Perhaps this is the best that human beings can do. But I sus-
pect that most of us, however unrealistically, hope for more. And,
of course, there are those theologians who think Taylor is simply
wrong, for example, in moving from the impossibility of a tran-
scendental signified to the death of God. The God of the Jewish
and Christian traditions, though indeed the ultimate referent of
human thought, bears no significant resemblance, some argue, to
what deconstruction calls the “transcendental signified.” Hence,
Susan Wennemyr:“I wholeheartedly agree that the transcendental
signifier is an impossible dream. My response as a theologian, how-
ever, is simply ‘So what?’”33
Finally, it is useful to consider the pitfalls faced by any theol-
ogy (or a/theology) that is built upon, and therefore dependent
upon, a highly specific philosophical foundation. On the one
hand, our spiritual visions ought to be backed up by the best
reflection that we can bring to bear on them. Robert Frost said
that writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without
a net, and the analogy has been extended to theology: philosoph-
ical theology is like tennis without a net, in that it is not philo-
sophical enough. It is not rigorously beholden to the best intellec-
tual reflection, but, rather, allows itself to be determined at crucial
points by wish, tradition, or mere whimsy. At the same time, tying
one’s religious reflection too tightly to a specific philosophical per-
spective burdens that perspective with an Achilles’ heal. Suppose,
for example, that the philosophy at issue goes out of intellectual
36 Gods after God

fashion, which some would in fact judge to be the case with

deconstruction at the present time? Of course, fashion is hardly the
best criterion of theological usefulness, but a theology built upon
a philosophy that is no longer widely countenanced is a theology
that will have a difficult time communicating with the larger intel-
lectual culture. To take but one example of where the specific
deconstructive philosophy employed by Taylor is now vulnerable,
we should note how deconstruction’s pronouncements about the
relation of self and language might be undermined by contempo-
rary neurobiological studies of the nature of consciousness and
selfhood which suggest that consciousness may not be so directly
tied to language after all.34
 — —4

Sacred Nature:
Ursula Goodenough, Donald Crosby,
and Religious Naturalism

S imply stated, religious naturalism holds that nature itself is

worthy of our devotion, worthy of what Paul Tillich would
call our “ultimate concern.” It is not a matter, then, of seeing
nature as sacred because it is the handiwork of a God or because
spirit-forces flow through it: it is nature simply qua nature that
rightly evokes wonder and awe in us, and that presents us with the
resources required for fueling a meaningful and productive version
of the human project. Many versions of religious naturalism exist,
from breathless, vaguely formulated New Age manifestos to closely
argued, highly rational positions. Needless to say, it is the latter sort
of religious naturalism that will be of concern to us in this chapter.
Yet the two versions that we shall investigate still have some differ-
ences from one another. Ursula Goodenough is a scientist, and she
combines hard science with a poetic sensibility to nature. By con-
trast, Donald Crosby is a philosopher, and he brings a philosopher’s
systematic mind-set to his project and produces more metaphysics
and less poetry. Neither thinker identifies nature with God—recall
that Spinoza did so—and, thus, it might be objected that neither is
a “theologian.” But both thinkers’ work can be put under the head-
ing of theology, as long as we keep in mind that it is radical theol-
ogy that is at issue. Functionally speaking, nature, as ultimate concern

37
38 Gods after God

and ultimate source of meaning, takes the place of what other rad-
ical thinkers feel comfortable calling God.
It is Ursula Goodenough’s goal in her book The Sacred Depths
of Nature “to present an accessible account of our scientific under-
standing of Nature and then suggest ways that this account can call
forth appealing and abiding religious responses—an approach that
can be called religious naturalism.”1 Goodenough is a cell biolo-
gist, and her religious vision is a form of naturalism in that it
eschews any supernatural forces or entities: the philosophy of real-
ity at work here is the matter-energy worldview of natural science.
While Goodenough can draw sustenance from participation in the
rituals of traditional Christianity and in a traditional Christian
community, her celebration of the world of nature rejects any lit-
eral embrace of the supernaturalistic tenets of traditional Chris-
tianity. Of course, if Goodenough rejects the supernatural, then we
must ask about the more-than-the-everyday that allows her posi-
tion to qualify as a religious or theological perspective. Daly had
her attachment to Be-ing,Taylor his reveling in the Divine Milieu.
What is comparable in The Sacred Depths of Nature?
A helpful place to begin is with a consideration of a classic of
early-twentieth-century analysis of religion, Rudolf Otto’s The
Idea of the Holy.2 Otto wishes to describe just how the object of
religious experience is presented to our consciousness. He comes
up with what turns out to be a venerable description of religious
consciousness: it is a consciousness of a Mysterium tremendum et
fascinans, a mystery that is both tremendous (in the sense of over-
powering and awe-inspiring) and attractive.While Otto’s descrip-
tion cannot be applied without some alteration to Goodenough’s
approach to nature—Otto’s Mystery is “wholly other” than the
world of ordinary nature—the sense of overpowering grandeur
encountered in the holy applies almost as well to her experience
of the cosmos and nature as it does to the experience of God in
the Hebrew Bible.
But there are other dimensions too to Goodenough’s
approach to nature. Beginning with the scientific account of the
origin of the cosmos, Goodenough’s book goes on to explore ter-
ritory closer to her own field of endeavor when she discusses the
 Sacred Nature 39

origin of life and its evolution, including the appearance of those

self-conscious beings that we call “homo sapiens.”The grandeur of
the cosmos, our inextricable connection with the larger world of
nature, the desire to participate self-consciously in nature and
thereby to experience self-transcendence—all of these elements
are present in Goodenough’s account. “The evolution of the cos-
mos,” she says, “invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in
biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understand-
ing of the evolution of death offers me helpful ways to think about
my own death.”3
Goodenough knows all about the grandeur of the cosmos,
including Otto’s element of the tremendum, the universe’s over-
powering vastness that left the famous seventeenth-century
thinker Blaise Pascal panic-stricken. Indeed her first chapter
includes a personal account of Goodenough’s own terror before
the immensity of the universe:

I’ve had a lot of trouble with the universe. It began soon after I
was told about it in physics class. I was perhaps twenty, and I
went on a camping trip, where I found myself in a sleeping bag
looking up into the crisp Colorado night. Before I could look
around for Orion and the Big Dipper, I was overwhelmed with
terror. The panic became so acute that I had to roll over and
bury my face in my pillow.4

She even quotes physicist Steven Weinberg’s notorious dictum that

the more we learn about the universe, the more pointless it all
seems.5 But since that camping trip, she says:

I have found a way to defeat the nihilism that lurks in the infi-
nite and the infinitesimal. I have come to understand that I can
deflect the apparent pointlessness of it all by realizing that I
don’t have to seek a point. In any of it. Instead I can see it as the
locus of Mystery.
• The Mystery of why there is anything at all, rather than
nothing.
• The Mystery of where the laws of physics came from.
• The Mystery of why the universe seems so strange.6
40 Gods after God

As we have seen, Mystery is one of Rudolf Otto’s qualities of the

holy or religious, and Goodenough goes so far as to speak of her
“covenant with Mystery.”7 The word “covenant” is redolent with
religious connotations, especially given the all-important notion in
traditional Judaism and Christianity of God’s covenant with Abra-
ham and the people of Israel. And she can go on to talk about the
grandeur that is such an important part of her covenant:“The real-
ization that I needn’t have answers to the Big Questions, needn’t
seek answers to the Big Questions, has served as an epiphany [a
showing forth or revelation]. I lie on my back under the stars and
the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash over me.”8 There
are no Big Questions from the point of view of religious natural-
ism, if we mean Big Questions that presuppose that some Designer
planted secrets in the universe that we are meant to uncover. But
the universe itself, in its immensity and mysteriousness, is, for
Goodenough, the occasion for spirituality.
So it is that, when she moves on to talk about the origins of
life on Earth, Goodenough announces:“I once again revert to my
covenant with Mystery, and respond to the emergence of Life not
with a search for its Design or Purpose but instead with outra-
geous celebration that it occurred at all.”9 But if the origins of life
are mysterious and seem against the odds, the workings of life con-
tain no mystery at all:

. . . all of us, and scientists are no exception, are vulnerable

to the existential shudder that leaves us wishing that the foun-
dations of life were something other than just so much bio-
chemistry and biophysics.The shudder, for me at least, is differ-
ent from the encounters with nihilism that have beset my
contemplation of the universe.There I can steep myself in cos-
mic Mystery. But the workings of life are not mysterious at all.
They are obvious, explainable, and thermodynamically
inevitable. And relentlessly mechanical. And bluntly determinis-
tic. My body is some 10 trillion cells. Period.10

But this hardly means that the scientific account of life leaves us
with no footholds for spirituality. On the contrary, Goodenough
has plenty to say about our self-transcending interconnection with
 Sacred Nature 41

other living things.We are part of “deeply interconnected web of

life.”11 It is a connection that Goodenough wants to celebrate:
“Blessed be the tie that binds. It anchors us.We are embedded in
the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant
process of mutation and selection and bricolage [the patchwork-
quilt process of adapting already existing gene sequences for use in
new organisms]. And this means that we are anything but alone.”12
In fact, Goodenough goes so far as to underline the spiritual rele-
vance of this sense of interconnectedness by pointing out that the
etymology of the word “religion” takes us back to the Latin religio,
which means “to bind together.”13
Goodenough wishes self-consciously to participate in the world
of nature revealed by science.The scientific account of nature is rel-
evant to our very identity: “In order to give assent to who we are,
we need to understand who we are.”14 And, she says, “I have come
to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of
its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence.”15
But precisely because life and nature are sometimes frighten-
ingly other and without Design, to affirm our place in the larger
web of nature is to engage in self-transcendence.We learn to affirm
that “What Is, Is.”16 This self-transcendence includes the ability to
affirm a natural order that dictates that we must die.A single-celled
organism can, in theory, go on and on, if only it continues to find
favorable conditions and sources of nutrition. But multicellularity
brings with it the phenomenon of death. For in multicellular
beings, it is the germ cells, the cells responsible for reproduction,
that are set up for immortality: they can pass on their genetic mate-
rial to future generations. But the other cells in the organism are
specialized and assigned others tasks and thereby forgo immortal-
ity, which means that the organism as a whole must forgo it too.To
look foursquare at nature, including our mortality, and to affirm its
sacred character, is to manage a fundamental sort of self-transcen-
dence. Goodenough’s religious naturalism is impressive for many
reasons, not least because of its bracing realism about nature, its abil-
ity to forge a potent spirituality despite taking something like
Weinberg’s dictum—the more we learn about the universe, the
more pointless it seems—with utmost seriousness.
42 Gods after God

In a separate essay, written in collaboration with moral

philosopher Paul Woodruff, Goodenough’s religious naturalism
displays that particular kind of self-transcendence required in the
sphere of virtue and morality. Goodenough and Woodruff con-
centrate on “mindfulness,” a quality especially emphasized in
Buddhist spirituality. Mindfulness, they assert, “is deeply
enhanced by an understanding of the scientific worldview.” Fur-
thermore, “the four cardinal virtues—courage, fairmindedness,
humaneness, and reverence—are rendered coherent by mindful
reflection.” Mindful reverence, they hold, is “elicited by the evo-
lutionary narrative.”17
Mindfulness is all about a special kind of participation in our
daily world: “Mindfulness is knowledge or wisdom that pulls the
whole mind and heart of the knower toward a connection with
the way things are in all their exciting particularity.”18 Self-tran-
scendence, too, is emphasized. As the Confucian tradition tells us,
what we should seek via our mindfulness is “self-transformation
through a personal grasp.”19 How, exactly, does science prepare the
way for mindfulness and reverence? It is not a matter of project-
ing onto science our sundry spiritual aspirations and convictions.
Rather, science is allowed to do its work without interference, and
it is only subsequently that we appropriate scientific insights for
our spirituality:

Scientists, trained in a particular kind of “pure observation,”

have provisioned us with stunning understandings of the natu-
ral world, and these understandings then provision the religious
naturalist with countless substrates for mindful apprehension.
So, for example, mindfulness of the body is no longer just about
breathing and walking as in the original Buddhist practice; we
are now able to contemplate as well the molecular and genetic
underpinning of the body and its evolution from simpler
forms.20

The self-transcending virtue of reverence, in particular, is called

forth from a mindful attitude toward the world of nature.After all,
the material world transcends us in a variety of ways. Quoting
Goodenough and Woodruff again,
 Sacred Nature 43

• It is larger than a human being (indeed, it is our source, if not

our Source).
• It cannot be changed or controlled by humans (we can manip-
ulate nature, to be sure, but we cannot change its fundamental
properties).
• It is not fully understood by experts (we do not understand, for
example, how nature becomes human nature).
• It is not created by humans (it is our given, if not our Given).
• It elicits awe and respect and, hence, humility. When we dese-
crate the natural order of things, we feel shame; when we wit-
ness its desecration by others, we experience outrage and voice
protest.21

With this exploration of how mindfulness of nature leads to self-

transcending virtues such as reverence, we begin to see how reli-
gious naturalism might become a source not just of discrete spiri-
tual practices, but of a whole way of life.
Donald Crosby is every bit as committed as is Goodenough to
the idea that nature by itself can become the focus of a whole way
of life, indeed a religious way. Nature, he tells us in his book, A
Religion of Nature, is both metaphysically and religiously ultimate.22
To say that nature is metaphysically ultimate is to claim that “(1) it
is self-subsistent, requiring no explanation beyond its immanent
powers for its sustenance or creativity; and (2) that it is all-encom-
passing, including within itself all that is or ever will be.”23 To say
that nature is religiously ultimate is to say that it is the proper
object of our ultimate devotion and the proper focus for our sense
of value and meaning. For Crosby, nature, which he defines as the
“creative matrix from which all things arise and to which they
return, the complexity and order of powers by which these things
are upheld and by which each of them . . . attains its own peculiar
attributes . . . ,” is indeed all-encompassing: nature includes not just
the physical universe as it now exists, but the universe in all of its
possible permutations.24 And the possibility of permutation is sig-
nificant: most working natural scientists, if asked, would probably
say that causal determinism reigns on the macro level, that is, in
every order of nature larger than a molecule. It is only on the
44 Gods after God

quantum level, the level of the molecular, atomic, and subatomic

that nature is at all indeterminate. It is on this quantum level that
the famous Heisenberg “uncertainty principle,” which tells us that
there are genuinely indeterminate elements in nature’s behavior,
applies. But Crosby disagrees with this strict macro-micro divide.
For him, while nature clearly exhibits elements of causal order, it
is also shot through, on every level, with indeterminacy and free-
dom, including the genuine freedom of the human agent.And this
means that nature and the universe can be extraordinarily fluid
and diverse—perhaps laws of physics other than those with which
we are familiar hold sway in some distant part of the universe—
and the universe continually evolves into an open future, so that
the laws of nature with which we are familiar in our neck of the
cosmic woods might someday change.
Given that it is nature that is Crosby’s subject, one might sup-
pose that the natural sciences would provide all of the technical
resources that he needs for his undertaking. But as a philosopher,
he also wants to engage in metaphysics. The word “metaphysics”
(from the Greek meta, “after” or “beyond,” and phusis, “nature”) is
often taken to refer to a supernatural realm beyond the physical
world. Originally, as it is used in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it may sim-
ply mean a treatise by Aristotle that comes “after” his work on
physics. In any case, as one who holds that nature is all there is,
Crosby obviously cannot mean by metaphysics a branch of philos-
ophy dealing with some supernatural realm beyond nature.
Rather, he uses the term to mean a philosophical theory that pulls
together in an overarching system the common and general fea-
tures of reality that the individual sciences, with their narrow foci,
leave out. One of the payoffs of Crosby’s metaphysics, he claims, is
that it can show us that there are genuine values in nature.This is
a contentious issue. Traditional theists would say that our moral
values originate in the commands of God, for example, in the
teachings delivered to Moses at Mount Sinai.Values, from this the-
istic perspective, may apply to our actions within nature, but they
do not derive from nature itself. Many atheists would also say that
values do not originate in nature: they are purely human concoc-
tions, and to the extent that they appear to inhere in nature, we
 Sacred Nature 45

have simply projected our humanly created values onto the natu-
ral world; nature itself is oblivious to value. Crosby’s metaphysics
takes him in a significantly different direction. Nature really does
provide us with examples of genuine values.Yet it would make no
sense to say that values inhere in nature considered as an abstrac-
tion, in nature just in and of itself. Rather, we discern real values
in nature when we interact with it: nature’s values come into view
in the relationship between human evaluators and the world of
nature.We do not simply project these values onto nature. Rather,
we discover them there, especially through inescapable elements of
our experience, but discovery requires a relation, an interaction
between what is discovered and a discoverer, one who brings
interpretive categories to bear on her experience. Explains Crosby:

The valuative aspects of experience have a persistence and

a compellingness that cry out for interpretive reactions. When
those reactions are made, conceptual constructions are brought
into play, and when we allow our continuing thought and
ongoing experience to test and refine these constructions, we
are in the process of making responsible judgments about values
in nature. Thus, reliable claims about values in nature emerge
from interactions between the compulsions and constraints of
experience and imaginative conjectures about the world. . . .25

In his careful metaphysical analysis of this process, Crosby discerns

at least ten values in the world of nature: life; plant and animal
species; the particular ecosystems necessary for different life forms
to exist; the biosphere (in which all of the ecosystems are put
together); diversity of life forms; creativity; splendor (nature’s “vast-
ness, complexity, power, and beauty”)26; practical value (for exam-
ple, the way in which nature’s laws nurture life); moral value; and
religious value.
The final value listed, religious value, provides a segue to the all-
important question, “If Crosby is putting forth a ‘religious’ natural-
ism, what precisely does he mean by religion?”With his usual philo-
sophical thoroughness and precision, Crosby elucidates religion via
what he calls six “role-functional categories.”27 His approach to reli-
gious objects of concern and devotion is “functional” in the sense
46 Gods after God

that he focuses on the functions that these objects perform, not on

particular attributes that they possess. This is a necessary approach,
for, while Crosby’s six functions can be argued to be valid across reli-
gions, different religions obviously choose objects of devotion with
very diverse specific attributes.
The first functional category is Uniqueness: the religious
object is of special importance and set apart from ordinary objects
and activities. Second, the religious object has Primacy: it is an
individual’s central, ultimate concern in life, and everything that
exists depends on it.Third is the category of Pervasiveness: the reli-
gious object is important for the individual’s whole life and for the
whole of nature. Fourth, is the category of Rightness: it means that
the religious object provides its devotee with a salvific goal and
that the universe itself is supportive of the quest for redemption.
Fifth, the religious object has Permanence. And finally, religious
objects are charged with Hiddenness: this refers to the “overpow-
ering sense of mystery and awe experienced by religious persons
as they contemplate the religious object. This object is beyond
speech or characterization; it lies in depths of awareness that can-
not be fathomed by ordinary ways of thinking. It can only be spo-
ken of elliptically, with symbols, metaphors, analogies, and sto-
ries. . . .”28 Crosby’s description here of the ramifications of
Hiddenness recalls Otto’s tremendum, and it points to the emphasis
on symbol and metaphor that will be a part of so many of the rad-
ical theologies that we shall consider in this book.
The heart of Crosby’s project is the contention that these six
defining, functional categories are thoroughly applicable to nature,
a nature that we have already seen generates, in interaction with
human beings, fundamental values. Nature, then, is a wholly proper
object of religious devotion, of ultimate concern. We must recall
that this means nature not as the handiwork of a supernatural per-
sonal agent, a God, nor as infused with some kind of supernatural
spirit-force. Nature, qua nature, the physical cosmos that embraces
us, is the proper focus of religious concern.With his penchant for
enumerated explanations, Crosby nicely caps off his argument with
four reasons for suggesting that nature is the principal source of
good for all of its creatures and, hence, possesses religious ultimacy:
 Sacred Nature 47

First . . . it has produced the beauty and sublimity of the present

physical universe, including the extraordinary splendor of our
homeland the Earth. This splendor has inspiring, healing, and
humbling powers for the human spirit. Second, through the
workings of biological evolution, nature is the source of life on
Earth in all of its diverse and interdependent forms (and, in all
probability, of myriad forms of life elsewhere in the universe as
well). It also sustains these evolved species and individuals in the
face of threats and dangers, and it restores ecosystems and life-
forms when they have been devastated.Third, nature is the ulti-
mate source of the good of human life itself, and of all the spe-
cific goods of human history, civilization, and experience.
Finally, nature has evolved humans in such a way as to implant
in them a yearning for the preservation of established goodness
and for the attainment of ever-increasing goodness in them-
selves and in the rest of the world.29

We should not suppose that Crosby is a naive optimist in his ulti-

mately positive assessment of nature. On the contrary, he gives
ample time in his book to a discussion of the “disvalues” as well as
of the values found in nature. And he does not avoid confronting
the massive destructiveness, the pain and the suffering, that nature
also displays. But in the overall scheme of things, Crosby firmly
maintains, nature is the supportive matrix that can rightly serve as
my ultimate concern and that can take the place in my life of God.
His is a thoroughgoing and tightly argued religious naturalism.

Perhaps the first potentially critical question addressed to

Goodenough should be about exactly what she means by mys-
tery/Mystery. Her Mystery, which is in many ways the heart of her
religious naturalism, cannot be the Mystery of the divine fullness,
the Mystery celebrated by traditional theologians and mystics. It
seems more a function of what we do not know about the uni-
verse:Why is there anything at all? Why did the universe take just
this shape and not some other? What is the future of the universe?
But isn’t it possible that, just as biology has demystified the work-
ings of life, sciences such as physics and cosmology may answer
these questions? Some thinkers, after all, including the famous
48 Gods after God

physicist Stephen Hawking, hold that we are on the threshold of

a “theory of everything.”Would Goodenough’s Mystery be eroded
if such a theory were successfully set forth? If so, the focus of her
spirituality would turn out to be that notorious, undesirable old
fellow, the “God of the gaps,” that is, an ultimate that we posit in
those gaps where science cannot explain something.
It is possible, of course, that Goodenough’s Mystery is not at
all simply a function of a lack of explanation. If “Mystery” is essen-
tially the character that attaches to any object of wonder, then the
universe will probably always be a source of Mystery. Certainly
human beings will not cease to wonder at its grandeur and beauty.
On another matter, what of the particular spirituality that
comes out of Goodenough’s perspective? It is clearly a spirituality
of wonder, but apparently also one of resignation. We resign our-
selves to our small place in the larger scheme of things and to the
inevitability of our eventual annihilation. Should we say of her
work, then, what we said of Taylor’s, namely, that it leaves us with
a kind of happy nihilism? And, if so, is that good enough, or would
we do better to embrace something more optimistic, such as the
perspective of feminist spirituality, which is given one representa-
tion in the work of Mary Daly? Though this is, I think, a legiti-
mate question to ponder about Goodenough’s program, one
might come to her defense by pointing out that the element of
resignation in her thought does not cast a pall over spirituality. On
the contrary, Goodenough celebrates nature and its power. There
is more exaltation than despair in her piety.
This matter of resignation does, however, lead to another sig-
nificant question raised by several commentators: will any signifi-
cant number of persons ever be attracted to something such as
Goodenough’s religious naturalism with its total lack of supernat-
uralism? Thus, Paul Jerome Croce avers: “The challenge remains:
how to persuade the average believer who derives great solace and
meaning from supernaturalism.”30 And Barry Palevitz observes,
“. . . naturalism has been around a long time, with no mass move-
ment in sight. Goodenough’s ‘religious naturalism’ won’t win
many more converts—people want a God that answers prayers.”31
This is a topic to which we shall have to return in the last chapter
 Sacred Nature 49

of the book, for it is a challenge that confronts radical theology as

a whole: can a theology without a God who answers prayers ever
attract enough followers to be considered a viable perspective?
The rather different questions that need to be asked of Don-
ald Crosby spring precisely from the fact that, while Goodenough
is a scientist whose scientific knowledge affords a stepping-stone
to a poetic, spiritual attunement to nature, Crosby is a philosopher
who interprets science in a way that many scientists themselves
may find wanting. We asked about possible ambiguity in Goode-
nough’s notion of Mystery; Crosby is inevitably clear and without
ambiguity, and his admirably clear notion of natural science is
summed up in the following quotation:

One thing the “second scientific revolution” (the radical

changes in physical theory introduced by physicists such as Max
Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Niels Bohr early in the twen-
tieth century) has helped teach us is that even the supposedly
hardest of “hard” natural sciences [i.e., physics] is a fallible, his-
torically conditioned human undertaking, subject to unex-
pected basic shifts and discontinuities. If scientific thinking
changed so fundamentally from the late nineteenth century to
the early twentieth, it is quite conceivable that it can change as
much or even more in the future.32

The problem here is that physicists themselves seldom read the

history of modern physics as involving radical changes in perspec-
tive. Rather, they think of new physical theories as improving
upon and taking up into themselves older theories, as when Sir
Isaac Newton’s theories (which are still perfectly valid for calcu-
lating how to send a probe to Mars) are absorbed into Einstein’s.
Hence, cosmological physicist Timothy Ferris, who quotes Nobel-
laureate particle physicist Steven Weinberg:

. . . science really is progressive and cumulative, and . . . well-

established theories, though they may turn out to be subsets of
larger and farther-reaching ones—as happened when Newton-
ian mechanics was incorporated by Einstein into general relativ-
ity—are seldom proved wrong.As the physicist Steven Weinberg
50 Gods after God

writes, “One can imagine a category of experiments that refute

well-accepted theories, theories that have become part of the
standard consensus of physics. Under this category I can find no
examples whatsoever in the past one hundred years.”33

This issue between Crosby and practicing physicists is a compli-

cated one, and philosophers of science and postmodern theorists
have been contending about it for decades. But it bears remem-
bering that Crosby is out of step with most of the practicing sci-
entific community. For a work that is all about nature, and that
must admit that modern science is our most important avenue to
knowledge of nature, this is certainly a potential problem.
Crosby gets into trouble too with science in his emphasis on
the claim that the cosmos is shot through with freedom. We saw
above that he is absolutely committed to the freedom of the
human subject and that he sees the cosmos itself as balancing
causal structure with a freedom sufficiently powerful to allow
nature’s very “laws” to evolve into something different in the
future, at least in principle. But contemporary science finds gen-
uine freedom—more accurately, indeterminacy—only on the
quantum level, the micro-realm of molecules, atoms, and sub-
atomic particles along with their associated fields.Yet the human
brain, which science today affirms to be the seat of the mind, is a
macro-organism. In other words, it operates on the level where
causal determinism reigns. Thus, it is very difficult to entertain a
untroubled belief in the freedom of the human will if one is sci-
entifically conscientious. True, there have been physicists and
philosophers who have proposed that perhaps quantum indeter-
minacy bubbles up from the micro-level to inform the macro-
workings of the brain, but the majority of scientists would say that
while individual quantum events exhibit indeterminacy, myriad
quantum events strung together (as in any macro-phenomenon)
produce a statistical regularity. In other words, quantum indeter-
minacy washes out on the macro level, and causal determinism
takes over. If freedom of the will means that there is some gap in
the causal determinism of brain processes, then freedom of the will
seems highly unlikely.34
 Sacred Nature 51

Similarly, the degree of freedom that Crosby finds in the larger

cosmos is highly unlikely. One of the most often ballyhooed
examples of alleged freedom or indeterminacy on the macro-level
is the phenomenon labeled “chaos.” Chaotic systems—weather
systems, for example—are characterized by what scientists term
“sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This means that if
two systems are identical except for the most minute differences
in their initial conditions, the two systems can end up diverging
radically. This is why the weather is “chaotic” and so difficult to
predict. As the standard example would have it, the flapping of a
butterfly’s wings in Asia might result in a storm in North Amer-
ica. Obviously, the flapping of the butterfly’s wings is such a tiny
part of the initial conditions of the weather system in question that
meteorologists will be unaware of it and thus unable to see what
is coming as the system develops: the system is extraordinarily sen-
sitive to initial conditions.
The problem here is that champions of freedom in nature
often point to chaos as an example of such freedom: chaotic events
are not fully determined by nature’s laws, they say, but are free to
unfold in wholly unpredictable ways. But these champions of cos-
mic freedom confuse unpredictability with indeterminacy. Scientists
themselves point out that chaotic phenomena are wholly determined
by the laws of nature.What makes chaotic phenomena interesting is
not that they exhibit indeterminacy or natural freedom, but that
the thoroughly deterministic causal connections that characterize
the chaotic system are too numerous, tiny, and complex for us to
trace. The meteorologist in Atlanta cannot be expected to know
about the butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing.
In short, Crosby’s convictions as a metaphysical philosopher
(convictions informed in many cases by the work of Alfred North
Whitehead, whose philosophy has a big stake in freedom and cre-
ativity in nature) color his reading of science, and color it in a way
that will make it unrecognizable to many scientists themselves.
This page intentionally left blank.
 — — 5

God and Pragmatism I:

Sallie McFague’s Metaphorical Theology

“P
ragmatism” as a particular school of philosophy is
informed by such now-classic American thinkers as
William James (1842–1910), Charles Saunders Peirce
(1839–1914), and John Dewey (1859–1952). Sallie McFague is
certainly not a pragmatist in the sense of following the dictates of
this pragmatist school of thought. Nor would she want to sub-
scribe to any brand of pragmatism that advocated systems of
thought meant to manipulate or control the natural or human
world. Rather, as we shall see, she is passionately concerned about
the kind of theology that will lead to a profound ethic of respect
and non-manipulative concern for creation. But there is nonethe-
less an important sense in which McFague’s theology can indeed
be described as pragmatic: she views theology not as a discipline
that affords an objective view of the truth about God and the
world, but rather as one that utilizes metaphors that enable us, in
particular situations, to accomplish Earth-friendly and healing
relationships with God and God’s creation.
One of the reasons that we shall consider McFague a radical
thinker is that, despite the fact that she considers herself a Christ-
ian theologian, hers is a Christian faith characterized by a large
dose of skepticism:

I begin with the assumption that what we can say with any
assurance about the character of Christian faith is very little and

53
54 Gods after God

that even that will be highly contested. Christian faith is, it

seems to me, most basically a claim that the universe is neither
indifferent nor malevolent but that there is a power (and a per-
sonal power at that) which is on the side of life and its fulfill-
ment. Moreover, the Christian believes that we have some clues
for fleshing out this claim in the life, death, and appearances of
Jesus of Nazareth.1

“Theology,” she tells us, “is mostly fiction.”2 McFague’s pragmatic

bent comes out clearly when she asserts that the criterion for
judging different metaphorical descriptions of the divine—differ-
ent “fictional” lenses—“is not whether one is true and the other
false, but which one is a better portrait of Christian faith for our
day.”3 Which imaginative picture of the God-world relationship
will allow us to enact the spirituality and the care for the world
that we need to enact right now?4 Thus, while McFague might be
labeled by some a “reformer,” insofar as she wishes to preserve and
enhance the Christian tradition, she goes about that by inviting
her readers to “imagine boldly and radically.”5 She describes her
theology as, among other things, “feminist, skeptical, relativistic,”
and also “iconoclastic,” that is, toppling the “icons” or cherished
traditional pictures of the God-world relationship.6 As a matter of
fact, at some points McFague’s pronouncements sound like those
of the famous “radical theologians” of the 1960s that we discussed
in chapter one. She asserts, for instance,“For most of us, it is not a
question of being sure of God while being unsure of our language
about God. Rather, we are unsure both at the experiential and the
expressive levels.”7 And she can quote with approval German the-
ologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous notion that, rather than
being God-dependent in an immature or childish fashion, we live
in a world “come of age,” a phrase that was a favorite of the 1960s
radical theologians.8 Indeed, McFague’s work meets our definition
of radical theology in that it not only rethinks the notion of the
divine, but also in that it denies the absolute authority of forces
such as Scripture and tradition. While McFague will still look to
the Jesus found in the New Testament for guidance, she will, at the
same time, not be bound by biblical notions of God and will be
perfectly comfortable looking outside the biblical tradition for
 God and Pragmatism I 55

metaphors and models of the divine.9 As Sheila Greeve Davaney

perceptively says of McFague’s approach, Scripture and the various
strands of Christian tradition “are examples of theology, not
authoritative, sacrosanct norms for theology. Even Jesus . . . repre-
sents one, and not the only story or source for understanding how
god relates to the world.”10
McFague has published a series of four books that lay out her
ecological theology: Metaphorical Theology, Models of God, The Body
of God, and Super, Natural Christians.We shall consider each of these
books in turn. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Lan-
guage provides a kind of theoretical preface to her whole theology,
because it is here that she works out her notions of how religious
language refers to God and the nature of the theologian’s task.
McFague begins with the conviction, common to so many con-
temporary thinkers, that “there is no uninterpreted access to real-
ity.”11 That is to say, the human mind is not just a mirror that can
simply reflect the world around it.We never grasp the world purely
as it is in and of itself. Rather, we always have a particular vantage
point upon the world. Even discrete sense experiences—seeing a
tree, for example—are not pure and unfiltered. Our cultural back-
ground and language tradition, the particular way in which we
were raised as children, our cache of previous experiences, our
religious and philosophical convictions—all of these things and
more shape our experiences. Our approach to the world is always
situated, and our thinking about the world has always already been
tutored.
Yet, this is certainly not to say that the lenses through which
we view the world wholly falsify our intuitions.The world is not
simply a fanciful construction of the individual imagination. Here
is where a pragmatic philosophical sensibility is helpful. It is true
that we cannot step outside of our mental framework and com-
pare that framework to reality in itself in order to see how “true”
the framework is. But we can speak of our frameworks being more
or less true to reality in a pragmatic sense. Does a particular cog-
nitive vantage point make sense of our experience? Does it allow
us to handle particular problems that reality throws our way? If it
does, then one can at least argue that there must be some sense in
56 Gods after God

which that vantage point connects with the real world outside
and about us. At the same time, we may discover that a vantage
point that has served us well for many years begins to encounter
anomalous experiences that it cannot decipher or help us to
interpret. In that case, it may be necessary to modify our venera-
ble mental framework, or even to abandon it altogether in favor
of some other vantage point. Both the new vantage point and the
old one make some connection with the world, are in some sense
“true” descriptions of the world, but the new vantage point
proves more powerful in the present circumstances. McFague’s
epistemology (the technical term in philosophy for a theory of
knowledge), then, is pragmatic, and it is at least partially “realist,”
which means that it makes modest claims that our ways of know-
ing the world do actually put us in touch with the world. She
accepts what, in the philosophy of science, is dubbed a “critical or
modified realism.”12
But now consider the plight of the theologian, especially a
theologian with a skeptical bent. Theology deals, by definition,
with something that transcends anything merely present-to-hand
in our environment. However one conceives the divine, there is
necessarily something mysterious about it. Of course McFague
intends to hold to the Christian God in her thinking about the
transcendent, but recall that, for her, we know very little about that
God: only that it is (probably) a personal force that has the best
interests of the universe at heart and that can be glimpsed some-
how in the New Testament accounts of Jesus. If the connection
between ordinary thinking and even the most mundane reality is
tenuous and pragmatic at best, what about the connection
between our thinking about God and the reality of God in God-
self? Literal language will only infrequently be up to the task of
connecting with God, even from a pragmatic perspective.
This brings us to one of the foci of McFague’s whole theol-
ogy, namely, her emphasis on the absolute necessity of metaphors
and models in our God-talk. Let us begin with her definition of
metaphor.“A metaphor,” she tells us,“is an assertion or judgment
of similarity and difference between two thoughts in permanent
tension with one another, which redescribes reality in an open-
 God and Pragmatism I 57

ended way but has structural as well as affective power.”13 Suppose

we unpack this definition by applying it to Shakespeare’s phrase
“sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” There are two
metaphors here: “sleep is a knitter,” and “care is a raveled sleeve.”
Both illustrate the similarity and difference, the “is” and the “is
not,” of metaphor.14 In some ways, sleep is like a knitter and care
is like a raveled sleeve. Care can break down the human psyche
just as the raveling of the yarn on a sweater eats away at the
integrity of the sleeve. And sleep can help restore a overburdened
psyche like a knitter can repair the raveled sleeve. But, of course,
there are crucial differences too. Care is not a clearly visible com-
ing apart of brain tissue in the way that unraveling involves the
visible coming apart of a sleeve. And sleep does not restore the
psyche via any mechanism as simple as taking a knitting needle to
a sweater.
The “permanent tension” in metaphor created by the juxta-
position of two things that are both like and unlike, the “is” and
the “is not” of metaphor, is part of what gives it its great power.
This is also why a good metaphor can never be translated exhaus-
tively into literal, nonmetaphorical terms. To assert that the
metaphor “care is a raveled sleeve” can be translated simply by say-
ing that “our cares wear on us” is to miss the force of the
metaphorical statement. It is to blunt its aesthetic and emotional
power. But what does McFague have in mind when she claims
that metaphors have “structural” as well as “affective” power?
Metaphors can help structure our thinking about the world that
we wish to encounter and know. Let us return to the notion that
“care is a raveled sleeve.”Think about how once a single piece of
yarn in a sweater sleeve begins to unravel, it can begin a process
which, if left unchecked, can lead to the whole sleeve coming
undone. The metaphor that “care is a raveled sleeve” might thus
point us to the insight that one set of cares often leads to others in
an unhealthy spiral of anxiety and worry.The metaphor, then, has
not merely an affective punch, but it also affords us new insights
about that aspect of the world that it addresses.
If McFague’s theology is powered by metaphor, it is a theol-
ogy that ends up centering upon what McFague calls “models.” A
58 Gods after God

model, most simply stated, is “a dominant metaphor, a metaphor

with staying power.”15 More exactly, while retaining the images
that are at the heart of metaphor, models have a larger conceptual
component. They are a mixed discourse, standing between the
image and conceptual, philosophical discourse. Scientists use
models in their explorations of the universe. For example, as chil-
dren, we all learned the simple solar system model of the atom,
wherein the solar system is used to explain the atom. Such a
model, if effective, can lead a researcher into new avenues of
thought about the atom and suggest yet untried experiments to
tease out the atom’s structure. In the model, the nucleus of the
atom is akin to the sun, and the orbiting electrons are like the
planets that orbit the sun. There is obviously a metaphorical ele-
ment at the heart of the model: the atom “is” and “is not” like the
solar system. But there is also a fair amount of conceptual
machinery.Though advances in physics, such as the development
of quantum theory, make the old solar system model less and less
fruitful, it can still be used to provide a basic understanding of
phenomena such as chemical bonding. Here is McFague’s
detailed summary of the nature and role of models:

Of primary importance, models provide a way of talking about

an unfamiliar area: they give intelligibility to the unintelligible.
And models, unlike discrete or passing metaphors, yield this
intelligibility in a structural or comprehensive manner. They
provide a network of language to be expanded so that we can
say many things about an unfamiliar area of investigation. At
least three subsidiary points have emerged regarding these struc-
tural, comprehensive models. First, the most effective models are
specific, common ones: good models like “body,” “machine,”
“person” are concrete and well known. Second, the best mod-
els are sufficiently different from their principal subjects so that
insight is generated through encountering similarity in spite of
difference.Third, helpful models manifest a dialectic [a back-and-
forth, unfolding pattern] of simplicity and detail: models must
simplify and order the seemingly chaotic detail of the principal
subject, but they must also provide sufficient complexity to offer
suggestive connections.16
 God and Pragmatism I 59

These insights about the nature of models, that McFague draws

from the use of models in the natural sciences, she then applies to
theology and the attempt to know that most mysterious of reali-
ties, namely, God and our relation to God. As we shall discover
later in this chapter, the main models that McFague introduces
into theological conversation and debate are: the “world as God’s
body” and God as “mother,” “lover,” and “friend.”
Before we can come to understand why she centers on just
these models, however, we must turn to her notion of “paradigm.”
McFague explains that “a paradigm constitutes the most basic set
of assumptions within which a tradition, in this instance, a reli-
gious tradition, functions. It is the unquestioned framework or
context for its normal operations; it is its ‘world.’”17 If one aban-
dons the paradigm, one steps outside of the religious tradition. Par-
adigms are powered by what various thinkers have called “root-
metaphors.” The root-metaphor in the Christian tradition, and
hence the heart of the Christian paradigm according to McFague,
is constituted by Jesus’s parables (which are extended metaphors)
of the Kingdom of God.These parables, and Jesus himself as para-
ble—his way of being in the world—catalyze a disorientation and
reorientation process. Parables such as the Workers in the Vineyard,
for example, in which the vineyard owner graciously pays those
who arrive late for work the same amount as those who arrived
much earlier, disorient our ordinary notions of merit and salvation.
They reorient us by focusing our attention on the grace of God: our
destiny is a matter of God’s lovingkindness rather than of our own
abilities to define and control our destiny. Furthermore, life in the
Kingdom of God as made present in Jesus and his parables reori-
ents us from valuation of power and privilege to concern for those
forced to the margins of society, to the oppressed of the world.
If Jesus’ parables, and Jesus himself in his life, death, and
appearances, constitute the root-metaphor or metaphors of the
Christian tradition, then McFagues’s models will need to be con-
sistent with this paradigm. One of the things that she notes in this
paradigmatic Jesus material is that the root-metaphors are all rela-
tional. Thus, models consistent with the Christian paradigm will
not attempt to describe God in Godself, but rather our relation to
60 Gods after God

God, and the relationship between God and the world of which
we are a part. So it is that “the world as God’s body,” and God as
“mother,”“lover,” and “friend” are much more about how we and
our world are related to God than they are about the inner nature
of divine being.
The second and third books in McFague’s series of four are
Models of God, which was published in 1987, and The Body of God,
which appeared in 1993. However, we shall consider them in
reverse order, since, in hindsight, the model of the world as God’s
body seems to be the center of gravity in McFague’s theology,
while the models that she pursues in her second book (in addition
to the world as God’s body, which she does touch on in that sec-
ond book)—God as mother, lover, and friend—become ancillary
models. Since the third book affords us a more thorough analysis
of the model of the world as God’s body, let us turn next to it.
Subsequently, we shall be able better to understand the place of the
models of God as mother, lover, and friend.
McFague’s focus upon the model of the world as God’s body
serves, she tells us, to pull together all of her professional concerns:
“In different and very complex ways, Christianity, feminism, and
ecology have been sites of conflict on the issue of the importance
and meaning of ‘body.’”18 But what, exactly, does McFague have in
mind when she speaks of the world as God’s body? She asks us to
think of the whole universe, not just the Earth and its inhabitants,
as the body of God. If the notion of the body is crucial here, so to
is the image of spirit: God’s spirit enlivens God’s body, empowers
and sustains it. By thinking of the divine on the model of God’s
spirit empowering God’s body, McFague seeks to protect both the
transcendence (the “beyondness” of God) and the immanence (the
“withinness” of God) of the divine, and thereby stay within prox-
imity to the Christian tradition. The body component of the
model emphasizes divine immanence.The physical universe is not
separate from God but rather the very embodiment of divinity in
this model; God is immanent. But yet divine transcendence is pro-
tected too in this model, for God is more than God’s body, more
than the universe; God is also the spirit that enlivens and preserves
the universe.Thus, the model of the world as God’s body is, tech-
 God and Pragmatism I 61

nically speaking, a species of panentheism, a term derived from the

Greek words for “all,” “in,” and “belief in God.” In panentheism,
one holds that the entire universe exists within God, but that God
is more than the universe. Thus, panentheism, unlike pantheism,
protects the divine transcendence (pantheism simply identifies
God with the universe).
Another way in which McFague talks about the spirit/tran-
scendence side of her model is by speaking about an “agential”
aspect of the model. By enlivening and empowering the universe,
God acts within it. God is more than just the universe itself, the
body; God is also the spirit who works for God’s purposes in the
world.
Of course we need to keep in mind here what we learned
about models in McFague’s earlier book, Metaphorical Theology.The
model of the world as God’s body is not meant to give us an exact
description of God, or even a literal account of the relationship
between God and the world. Rather, models operate pragmatically
and metaphorically.There are ways in which the God-world rela-
tionship is like the model and ways in which it is quite different.
We use the model to help us effect a particular relationship of our
own to both God and the world, a point that will become clearer
a bit later when we look at the ethic that McFague is suggesting
in The Body of God. She reminds us that faith in God “is not so
much correct thoughts about God (ones that correspond to God’s
being), but appropriate, responsible action to help a planet, created
and loved by God.”19
While one essential pragmatic test of McFague’s model of the
world as God’s body will be its ability to effect the ecological ethic
that she champions, another attribute that she attributes to the model
is its consistency with contemporary, “postmodern” science. She
notes, for example, how the “common creation story” embraced
throughout the scientific world emphasizes the unity of the universe:
everything that is traces its origins back to the so-called big bang
some fifteen billion years ago (perhaps closer to fourteen billion
according to more recent calculations); galaxies, stars, planets, and bil-
lions of living things have evolved over the course of those billions
of years—there is amazing diversity here—but all are ultimately
62 Gods after God

derived from the same process. So, too, the model of the universe as
God’s body allows us to relate to the vast diversity of the universe as
all part of the body enspirited by one God.
If McFague’s favored model is consistent with science’s com-
mon creation story in its ability to show both unity and diversity,
it is less clear that the model is consistent with contemporary sci-
ence when it comes to the question of divine agency. From the
perspective of the scientific worldview, the notion of a divine
being intervening in the universe to work its will within the uni-
verse is highly problematic.The law of conservation of matter and
energy tells us that, in a closed system, energy can be neither cre-
ated nor destroyed; it can only change its form, as when the kinetic
energy of a projectile is turned into heat energy when the projec-
tile hits a wall. In any biological process, for instance, all of the
energy involved in that process can be accounted for by biologists
in terms of purely chemical-physical phenomena. Where, then, is
there any room for God to add God’s action or guidance to the
processes of the universe?
McFague seems to be aware of this sort of difficulty, and she
attempts to craft her account of the relationship between the spirit
of God and the universe as God’s body accordingly. “Spirit theol-
ogy,” she tells us, holds that

God is not primarily the orderer and controller of the universe

but its source and empowerment, the breath that enlivens and
energizes it. . . . [Spirit theology] does not claim that the divine
mind is the cause of what evolutionary theory tells us can have
only local causes; rather, it suggests that we think of these local
causes as enlivened and empowered by the breath of God. . . .
The principal reason, then, for preferring spirit to alternative
possibilities is that it underscores the connection between God
and the world as not primarily the Mind that orders, controls,
and directs the universe, but as the Breath that is the source of
its life and vitality.20

McFague acknowledges that evolution and the process of natural

selection can appear cruel and wasteful, with countless species
doomed to extinction. And she is fully aware of the fact that evo-
 God and Pragmatism I 63

lutionary theory disallows the notion of teleology, the idea that

there is some preordained direction that the evolutionary process
takes, some built-in purpose. Interestingly enough, however,
McFague points out that once human self-consciousness arrives
on the evolutionary scene, there is historical and cultural evolution
via which we as human beings can introduce an element of direc-
tion and purpose into the world’s development.

At this point divine purpose can be spoken of within the evo-

lutionary process in a new and special way. It is not only
empowerment but also a direction for all that teeming life, a
direction expressed by Christians in the stories, images, and
ideas of the Hebrew people, its paradigmatic founder Jesus, and
all the lives and understandings of disciples over the centuries.
The guide for interpreting that direction is called the Holy
Spirit, and it works through human beings: we become the mind
and heart as well as the hands and feet of the body of God on
our planet. Christians claim that God has been in the natural
process as its creator and sustainer (the spirit of the body), since
the beginning, but now that process has been given a particular
direction (a “new creation”) characterized by inclusive love,
especially for the vulnerable and oppressed. For Christians, the
spirit has been qualified or given shape and scope by the Holy
Spirit and is a direction or purpose for life that depends on our
cooperation as God’s partners.21

At the same time, McFague does want to be able to read this ele-
ment of teleology back into the larger cosmos beyond merely
human action. But she does so in a highly qualified (fictional?)
fashion:

. . . what does it mean to say that salvation is the direction of

creation and creation is the place of salvation? . . . It is a state-
ment of faith in the face of massive evidence to the contrary,
evidence that we have suggested when we spoke of the absurd-
ity of such a claim in light of both conventional standards and
natural selection. Some natural theologies, theologies that begin
with creation, try to make the claim that evolutionary history
contains a teleological direction, an optimistic arrow, but our
64 Gods after God

claim is quite different. It is a retrospective, not a prospective

claim; it begins with salvation, with experiences of liberation
and healing that one wagers are from God, and reads back into
creation the hope that the whole creation is included within the
divine liberating, healing powers. It is a statement of faith, not
of fact; it takes as its standpoint a concrete place where salvation
has been experienced—in the case of Christians, the paradig-
matic ministry of Jesus. . . .22

We are given here “a new, contemporary picture with which to

remythologize Christian faith.”23
With this talk of liberation and healing, we have moved into
the territory of what theologians call “soteriology,” the doctrine of
salvation. From what do we need to be saved? The traditional
Christian answer, of course, has been “sin.” Sin, in turn, has tradi-
tionally been conceived as our personal rebellion against God, our
refusal to obey God’s commands and our desire to live on our
own, apart from God. McFague modifies this slightly. Sin is indeed
rebellion against God if we think of the world as God’s body, for
sin is now conceived as a selfishness that prevents us from accept-
ing our proper place in the larger cosmos. To sin is selfishly to
think only of ourselves and thereby to deny our responsibilities,
not only to our fellow human beings, but also to the natural world
of which we are all a part. In her earlier work, McFague empha-
sizes our responsibility to protect the Earth not only from ecolog-
ical degradation, but also from nuclear annihilation.With the pass-
ing of the cold war and the great lessening of the possibility of a
nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia, that
nuclear concern may seem dated. However, new worries about
nuclear war have arisen at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury with respect to countries such as North Korea, India, and
Pakistan.Thus, her nuclear concerns are perhaps nearly as relevant
today as are her ongoing concerns about ecological disaster caused
by our industrial and other activities.
In the life of Jesus Christ, we see a consistent and powerful
concern for the poor and powerless. In his parables, in his healing
of the sick, and in his association and eating with the dispossessed
and despised of his society, Jesus brought to bear the possibility of
 God and Pragmatism I 65

a liberating reorientation from selfishness to concern for the

other. For McFague, we should see the world of nature not as
something to be used and abused, but rather as “the new poor of
Jesus’ parables.”24
In this modified picture of salvation and the paradigmatic role
of Christ for Christian faith, we have further evidence of the rad-
icality of McFague’s theology. For one thing, though she remains
a Christian theologian, who identifies with the Jesus story, she sees
that story as only one possible vantage point or model for encoun-
tering the divine and properly approaching the universe. In her
words, she wishes to “relativize the incarnation [the way in which
God inhabits the physical] in relation to Jesus of Nazareth.”25
In other words, the proposal is to consider Jesus as Paradigmatic
of what we find everywhere: everything that is is the sacrament
of God (the universe as God’s body), but here and there we find
that presence erupting in special ways. Jesus is one such place for
Christians, but there are other paradigmatic persons and
events—and the natural world, in a way different from the self-
conscious openness to God that persons display, is also a mar-
velous sacrament in its diversity and richness.26

Furthermore, with her emphasis on the body, in contrast to the

traditional Christian emphasis on the soul, McFague expresses
skepticism about whether or not the individual survives death.27
This is a most radical observation, indeed, inasmuch as Christian
theology has often seen life after death with God as the whole
point, the fundamental goal of Christian faith.
Theology is about metaphors and models that enable us to
find our proper place in the larger scheme of things. Such
metaphors and models must help us to take care of the Earth and
the most vulnerable of our fellow human beings. One powerful
model for doing so is the model of the world as God’s body, but
there are other useful contemporary models as well, models that
McFague explores in some depth in her book Models of God:The-
ology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. One model of God that
McFague argues is no longer helpful is the traditional one of God
as a transcendent king. For her, this “monarchical” model has three
66 Gods after God

major flaws: “in the monarchical model, God is distant from the
world, relates only to the human world, and controls that world
through domination and benevolence.”28 The model of God as
transcendent monarch cannot empower the ethic of concern for
others and the Earth in the way that, McFague argues, the model
of the Earth as God body may be able to do. But we must also
keep in mind that “since no metaphor or model refers properly or
directly to God, many are necessary.”29 Hence, McFague also sug-
gests the models of God as mother, lover, and friend. Now one
may immediately question how it is possible to conceive of the
world as both the body of God and of the world as the child of
God or the object of God’s affection as its lover. But, of course,
models are extended and conceptually elaborated metaphors.
Because they are not literal descriptions of God, it is quite appro-
priate to use different models of God, models that if taken literally
would perhaps clash with one another. There is no problem, for
example, indeed it is quite useful, for physicists to model light both
in terms of a wave and a particle.
The three models of God as mother, lover, and friend can be
linked to three kinds of love that are expressed in the Ancient
Greek of the New Testament as agape, Eros, and philia. Agape—
linked to God as mother—is the kind of parental love that val-
ues the child despite the child’s faults or weaknesses. Eros—
linked with God as lover—is the word from which we derive our
English word “erotic.” Philia—linked with God as friend—is the
love between friends or brothers. McFague appropriates the
three Greek terms in this way, specifically: “God’s creative love
(agape) emphasizes the right of different forms of life to existence
and nourishment; God’s salvific love (eros) stresses the value of
these forms of life and God’s desire that they be whole and free;
God’s sustaining love (philia) underscores the joy of all forms of
life as companions united with one another and with the source
of their life.”30
Let us analyze each of the three models in turn. The agapic
dimension of the model of God as mother is given expression in
McFague’s claim that “Parental love is the most powerful and
intimate experience we have of giving love whose return is not
 God and Pragmatism I 67

calculated . . . it is the gift of life as such to others. Parental love

wills life and when it comes, exclaims, ‘It is good that you
exist.’”31 Furthermore, this model moves us in a direction differ-
ent from the traditional Christian notions of God’s relation to
the world:
The received view consisted of a nest of shared beliefs, but the
two most important for our concern are that God created ex
nihilo, from “nothing,” and that God created hierarchically, with
the physical subordinated to the spiritual. Both of these notions
support dualism: the absolute distinction of God from the
world, and the inferiority of matter to spirit, body to mind.32

Obviously, to imagine God as mother and the world as what God

brings to birth reorients our thinking: the world is not distant
from God but a part of God, and the material dimension of real-
ity, as part of God, is to be valued, not denigrated in relation to the
spirit.
What of God as lover? “The crux of being in love,” explains
McFague, “is not lust, sex, or desire (though these are expressions
of a human love relationship); the crux is value. It is finding some-
one else valuable and being found valuable. . . . Being found valu-
able in this way is the most complete affirmation possible.”33 We
should not associate the model of God as lover with a notion of
God loving individuals. Rather, it is meant to communicate the
love of God for the whole of God’s world. At the same time,
“What we do not want to lose, however, is the passion in the
model, the desire to be united with the beloved.”34
This unification of lover and beloved is McFague’s point of
entry into the notion of salvation: “we shall understand salvation
to be the making whole or uniting with what is attractive and
valuable, rather than the rescuing of what is sinful and worth-
less.”35 Her focus on the model of God as lover and its dimension
of eros “implies that the world is valuable, that God needs it, and
that salvation is the reunification of the beloved world with its
lover, God.”36
Finally, God as friend. McFague acknowledges, first of all, that
friendship may initially appear to be insufficiently weighty to serve
68 Gods after God

as a model of the God-world relation. Can we really imagine the

God who gives birth to and cares for the entire universe as our
“friend”? Part of McFague’s response is, as with the model of God
as lover, to de-individualize the model. That is, God is not to be
understood here simply as a kind of supernatural buddy with
whom I as an individual commune. Rather, “friendship between
God and human beings in our time can be seen as focused on a
common project: the salvation, the well-being of the Earth.
Friendship here, unlike friendship between God and certain mys-
tics, is not between two facing each other but between two facing
the common vision that is the basis of the friendship.”37 And she
explains that, while “friendship appears strangely unnecessary,
yet . . . it is this very lack that, as a balance to the other models, is
its strength, for it is of all human relationships the most free . . .
what distinguishes friendship from other relationships is that it
alone exists outside the bounds of duty, function, or office.”38 In
friendship, then, we can freely join with God in caring for God’s
world, and we can exercise friendship with the other creatures and
entities that make up God’s world.
The work of God under the heading of friendship, as
McFague sees it, is to sustain God’s world. She can say, in summary,

the work or activity of God as friend is not, then, different from

the work of God as mother or lover—even as the work of cre-
ation and salvation are also one. Salvation is the reunification—
the healing and liberation—of the torn, alienated, enslaved body
of the world through the revelation of the depths of divine love
for the world which gives us the power both to work actively
for reunification and to suffer with the victims of estrangement.
The work of God is always of a piece; in our models of God as
mother, lover, and friend we see different aspects of God’s one
love, the destabilizing, nonhierarchical, inclusive love of all.
God’s creative love (agape) emphasizes the right of different
forms of life to existence and nourishment; God’s salvific love
(eros) stresses the value of these forms of life and God’s desire
that they be whole and free; God’s sustaining love (philia) under-
scores the joy of all forms of life as companions united with one
another and with the source of their life.39
 God and Pragmatism I 69

We see at work here McFague’s assertion that a whole host of

models of God can be used, each model with its own unique
strengths and weaknesses.
Sallie McFague brings her four-book cycle to completion with
Super, Natural Christians.We have seen all along that her theology is
practical, specifically, that it seeks models of God that will help us to
care for the Earth and the many species that inhabit it. Super, Natural
Christians is especially concerned with the pragmatic, ethical dimen-
sion of her thought.The very title of the book indicates that, rather
than focusing upon the supernatural or ethereal, Christians ought to
focus their attention upon the natural world, the body of God.We
can begin to unpack her argument by noting that the traditional
Western perception of our relation to everything around us is in
terms of a subject-object structure. I am a subject, an experiential
center that directs its attentions upon objects outside myself, objects
from trees, to other human beings, to God. But McFague argues that
this perception, however basic it may appear, is not an automatic
relation to reality: it is a construct, a model. Its one great disadvan-
tage is that it encourages us to reduce the other, of whatever sort, to
a mere object. And objects are things that are ultimately at our dis-
posal. What we need, she argues, is a new model, a subject-subject
model rather than a subject-object one. In this subject-subject
model, we empathize with the other as a genuine subject, a subject
that is other from our own subjectivity. McFague’s approach sounds
almost Zen-like, as well as a bit like Ursula Goodenough, when she
says that what we require is a way of “paying attention.”40 She goes
further in pleading for a “loving eye” toward the other:
We have been asking about how a Christian should love nature
and have suggested that practicing the loving eye, that is, recog-
nizing the reality of things apart from the self and appreciating
them in their specialness and distinctiveness, is a crucial first step.
It is opposed to the arrogant eye, the objectifying, manipulative,
and disengaged kind of knowledge that supposes that I am the
only subject and the rest of reality merely an object for me or
against me.We have suggested further that a helpful way to think
about knowledge with the loving eye is in terms of a subject
knowing another subject, especially on the analogy of friendship.41
70 Gods after God

Wishing to remain connected with the Christian tradition,

McFague asks how this subject-subject approach to the world can
be distinctively Christian.What does Christian faith, in particular,
have to contribute? “A Christian nature spirituality, then, is not
Christian praxis [transformative action] for nature apart from or
opposed to the well-being of the human oppressed. It is not a
nature religion, a nature mysticism, or a nature ethic. It extends the
paradigm of the destabilizing radical love we see in Jesus’ parables,
healing stories, and eating practices to nature.”42 It should be clear
that, for McFague, human salvation and the salvation of the natu-
ral world are inextricably connected.
An additional strength of this subject-subject theological
approach to nature, according to McFague, is that it can work pro-
ductively with contemporary science.

We cannot love what we do not know; we cannot care appropri-

ately for what we do not know. Accurate, detailed, scientific
information about other life-forms as as well as whole ecosystems
is central to educating the loving eye. Scientific knowledge need
not objectify the other. Rather . . . it can do just the opposite: it
can produce appreciation of and a desire to care for the other. In
fact, we cannot care for the wild others unless we do know, in
detail, in accurate detail, who they are and what they need.43

This is a refreshing perspective on the relationship between the sci-

entific method and love of nature. In contrast to what is so often the
case—commentators approaching science in terms associated with
thinkers such as Sir Francis Bacon who wanted science to put nature
on the wrack and force out her secrets—McFague reads science as
another avenue to deep appreciation of the world as God’s body.
In summary, then, McFague takes a “pragmatic” approach to
theology in which we use metaphors and models to describe the
relationship between God and the world, metaphors and models
that help us to care for that world.We know very little about what
God is like in and of Godself, but we can value as “true” those
models that help us to accomplish the ecological agenda, the
agenda of care for oppressed persons and oppressed nature, that
McFague’s Christian commitments prod her to take up.
 God and Pragmatism I 71

What are the major questions that might be posed to

McFague’s theology? First, McFague has been clear and honest
about the fact that, however radical her rethinking of the Chris-
tian tradition, she remains committed to the paradigm that tradi-
tion provides. The figure of Christ sets the paradigm within
which McFague finds herself and from which vantage point she
will evaluate possible metaphors and models. At the same time,
she acknowledges that there can be other vantage points, other
paradigmatic figures and perspectives from which to view the
relationship between the divine and the world. The question,
then, is this: what is the motive for allegiance to the particular
paradigm provided by the Christian tradition? Is it simply that
this is the tradition in which McFague was raised? Is it an arbi-
trary choice, especially in a world where one now has the option
to free oneself from any particular tradition and draw upon
resources from many? Is there any evidence that confining one’s
thought to the Christian paradigm produces a pragmatically
more effective way of approaching the world and other human
beings? Why not develop models based on both the Jesus tradi-
tion and the Buddha tradition? It would add to the intellectual
integrity of McFague’s work for her to explore these questions
in more detail.
Second is the matter of the relationship between McFague’s
theological vision and science. It is one of the great strengths of
her position that she sees science as an ally in creating the “lov-
ing eye” toward the world, rather than seeing science as a cold,
dissecting tool for reducing the world to a mere object. The
potential problem comes with her treatment of the notion of
divine agency. She scrupulously attempts to avoid accounts of
divine action that would get in the way of science’s view of the
operations of nature. Her God does not intervene in physical
processes or even act as a designer of nature or as an architect of
some sort of teleology within evolution. Instead, McFague’s God,
as we saw, is the encompassing, empowering spirit of the natural
world, the world as God’s body.The problem is that it is not clear
what such talk of encompassing empowerment adds to the scien-
tific account of nature. That latter account appears to be able to
72 Gods after God

explain everything that needs to be explained about how nature

works, rendering McFague’s God-talk superfluous in describing
the world. Her account becomes a mere “idling wheel,” as the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might say.
What is more, McFague’s talk of God as an enspiriting force
that animates the universe sounds uncomfortably like the thor-
oughly discredited notion of vitalism. Vitalism was a philosophy
that held that life cannot be explained exhaustively in terms of
purely physical, biological processes. Rather, one must point, in
addition, to some immaterial vital force that fructifies the world of
living things. But science has advanced to the point that physics,
chemistry, and biology can explain by themselves how life works,
without any need for the sort of power that vitalism advocates.
And, of course, nonliving portions of the physical world are even
less in need of vitalist explanations. McFague would do herself a
favor if she could show how her theology of God’s relation to
nature is more than an idling wheel and how it can be distin-
guished from vitalism.
One other criticism that has been raised about McFague’s
work, especially Super, Natural Christians, is that it seems to be
long on ecological ethics and short on theology. Isn’t her posi-
tion on loving and caring for the world almost exactly that of
secular ecological activists? Ought she not say more about the
God-component of her ecological ethic and about exactly what
that God-component adds to an otherwise secular ethic? Roman
Catholic theologian Lawrence S. Cunningham charges McFague
with being “strangely silent about her passion for the world of
nature from a theological point of view.”44 He goes on to say (with
nary a nod to charity, Christian or otherwise): “McFague’s solu-
tion, in my estimation, is somewhat sentimental and theologi-
cally thin.”45 Cunnningham overstates the case, as far as I am con-
cerned, especially when we put the theological ethic articulated
in Super, Natural Christians within the context of McFague’s
larger body of work. Remember also that McFague makes it
clear in Super, Natural Christians that she is applying the radical,
destabilizing love expressed in Jesus’ parables to nature. This is
surely a theological vantage point. But it is nonetheless always
 God and Pragmatism I 73

valuable to remind a theologian, and perhaps especially a radical

theologian who is willing to cut out many of the traditional
components of God-talk, that she ought to make perfectly clear
to her readers just what devotion to God is supposed to add to
ethical being-in-the-world.
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 — — 6

God and Pragmatism II:

Gordon Kaufman’s Project
of Theological Construction

T he great American pragmatist John Dewey set forth what

might be taken as a quintessentially pragmatist definition
of God. One could use the notion of God, proposed
Dewey, not to refer to a transcendent being who created the uni-
verse, but as a symbol of the unity of our ideal ends along with the
forces in nature and society that make the realization of those ends
possible.1 In Dewey’s pragmatic “theology,” then, there is nothing
supernatural: God is a symbol that pulls together our mundane
moral goals and the resources of society and the physical universe.
We have seen that Sallie McFague provides us with what might
well be interpreted as a contemporary pragmatist theology. But for
McFague, in contrast to Dewey, there is an element of genuine
transcendence involved: she holds to the traditional Christian (and
Jewish and Muslim) contention, however modestly, that reality is
not ultimately malevolent or indifferent but is fructified by a per-
sonal power that has the best interests of the universe and its inhab-
itants at heart. However, we have no direct access to this power that
animates the universe.Therefore, we are reduced to metaphors and
models in order to describe it, and we can never step completely
outside of our idiosyncratic values and vantage points in order to
determine whether those metaphors and models accurately

75
76 Gods after God

describe the divine as it is in itself. Rather, we rely on pragmatic

criteria for judging our theological models: do they help us to
work with God in caring for the creation and its inhabitants?
Indeed, in an essay in honor of Gordon Kaufman, McFague reveals
that her theological approach has become more oriented to prag-
matism as time has gone on.2
Christian theologian Gordon Kaufman’s own radical theology
can be placed between the proposals of Dewey and McFague.
Kaufman immediately confesses that he is interested in setting out
“a wider and deeper (pragmatic) framework” for understanding
human life, the world, and God.3 Like McFague, he holds that we
must construct models (he more often speaks of “metaphors” or
“symbols” or “images”) to refer to the divine and that their efficacy
must be judged not in terms of some abstract correspondence with
the nature of God in Godself but in terms of their ability to further
our practical and moral goals in life on this Earth. In fact, just as
McFague, Kaufman is particularly concerned about how our
notion of God can help us face the nuclear and ecological threats.
But, in contrast to McFague, Kaufman is not willing to start
with even such a modest residue of the traditional Christian faith
as the conviction that the universe is enspirited by a personal
power that benevolently directs nature and life. Rather, he suggests
that our God-metaphors point to a reality that is absolutely mys-
terious.Yet, unlike Dewey, who remains firmly planted in the non-
mysterious reality of everyday life, Kaufman’s “mystery” still means
that our symbols of God point to something beyond the ordinary
world that is present-to-hand.
In order to unpack Kaufman’s theology, then, let us begin with
his notion of mystery. Kaufman’s way of construing this mystery is,
one might say, itself a bit mysterious. He starts off clearly enough:
he tells us that what is mysterious is “that ‘ultimate reality’ which
is taken to ground and unify and comprehend all experience and
being.”4 It is this to which our metaphors or images of God will
somehow point. Now the notion that God is mysterious is a sta-
ple of traditional Christian thinking.The great thirteenth-century
theologian Thomas Aquinas argued, for example, that we cannot
describe God directly: all of our language about God must employ
 God and Pragmatism II 77

analogy. We can say something about what God is like, but never
exactly what God is in and of himself. And way back in the fifth
century a.d., the incomparable church father Augustine of Hippo
held that if we understand God, then it is not really God! But note
that this traditional sense of divine mystery was predicated upon a
fair amount of experience and knowledge of God. That is, it was
because of something such as an overpowering experience of
God—recall Rudolf Otto’s tremendum—or because we knew
through divine revelation that God was the omnipotent and
omniscient Creator of the universe that we concluded that our
finite intellectual faculties would never be able to plumb the inner
being of God. By contrast, for Kaufman, ultimate reality seems to
be pure mystery. This mystery is a function not of a modicum of
knowledge, but of total lack of knowledge. Indeed, even though
we will want our God-metaphors to refer to this mystery, we can-
not be sure that they do so:“we really do not know precisely what
it is in the world-process to which these metaphors refer. Faith
believes that they refer, but to what they refer remains in many
respects mystery”5 It is one thing to say that our metaphors are
only metaphors, and that we cannot be sure, except perhaps
through pragmatic tests, how effectively they refer to ultimate real-
ity. But Kaufman is here raising the possibility that, given his
notion of the mysteriousness of ultimate reality, we cannot even be
sure that our metaphors refer at all to what we suppose they refer
to. Thomas Aquinas knew that his words about God were only
analogies, but he thought that he knew to what he was referring
when he used human love as an analogy for God’s love. As the
quotation above suggests, Kaufman will have to fall back on some-
thing akin to an act of “faith” when he says that his God-symbol
refers to the ultimate mystery. But given his radical theological
predilections, it might be less misleading to say that he will fall
back upon a pragmatic wager. After all, to have faith requires that
we have sufficient knowledge about the trustworthiness of some-
thing or someone that we can invest our faith in it.
The plot thickens when we discover that a large portion of
Kaufman’s theology is constituted by his acceptance of the con-
temporary scientific worldview, what McFague calls the “common
78 Gods after God

creation story” (Kaufman does make reference to McFague’s

phrase). Thanks to contemporary science, it turns out that we in
fact know a great deal about that which grounds our being. Kauf-
man buys into an evolutionary view of the universe, a view that
describes a movement that begins with the big bang and is respon-
sible for numerous trajectories, including the trajectory that leads
to the evolution of life on Earth and the eventual appearance of
humankind. Furthermore, Kaufman knows full well, and does his
best to accept the fact that, the contemporary scientific creation
story has no room for a teleology, or goal-directed dynamic, that
leads intentionally or purposefully to homo sapiens.Yet, despite all
that science can tell us with reasonable certainty about the origin
of the universe and life within it, we have seen that Kaufman asso-
ciates that which grounds our being with inscrutable mystery. But
how can that which supports our being be inscrutably mysterious
if science is able to tell us so much about the ultimate origin of
things? The question becomes all the more pressing when we real-
ize that physicists are persistently working toward a “final theory,”
a “theory of everything” or “unified field theory” that would
explain how the fundamental forces that govern the universe ulti-
mately arose.
We can go a long way to solving this apparent inconsistency
in Kaufman’s theology by supposing that what he finds ultimately
mysterious about the universe is a matter of “existential mystery.”6
The term “existential” refers to those things that affect and deter-
mine the meaning and purpose and value of human existence,
rather than its purely physical characteristics.Thus, perhaps the sort
of mysteries that Kaufman wishes to emphasize are “the
inscrutable mysteries which men and women inevitably come up
against when pondering the hard questions of life and death and
the world.”7 In other words, what we can never know for sure is
whether the ultimate reality that grounds all experience and being
offers up any answers at all to our oh-so-human questions about
why we are here and how we ought to live our lives. Science, after
all, apparently has nothing to offer on these questions.
This brings us to the metaphor of God, for it is this metaphor
that will need to bear most of the weight of our attempt to find
 God and Pragmatism II 79

meaning and guidance as individuals within the cosmos and the

larger community of human persons. Kaufman begins his discus-
sion of the God-metaphor by asserting, radically enough, that all
theology must be viewed as “imaginative construction through
and through.”8 This is a radical assertion indeed, for even those
thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas who had a powerful sense
of what we do not know about God believed that the bedrock of
theology was something that was not our construction at all. For
the vast majority of Christian thinkers through the ages, theology
rested upon divine revelation, God’s self-disclosure to human
beings. This disclosure came through the prophets of Old Testa-
ment times and found its luminous consummation in the self-rev-
elation of God in Jesus Christ. That revelation is testified to
authoritatively in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments,
and according to some branches of the Christian faith, most
notably the Roman Catholic, it is also manifested to the Church
in the Church’s ongoing tradition. For Kaufman, however, famil-
iar notions of tradition, authority, and revelation go out the win-
dow. None of these notions square with our modern and post-
modern sensibilities, nor with our awareness as citizens of a
religiously pluralistic world that competing and wildly inconsis-
tent notions of the divine have each claimed such authoritative,
revelatory backing.All of our notions of God, he claims, have been
wholly human constructions, not gifts bestowed by the ultimate
mystery. We human beings come up with various symbols or
metaphors or images of God and use them to point to the ulti-
mate. The question of their truth or falsity is, finally, the question
of their usefulness or lack of usefulness for particular societies in
particular circumstances.
Today, then, our theologies ought to be self-consciously con-
structive; we now know what we are up to when we are doing
theology. Just what sort of God-symbol would be, according to
Kaufman, most beneficial in our own age, beset as it is by threats
of nuclear and ecological disaster, and informed by a scientific
knowledge of the cosmos and an awareness of religious pluralism?
We want an approach to God, says Kaufman, that is at one and the
same time “supremely humanizing and supremely relativizing.”9
80 Gods after God

To say that a God-image is humanizing is to say that it some-

how orients us in the world and empowers in us an ever-greater
appreciation of human potential so that we can live the most ful-
filling sorts of lives possible, in community with our fellow human
beings.To claim that a God-symbol is relativizing is to claim that,
by pointing to that which is ultimate mystery, it places us in a posi-
tion to see our own relative lack of power, knowledge, and moral
wisdom. The concept of God, in this second role, is a “limiting
concept”: it is “with reference to and in contrast with the concept
of God . . . that the deficiency of ultimate power and reliability in
everything else can be discerned, that the whole of our world and
everything in it can be seen as finite.”10
Here, Kaufman takes a page from Paul Tillich’s book (recall
Tillich’s influence on Mary Daly) in his concern that only if we
respect the ultimacy of God and our own limitedness, our finitude,
will we be able to avoid what the biblical tradition calls “idolatry.”
In its original form in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, idola-
try referred to the literal worship, in the place of the true God, of
something that was not God, even something as limited as the
product of human hands, as when the People of Israel bowed
down before the golden calf that they had fashioned. In the con-
temporary world, idolatry can be defined as orienting one’s life by
anything less than what is actually ultimate. Idolatry is to choose
as a “supremely adequate attachment-figure” something less than
God, such as power, wealth, or mere physical pleasure.11 It is, in
Tillich’s language, to choose something other than the genuine
God as one’s “ultimate concern.” Idolatry is a very real and prac-
tical danger for thinkers such as Kaufman and Tillich, because to
place all of one’s loyalty, without reservation, in something less
than the ultimate is not only to invite disappointment but also
destruction. Tillich would point us, for example, given his own
experience in Hitler’s Germany before the war, to the effects of
the German people making the German nation and its leader their
ultimate concern.
We have already gleaned a fair amount of insight as to what the
God-image ought to do according to Kaufman. It should refer to
the ultimate mystery, and by so doing, it should relativize all else
 God and Pragmatism II 81

that we encounter, including ourselves.At the same time, this God-

symbol should move us toward ever-greater degrees of human ful-
fillment and humaneness. But we have yet to consider the content
of the God-symbol itself.That is, we have looked at what it is sup-
posed to accomplish, but not at the human imaginative material
that actually makes it up and that, one can only hope, makes it an
appropriate pointer to the ultimate reality that grounds all being
and experience. When Kaufman does describe the content of his
proposed version of the God-symbol, he sometimes sounds almost
exactly like John Dewey: the symbol “God,” Kaufman avers,“sums
up, unifies, and represents in a personification what are taken to be
the highest and most indispensable human ideals and values.”12 But
we noted at the outset of this chapter that Dewey’s God-symbol
really has no element of mystery about it at all. And if we were to
construct our God-symbol simply as an imaginative tool for unify-
ing our own all-too-human ideals and values, how could we steer
clear of the idolatry that we have just seen Kaufman so assiduously
wants to avoid? We need something more.
That something more seems to appear when Kaufman fills in
his God-symbol with some of the details of the scientific account
of the evolution of reality, that is, with the details of the common
creation story.The metaphor “God” can then lead us “consciously
to attend to that which, in the evolutionary and historical
processes that provide the context of human existence (as we
understand it), gives us our humanity and will draw us on to a
more authentic humanness.”13 We are to focus upon a symbol of
God as “the serendipitous creativity manifest in evolutionary and
historical trajectories of various sorts.”14 This obviously requires
some interpretation.
Here is one interpretation of what Kaufman is attempting to
set forth: any God-symbol ought to refer to the ultimate reality that
grounds our existence.The scientific worldview tells us a great deal
about how we have received our existence. It uncovers a big bang,
an expanding universe, the formation of stars and planets, and the
creation of many different life trajectories on the face of the planet
Earth, and perhaps on other planets as well. Kaufman knows that
the scientific world picture refuses the notion of teleology: there is
82 Gods after God

no intentional, purposeful movement from the big bang to the

existence of the human species. Rather, there have been many dif-
ferent creative trajectories produced by the big bang, some of them
involving life and others involving nonliving things. Among the
trajectories involving life, many have turned out to be apparent
dead ends: the vast majority of species that have ever lived on the
face of the Earth have become extinct, and extinction may be the
inevitable fate of homo sapiens as well. But the symbol of God, pre-
cisely as a religious symbol, is not intended simply to reiterate the
scientific worldview. Rather, at least in the version of the God-sym-
bol being constructed by Kaufman, the symbol is meant to provide
a concrete focus for our search for existentially meaningful life, a
life of purpose and value—things not amenable to scientific analy-
sis—by pulling together certain specific elements of the scientific
world picture and unifying them under the heading “God.” The
symbol serves up for our attention and devotion just those elements
of the evolution of the universe that are supportive of human life,
the particular trajectory that did in fact lead to human existence,
and those features of nature that support our search for an ever
fuller, more humane way of life.
But why call this a symbol? Here we come to what I can only
take to be a major ambiguity in Kaufman’s use of language, one
that I shall attempt, however presumptuously, to clarify by sug-
gesting a tightening up of his terminology. Why is Kaufman’s so-
called symbol or metaphor or image of God not simply a reli-
giously and existentially useful view of the universe, one whose
usefulness flows from its selecting out particular aspects of the uni-
verse? For something to be a metaphor or symbol, it must fail on
the literal level and thereby point beyond its obvious, surface-level
meaning to something else.15 Care is obviously not a raveled
sleeve. Thus, when Shakespeare claims that it is, I look for some-
thing beyond the literal meaning of his statement and am led to an
insight about the disintegration of my mental well-being. And
when Sallie McFague says that God is Mother, that statement
makes no sense on the surface: God presumably does not possess
the female reproductive organs necessary to literally give birth.
Hence, once again, I look beyond the literal meaning of the asser-
 God and Pragmatism II 83

tion and am opened to various ways in which God is like a

mother.We must remember the “is” and the “is not” that are held
together in metaphor and symbol. One of the challenges posed by
Kaufman’s work is that it is often difficult to see just what is non-
literal in his supposedly symbolic God-talk, to see in what sense
his allegedly symbolic assertions or images break down on one
level and thereby point beyond themselves. What breaks down in
the idea of forces in nature that nurture human life and help it to
flourish? Because of this difficulty, one is sometimes unsure
whether Kaufman is talking about God in Godself or about a sym-
bol that is meant nonliterally to represent God.16
Consider a related issue: ordinarily, we think of a religious
symbol or metaphor or model as something very concrete, more
concrete than that to which it points, as when McFague uses very
human images—mother, lover, and friend—to refer to the divine,
or when Shakespeare uses a raveled sleeve to refer to a mental
state.We might expect that it would be just this sort of concrete-
ness that would allow Kaufman to unify the relevant strands of the
scientific picture into something that we could latch onto as a
source for orienting our lives, in other words, something such as a
God-symbol. But while earlier in his thinking Kaufman enter-
tained the possibility of using anthropomorphic elements—
anthropomorphic means, literally, “in the shape of a human
being”—in his construction of a God-symbol, he later moved
toward an interest in more impersonal realities, such as the evolu-
tionary trajectories described above. He argues, for example, that
we cannot conceive ultimate reality in personal terms, because the
only personal beings of which we are aware, namely, ourselves, are
the product of biological evolution.17 We know of no other ways
for persons to come into being. Hence, “God is not thought of
here as a particular being but rather as a particular form of order-
ing activity going on in the world, namely, that serendipitous
ordering which has given rise (among other things) to the evolu-
tion of life on planet Earth. . . .”18 But why should the fact that ulti-
mate reality cannot be literally personal, insofar as it is not a prod-
uct of biological evolution, prevent us from using persons as
symbols of ultimate reality? Symbols are supposed to be nonliteral,
84 Gods after God

after all. This ambiguity in Kaufman’s approach, again, makes it

unclear in the quotation above about God as an “ordering activ-
ity” whether the “God” about which he is speaking is his symbol
of God or God in Godself.
My proposed tightening up of Kaufman’s terminology and, by
extension, my attempt to eliminate this ambiguity in his writing is
spurred by the recognition that Kaufman often runs together terms
such as “metaphor” with a term that most theorists would regard as
something very different, namely, the term “concept.” For example:
. . . we will need to develop criteria to guide us as we con-
struct our conception of a focus for orientation, devotion, and
service which will most effectively facilitate human flourishing
and fulfillment—that is, which can guide our construction of the
image/concept God.Which models, metaphors, images, concepts
are most appropriate for imagining or thinking that to which we
should give ourselves with unqualified devotion today?19

It seems to me that Kaufman is not really after a nonliteral notion

of God at all; he is not looking for a “symbol” or a “metaphor.”
Rather, he is looking for a concept of God, something that works
on a single level rather than breaking down on a first level in order
to point to a second.What is radical in Kaufman’s theology is his
proposal that our theological notions are wholly human construc-
tions.They receive neither their foundation nor any of their com-
ponents from authority or tradition or, most important of all, from
divine revelation. Thus, while these constructions do not possess
the particular “is-and-is-not” configuration of metaphors and
symbols, they do have their own important “is not” built into
them: while something like the notion of the serendipitous cre-
ativity that has resulted in human life and flourishing is a concept
rather than a symbol or metaphor, as wholly a human construc-
tion, we really do not know at all whether this concept points
effectively to the ultimate mystery. The “is not” here, in other
words, is the “not” that strikes down any certainty that a theolog-
ical concept gives us genuine knowledge of the divine mystery.
Thus, while it is easy to understand why Kaufman might be pulled
in the direction of terminology such as “symbol,”“metaphor,” and
 God and Pragmatism II 85

“image,” what he is really talking about is literal concepts, but con-

cepts that have been fashioned exclusively by the human imagina-
tion and can offer no assurance that they describe how things
really are. From now on, then, we shall refer to Kaufman’s radical
project as one of constructing “concepts” of God.
At the same time, we should not fail to note that, while Kauf-
man focuses upon the literal notion of the serendipitous creativity
that leads to human life and its flourishing, as a theologian he dubs
this “God.” On the most practical level, this simply means that we
are to make this serendipitous creativity our ultimate point of ori-
entation and devotion, our ultimate concern. But by calling this
creativity God—or perhaps better said, by conceiving God in
terms of this creativity—we are inevitably tapping into, at the very
least subliminally, the whole Christian tradition’s various notions
of God. Kaufman forcefully critiques most traditional Christian
images of God, but to the extent that I at least unconsciously asso-
ciate the serendipitous creativity that leads to human flourishing
with traditional Christian notions of God—Creator, Father, Lord,
and so forth—one might say that I am employing those traditional
notions (rather than the concept of serendipitous creativity) as sym-
bols: they might function as concrete symbols of that now-more-
adequate concept of God as serendipitous creativity.This is some-
thing like what Paul Tillich had in mind, I think, when he said that
God can be a symbol for God (traditional images of God—a
supernatural father, for example—can be symbols of that which
we today wish to identify with God—Tillich’s “being-itself ”).And
perhaps this is related to what Kaufman has in mind when he says
that “the name ‘God’ can take up and hold together these vast and
complex [cosmic, biological, and historical] processes in a distinct
and powerful symbol.”20
Whatever the lack of clarity in Kaufman’s use of terms such as
“symbol,” we are allowed deeper into his theology by turning to
his use of the term “faith.” Kaufman, for all his radicality, happily
confesses that the whole process of constructing his concept of
God will involve numerous “small steps of faith.”21 It turns out that
Kaufman, in constructing his concept of God, allows that “signif-
icant leaps of imagination, going well beyond the direct evidence
86 Gods after God

before us, are required.”22 Here is what he has in mind: while the
scientific picture of the universe offers up no teleological move-
ment leading to human life and thus no assurance that there are
any existential values—meaning, purpose, moral rules—built into
the universe, one of the universe’s many evolutionary trajectories
did, after all, lead to the existence of human beings. And with the
advent of human cultures and societies, teleology does definitely
enter the picture, because socialized human beings do have partic-
ular visions of what it means to be a human person and they work
to come ever closer to realizing those visions. In retrospect, then,
might we not speak of “proto-teleological” tendencies in the uni-
verse?23 This question leads to the following illuminating rumina-
tion on Kaufman’s part: “we may well wonder whether there
might not be some sort of movement or tendency in the ultimate
nature of things which encourages the emergence of ever higher
and more complex forms of being (even though there is, of course,
no strictly scientific warrant for such a notion).”24
While this speculative movement beyond the scientific evi-
dence, a movement that fortifies Kaufman’s concept of God and
makes it more useful as the source of orientation for our lives, may
be a product of some sort of “faith,” let us consider some other
options. After all, as we noted earlier, the term “faith” seems a bit
inappropriate here, since it usually refers to personal trust in a
supernatural being who has revealed himself, and that is not part
of Kaufman’s theology. As a first explanation, there is what we
might call an affective element in play: Kaufman speaks of his
“feeling of profound gratitude for the gift of humanness,” and he
goes on to say,“I attempt to express both my piety toward and my
gratitude to the ultimate mystery which we daily confront. The
sense of gratitude for the gift of our distinctive human qualities
leads me to impute to this mystery a certain tension or movement
toward humanization, even humaneness.” 25
Perhaps more important, there is what I have called a “prag-
matic wager,” a move certainly consistent with the overall prag-
matic cast of Kaufman’s theology.The most famous of theological
wagers was set forth by Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century thinker
with very traditional Christian convictions. “Pascal’s wager” goes
 God and Pragmatism II 87

this way: a betting person ought to believe in God, for belief in

God is a “win-win” situation. If I believe in God and God does
indeed exist, I will live a meaningful life and be rewarded with eter-
nal life in Heaven after death; if I believe in God and there is no
God, I will lead a meaningful life and be none the wiser after death.
If I refuse to believe in God and God does exist, I will have a less
than fully meaningful life, and I will be punished in Hell after
death; if I refuse to believe in God and God does not exist, I will
avoid eternal punishment after death but will still have a less than
fully meaningful life. The conclusion: just in practical terms, it is
best to believe in God! Kaufman’s pragmatic wager is to say that,
while we can never know whether the universe is indeed “proto-
teleological” and does ultimately support the human project, it is
certainly useful to assume that this is the case, for it is an assump-
tion that will provide the most beneficial orientation in life and the
most potent impetus toward greater humanization.
All of this returns us to the subject of mystery and aids us in
understanding that potentially tricky notion in Kaufman’s
thought.The universe is not particularly mysterious from a purely
scientific point of view, but it is existentially mysterious.What sci-
ence tells us about the universe leaves open the question, at least
for Kaufman, whether the universe is ultimately hostile, indiffer-
ent, or supportive when it comes to the human struggle for fur-
ther meaning and humanization.26 It is in this existential, value-
oriented sense that the universe,“ultimate reality,” is mysterious.To
the extent that Kaufman’s concept of God, based on the idea of
serendipitous creativity that calls forth our continuing humaniza-
tion, claims to point to the way things ultimately are, it can only
do so with the greatest modesty. For we can never know whether
the universe is in fact existentially supportive of the human proj-
ect. Recall that this mysteriousness is important, for it “relativizes”
ourselves and everything in the world round about us: it shows us
our finitude, our limitedness.
Having attempted to figure out the basic contours of Kauf-
man’s concept of God, it is now time to step back and take a
broader view of Kaufman’s larger constructive project. His notion
of God fits into what he calls the “Christian categorial scheme.”27
88 Gods after God

Kaufman is here under the influence of the great eighteenth-cen-

tury philosopher Immanuel Kant, the single most influential
philosopher of the whole modern period. Kant posits the three
basic notions of God, self, and world as essential unifying ideas.
The idea of the world unifies all of those objects that I encounter
round about me. The idea of the self unifies a lifetime of experi-
ences by referring them all to a single, personal being. And what
Kant calls the “ideal” of God stands for absolute unity, that which
pulls all that is together. Kaufman believes that these three ideas
have always had an important place in the Christian tradition (not
just in Kant’s philosophy), but he updates them and renders them
more concrete.We have already seen that the concept of God does
indeed refer to that unifying mystery which underlies the whole
trajectory of human existence and its meaning, but its practical
task, precisely as this unifying source of meaning, is to provide us
with a single point of ultimate devotion and orientation for how
to understand and live in the world. Orienting ourselves by this
concept of God provides our best chance, argues Kaufman, for
continued advance toward humaneness, toward the full flourishing
of the human species.
It is even clearer in our own time than it was in Kant’s that we
also, as Kaufman avers, construct the concept of the self.The self is
no longer seen as some pre-formed, complete substance that comes
into being at conception. Rather, it is the product of our biology,
our personal upbringing, the mores of our society, as well as of our
free choices.The self is, says Kaufman, a “bio-historical” being.That
is, we are a product of the physical-biological forces that form our
bodies, but we are also historical beings, beings who become who
they are by growing up within a particular historical dynamic, the
ongoing development of a specific cultural current.
So too for the idea of the world. We do not actually experi-
ence the world as a single unified reality lying before our eyes.
How could we, given that the world is composed of a well-nigh
infinite number of particular components? No, we construct the
concept of the world as that unified arena in which we as indi-
vidual selves interact with other selves and other beings and enti-
ties, all under the eye of God.
 God and Pragmatism II 89

Now, as a Christian theologian, albeit a radical one, Kaufman

adds a fourth category to this basic scheme: the “picture” of Jesus
Christ.28 This picture qualifies and adds concrete detail to the cat-
egorial scheme of God, self, and world. Jesus provides the concrete
paradigm of just how human flourishing should be conceived:

The picture of Jesus which we can reconstruct historically gives

us a very striking image of the human: when this is made para-
digmatic, authentic human existence is seen to be life give in
service to others, life of unqualified agape [agape is the word in
the Greek New Testament that means God’s undeserved and
unconditional love for his creatures]. Here is a human being
entirely consistent with himself—teachings, actions, final mar-
tyr’s death: a life oriented entirely on self-giving, never self-
aggrandizement.29

Kaufman goes on to point out that “if Jesus expresses the authen-
tically human, his sort of self-sacrificing love should not be
regarded as merely a historical accident: it must be grounded in
and expressive of an agape at the deepest level of Reality.”30 Thus,
for the Christian, the concept of God as the serendipitous creativ-
ity that leads to human flourishing is filled out by the picture of
Jesus of Nazareth, for he provides a paradigm for understanding
concretely just what true human flourishing is all about.
One sees in Kaufman’s remarks here the echo of the tradi-
tional Christian assertion that Jesus Christ reveals God, indeed that
he is the incarnation of God, that is, that Jesus Christ is the very
presence of God in the flesh. Kaufman certainly picks up on this
tradition, but, not surprisingly, he gives it a different emphasis. He
focuses not just upon the individual Jesus of Nazareth, but upon
the communities of love, justice, and equality that should follow
from imitating the authentic humanity displayed in Jesus.Thus,

to say God is incarnate in Christ . . . is not to say simply and

directly that God is incarnate in Jesus; rather, God is incarnate
in that larger, more complex human reality, surrounding and
including and following upon the man Jesus: the new Christ-
ian community, with its spirit of love and freedom, of mutual
90 Gods after God

sharing and forgiveness of one another. It is in this new order

of interpersonal relationships that the incarnation of God is to
be found.31

But it is a function of Kaufman’s attunement to the contemporary

world and his conviction that theology is a free, human, construc-
tive task that he acknowledges that Jesus is hardly the only avail-
able choice as a paradigm for genuine human existence: “Other
quite different commitments are possible for us; other paradigms
of the human may seem much more plausible. Julius Caesar,
Socrates, Buddha, Henry Ford, Mozart, Henry Miller—any of
these may seem to reveal the truly human more adequately, and we
may choose to commit ourselves to one of these paradigms.”The
word “faith” crops up again here in Kaufman’s work, for he sug-
gests that which figure we choose as our paradigm, or which com-
munity or historical movement, is an expression of faith.32
But what about all those other faiths that Kaufman acknowl-
edges, those ways of orienting oneself to life that chose something
other than the picture of Jesus Christ as a paradigm? As a radical
theologian, Kaufman is not about to dismiss those other ways as
false, as missing out on the divine revelation and authoritative tra-
dition that grounds his way. For, needless to say, neither Kaufman’s
way nor any other is a function of divine revelation and unques-
tionable authority: each of the great world religions—let us con-
fine ourselves to those ways of being—is a function of the con-
struction of life-orienting ways of existence in the midst of
particular historical and social settings. But how should a Christ-
ian theology such as Kaufman’s approach the other world relgions?
First of all, we should, says Kaufman, keep in mind the afore-
mentioned fact that the christic paradigm points beyond the par-
ticular figure of Jesus of Nazareth to those communities of love
and justice and tolerance that reflect his way of life. Other religious
traditions might create their own communities of love, and justice,
and tolerance, that is, other similar manifestations of human flour-
ishing.This would allow us to find at least some common ground.
But perhaps even more important, Kaufman lays out a vision
of religious “truth” according to which truth is not to be sought
 God and Pragmatism II 91

in frozen, well-defined dogmas and creeds. When truth is in fact

seen in such dogmatic terms, then persons from one tradition will
be tempted to claim truth for their own dogmas and deny it to the
dogmas of other traditions. In place of this approach, Kaufman
proposes that truth be understood as a living process that arises out
of the back-and-forth movement of genuine conversation.33 After
all, given Kaufman’s emphasis on the historical-developmental
character that reigns within each individual tradition’s acts of reli-
gious construction and the internal pluralism that one finds there,
it should not be surprising for him to assert that truth could
develop out the larger historical-developmental dynamic of con-
versation among the world’s different religious ways. Of course
Kaufman is thinking here not of the prepackaged, formalized “dia-
logues” that are the order of the day in interreligious discussion.
Rather, he has in mind a real conversation, one in which the par-
ticipants allow themselves to be led by the unfolding dynamic of
the conversation itself. It is here, in the genuine interaction of dif-
ferent traditions, that new insights into truth may arise, insights
that were not in the possession of any one of the participants
before the dialogue began.
In summary of Kaufman’s ambitious enterprise, then, he holds
that we must self-consciously construct concepts of the divine that
will help to orient us in such as way that human life can flourish.
His notion of flourishing is constituted by a sensitivity toward
issues unique to our own historical moment, including the nuclear
and ecological threats, and he understands that all human beings
who occupy this moment must be allowed to contribute their own
traditions and voices to the project of theological construction.

What major issues does Kaufman leave unresolved, issues that

will be picked up by his critics and which must figure into any over-
all evaluation of his work? Two fascinating topics for debate can be
mentioned here. First of all, it is perhaps unsurprising that Kaufman
has taken fire from those who believe that one simply cannot aban-
don the personal element in the Christian notion of God. He has
been challenged, on the one hand, by those who are simply not
convinced that his arguments against thinking of God in personal
92 Gods after God

terms are valid.34 One might, on the other hand, demur on purely
existential grounds: the life of faith, the life of ultimate commit-
ment, can only be accomplished, so one might argue, in relation-
ship to something that can be engaged interpersonally, to some-
thing, indeed, that can be loved. The Bhakti sub-tradition within
Indian religion seems to understand this well: the Godhead in and
of itself may be an abstract, all-encompassing infinite, but in order
for me to give myself in devotion to this Godhead, I must attach
myself to one of the many personal manifestation through which
the abstract Godhead makes itself known. I will be a devotee of
Krishna or Shiva or Genesha or some other personal deity. Can one
love something as abstract as Kaufman’s “serendipitous creativity”?
And, if not, can such a notion of God really serve as an ultimate
point of orientation in life?
A second fascinating issue raised by Kaufman’s work is his
envisioning of a unified human community, and especially his
notion of the unifying role of the scientific worldview, that “com-
mon creation story” of which both McFague and Kaufman speak.
In some ways this goes very much against the grain of contempo-
rary postmodern sensibilities. For some so-called postmodernists,
the notion of a universal human community is an Enlightenment
illusion, and an oppressive illusion at that, inasmuch as it pictures
that unity as based on a Western European view of the world. Sci-
ence is, of course, part of this picture, for it is the paradigmatic
example of universal reason for Enlightenment, modernist
thinkers. But when we deconstruct what I called the “external
mastery” in my discussion of Mark C.Taylor’s book, scientific rea-
son is not universal at all: it is simply one (Western) construct for
viewing the world, what Nietzsche would call one “useful fiction”
out of many other possibly useful fictions.
Are Kaufman’s gestures toward universality hopelessly naive
and outdated, then? He might well respond by pointing out that
the world is being pulled together whether it wishes to or not by
certain universal crises. That is, there are various threats that
inevitably affect all cultures upon the face of the Earth, such as the
nuclear and ecological crises to which McFague and Kaufman pay
significant attention. What is more, how does one deny the de
 God and Pragmatism II 93

facto universality of the scientific worldview? Has it not perme-

ated myriad cultures that are, in other respects, very different from
one another? Isn’t it quite legitimate for Kaufman to challenge
Pure Land Buddhism in Japan with the tenets of the scientific
worldview?35 What society has made more use of the technical
fruits of science than Japan?
I would argue that, in any case, radical theologies must seri-
ously address the scientific worldview if they are to be relevant to
the present age. More traditional Christian theologies in their
twentieth-century guise tended to ignore science and the world of
nature in favor of the realm of history, the latter providing the
arena in which human beings encountered the revelation of God.
This attitude comes to clearest expression in the work of the mas-
sively influential Protestant theologians Karl Barth and Rudolf
Bultmann. But there is a movement afoot today among conserva-
tive and moderate Christian thinkers to take science with utmost
seriousness. Witness the impressive work of the philosopher of
religion Nancey Murphy.Thinkers like Gordon Kaufman are to be
congratulated for picking up the challenge of science on behalf of
radical theology.
Of course, given the radical character of Kaufman’s thought,
we may once more ask a question that was posed to McFague,
namely, whether such a theology has a sufficiently substantive the-
ological component to significantly differentiate it from purely
secular attempts to guarantee human flourishing. Hence, Robert
Cummings Neville, in commenting upon, In Face of Mystery,
observes,“This is a great book of liberal theology.That it might be
the last such book stems from the fear that humanistic ethics might
accomplish his purposes without the need for reimagining any
religious symbols whatsoever. Only Kaufman’s continued appeal
to mystery hedges this conclusion.”36 And, one might add, think-
ing of a query posed about Goodenough’s work, does Kaufman’s
notion of mystery have any appeal for persons used to the bene-
fits of belief in the supernatural father-figure of traditional West-
ern religion?
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 — — 7

Christ and the Tao:

Stephen Mitchell on Jesus as Zen Master

S tephen Mitchell is a poet, translator, and commentator. He

has focused upon spiritual or religious works, translating, for
example, both the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible or
Old Testament and the Taoist classic the Tao Te Ching. Mitchell is
steeped in the wisdom of the Zen masters and brings that wisdom,
along with related insights from the Taoist tradition, to his work.
In The Gospel According to Jesus, an abridgement and translation of
the Gospels of the New Testament along with extensive commen-
tary, Mitchell attempts to do what many before him in the mod-
ern and postmodern periods have tried: he seeks to distill the gen-
uine teachings of Jesus of Nazareth from what he takes to be
material of a very different spirit added by the gospel writers,
material that reflects the views not only of the writers themselves,
but also of the early church.
In order to see the radicality of Mitchell’s Jesus, let us begin with
a brief summary of the Christian church’s traditional teachings, the
church’s dogma, about Jesus Christ. Christ is, says the church, the
second person of the eternal Trinity and, hence, fully divine. He
took upon flesh in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth who was, then,
both fully God and fully man.The reason that this enfleshment, this
Incarnation, was necessary was because of human sin: the God-man
had to come to Earth to atone for the sins of his creatures who were
too caught up in that sin to extricate themselves via their own

95
96 Gods after God

power. Christ atoned for sin by offering himself as a sacrifice for sin
when he died on the cross (recalling the role of sacrifice in the Jew-
ish Temple, destroyed by the Romans in a.d./c.e. 70). Three days
later, Christ was resurrected from the dead, whereupon he was seen
for some forty days upon the Earth before ascending into heaven.
The church teaches that those who put their faith in Christ and
obey his teachings can take advantage of his atoning work and can
attain forgiveness of sin and passage to heaven to be with God after
death. By contrast, those who knowingly reject the Christ will be
sent to hell for all eternity.
Mitchell rejects this dogmatic tradition about Jesus Christ in
its entirety. He is interested not in the Christian tradition’s teach-
ing about Jesus, but rather in the teaching of Jesus (though he does
not doubt that Jesus was a healer, whatever the mechanics—psy-
chosomatic or otherwise—of that phenomenon). Mitchell, like
many other questers, would like to separate the Jesus of history
from the Christ of dogma. In the nineteenth century, there were
numerous attempts to find the “historical Jesus” and to set him
free from the dogmas of the church. The peculiarly nineteenth-
century versions of this quest were effectively brought to an end
by Albert Schweitzer’s epochal work The Quest of the Historical
Jesus.1 Schweitzer pointed out that most efforts to find the real
Jesus were not very good history at all: rather than finding the real
Jesus, nineteenth-century writers were painting portraits of Jesus
that simply reflected the predilections of their own times and
social milieus. After taking some time to absorb the full implica-
tions of Schweitzer’s chastening, the quest for the historical Jesus
was reborn in the second half of the twentieth century and con-
tinues to the present day, as represented in the work of such lumi-
naries as John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Raymond
Brown. Mitchell is fully aware of the work of contemporary Jesus
scholars, and he makes good use of it. However, he proceeds, by
in large, on the basis of what one might call a more “intuitive
method.” He looks for what is of “spiritual value” in the Gospels;
he seeks out words attributed to Jesus that have a distinctive sub-
limity about them and thus reflect the insights of a particular spir-
itual master.2
 Christ and the Tao 97

Mitchell is not the first to try this intuitive approach. He pays

due homage to that intellectual giant of American history,Thomas
Jefferson. In 1816, Jefferson made his own attempt to abridge the
Gospels and to purge them of what did not, as he saw it, belong
to the real teaching of Jesus. Jefferson avers that “in the New Tes-
tament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded
from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric
of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick
out diamonds from dunghills.”3 Jefferson’s Jesus and Mitchell’s are
not exactly the same, of course. In Jefferson’s, The Life and Morals
of Jesus of Nazareth, we have essentially a moral genius, just the sort
of moral genius that could be appreciated by Jefferson’s “Age of
Reason,” the Enlightenment mentioned in chapter one. For
Mitchell, by contrast, Jesus wishes to point us to the eternal and
unspeakable.
What, then, are the most fundamental differences between the
real Jesus and the “Jesus” invented by the Gospel writers and the
church traditions that they allowed to color their accounts? For
Mitchell,
Jesus teaches us, in his sayings and by his actions, not to judge (in
the sense of not to condemn), but to keep our hearts open to all
people; the later “Jesus” is the archetypal judge, who will float
down terribly on the clouds for the world’s final rewards and
condemnations. Jesus cautions against anger and teaches the love
of enemies; “Jesus” calls his enemies “children of the Devil” and
attacks them with the utmost vituperation and contempt. Jesus
talks of God as a loving father, even to the wicked; “Jesus”
preaches a god who will cast the disobedient into everlasting
flames. Jesus includes all people when he calls God “your Father
in heaven”;“Jesus” says “my Father in heaven.” Jesus teaches that
all those who make peace, and all those who love their enemies,
are sons of God; “Jesus” refers to himself as “the Son of God.”
Jesus isn’t interested in defining who he is (except for one pass-
ing reference to himself as a prophet); “Jesus” talks on and on
about himself. Jesus teaches God’s absolute forgiveness; “Jesus”
utters the horrifying statement that “whoever blasphemes against
the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal
sin.”The epitome of this narrowhearted, sectarian consciousness
98 Gods after God

is a saying which a second-century Christian scribe put into the

mouth of the resurrected Savior at the end of Mark: “Whoever
believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever doesn’t
believe will be damned.”4

Mitchell understands that a fair amount of the Gospels’ vindic-

tiveness is a function of their horrid anti-Semitism, which springs in
large part from the tensions that existed between church and syna-
gogue when the Gospels were penned. He would have no difficulty,
one presumes, in understanding Mary Daly’s contention that the
church’s teachings about Jesus and the cross represent a tool of
oppression and death.We have also seen an interest in Jesus, of course,
in the Christian theologies of Sallie McFague and Gordon Kaufman.
While Kaufman, and especially McFague, emphasize Jesus’ fellowship
with society’s outcasts in a way that Mitchell does not—Mitchell’s
Jesus is less a social prophet and crusader than a holy man, a guru—
both Kaufman and McFague clearly do their own at-least-implicit
editing of the Gospels and come out with a much less doctrinaire
Jesus than the one usually set forth by the Christian tradition.
For Mitchell, while one cannot defend the simplistic view that
all religions are the same—different teachers and traditions use dif-
ferent “skillfull means” as the Buddha would put it—it is nonethe-
less true that “when words arise from the deepest kind of spiritual
experience, from a heart pure of doctrines and beliefs, they tran-
scend religious boundaries, and can speak to all people.”5 He goes
on to assert,
The eighteenth-century Japanese Zen poet Ryokan, who was
a true embodiment of Jesus’ advice to become like a child, said it
like this:
In all ten directions of the universe,
there is only one truth.
When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same.
What can ever be lost? What can be attained?
If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of
time.
If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.
Look: this ball in my pocket:
can you see how priceless it is?6
 Christ and the Tao 99

This Zen poem provides a key to the teaching of Jesus that we dis-
cover in Mitchell’s book. Jesus is himself akin to a Zen master—
Mitchell calls him “a brother to all of the awakened ones: “the
awakened one” is the meaning of the term the “Buddha”—and
the God that he preaches is within everyone at all times, just as the
Mahayana Buddhist tradition teaches us that “all things are in Nir-
vana from the beginning,” and as Taoism shows the Tao embracing
all that exists.7
In order to provide a context for Mitchell’s interpretation,
then, let us take an all-too-brief look at Buddhism (especially its
Zen version) and Taoism. Sidhartha Gautama, the sixth-century
b.c.e./b.c. prince who becomes the Buddha, the “awakened one,”
teaches that suffering is the result of desire or selfish craving, what
is also sometimes called “attachment.” If the fancy new car of
which I am so proud is stolen, I shall suffer because I am attached
to my car. On a more profound level, if one of my loved ones dies,
I shall suffer because of my attachment to that person. But all such
attachments can ultimately be traced back to the ego, the self: the
selfish cravings that bind me to a world of suffering are my crav-
ings, the function of my living my life as if I am an independent
ego that must find its fulfillment by attaching itself to things and
possessing and controlling them.The Buddha wants to free us from
our suffering by showing us that the notion of the self, at least the
self conceived as this individual, isolated ego, is an illusion. Hence,
the Buddha teaches the doctrine of “no-self.”
When I have destroyed the illusion of the self as an isolated,
substantial entity, I am headed toward Nirvana. Nirvana can be
translated literally as “extinction,” that is, the blowing out of the
candle that is the illusion of isolated selfhood. But Nirvana also
stands for a state of being where one has passed into the infinite;
the isolated, substantial self is transcended and one is embraced in
all that is.
Zen Buddhism is a Japanese branch of the larger Buddhist tra-
dition, though it originated in China as Chan Buddhism (which
is where Taoism too originated, a fact that may help explain why
there is a good deal of similarity between Zen and Taoism). Zen is
what we might call the “meditational branch” of Buddhism.
100 Gods after God

Though meditation surely figures in other forms of Buddhism, it is

at the very heart of Zen. Practitioners meditate under the guidance
of a Zen master in order to attain satori, the Zen version of Bud-
dhist enlightenment, though one must be careful with this “in
order to,” lest it suggest just one more form of attachment. With
satori, one lets go of the egotistical need to categorize things and to
control them. One simply is, and one sees the things around one,
not as entities to be fit into one’s own plans, but rather in their sim-
ple “suchness.” One finds Nirvana within oneself and without, in
the world of nature. All things are in Nirvana from the beginning.
Taoism, as we shall use the term, is the way of being based
principally upon two classic texts, the Tao Te Ching and the
Chuang-Tzu. While the Tao Te Ching is attributed to Lao Tzu, he
may well be a merely legendary figure; what is important is the
content of the text itself. Similarly, the Chuang-Tzu purports to be
the teaching of the sage named Chuang-Tzu, but this may not
actually be the case historically. Taoism holds that our dissatisfac-
tion in life springs from our egotistical proclivity to resist the nat-
ural order of things. I want to have the world my way, so I make
my plans and execute my strategies upon the world in order to
secure happiness for myself. But this way of going about things is
based upon a pathetic delusion. It is to resist the very way of the
universe, namely, the Tao itself. To take a particularly dramatic
example, I suffer at the thought of having to die, because I resist
the natural rhythm of the universe, in which death is a necessary
moment. The Tao is the ultimate reality that empowers the uni-
verse and shows itself in the rhythms of nature. It is not a personal,
self-conscious being, but an enlivening force beyond our compre-
hension: “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” the Tao
Te Ching tells us in its opening pages.8 Indeed, from the perspec-
tive of ordinary thought, the Tao seems a kind of emptiness.“What
makes a bowl or a vase useful?” ask the Taoist sages. It is not the
sides of the vessel, but precisely the empty space within that is
important. So, too, the Tao is a mysterious emptiness that encom-
passes and holds all that is.The goal of the spiritual quest is to turn
off our individual egos and to harmonize ourselves with the Tao,
to allow the Tao to flow through us. As Chuang-Tzu teaches,“Do
 Christ and the Tao 101

nothing”—in other words, allow the ego to do nothing—“and all

things will be well done.” The Tao that flows through me will
assure my harmony with the universe and my right action.
Stephen Mitchell’s Jesus comes not to die on the cross in order
to atone for sin, but rather as a teacher who wants to show us that
we are all already within the “Kingdom of God,” or that it is
within us. And just as the Buddha, or Lao-tzu, or Chuang-tzu, he
comes as an ordinary man, indeed a man who has sinned at vari-
ous points in his life. First of all, Jesus had to struggle, says Mitchell,
with the sin of anger and resentment against his mother. Why?
Because she bore him illegitimately, thereby condemning him to a
life in which his first-century countryman would heap scorn upon
him. Mitchell, following some other commentators, argues that
the doctrine of the virginal conception, so much a part of later
Christian dogma, is really just an attempt to cover up the fact,
well-known among Jesus’ contemporaries, that he had been born
out of wedlock. In one part of the Gospel story, Jesus returns to
his native Nazareth to teach. How do the townspeople react?
Mitchell renders the passage this way: “And when the Sabbath
came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many people who
heard him were bewildered, and said, ‘Where does this fellow get
such stuff?’ and ‘What makes him so wise?’ and ‘How can he be a
miracle-worker? Isn’t this the carpenter, Mary’s bastard . . . ?’ And
they were prevented from believing in him.”9 We see a further
connection between Jesus and sin in that he went to the Jordan to
be baptized by John the Baptist who, the Gospels clearly tell us,
was baptizing for the forgiveness of sins.
It follows that Jesus had to undergo his own spiritual quest.
One part of that quest was to overcome his anger against his
mother (whom he is shown treating dismissively in several Gospel
stories), and that may be why forgiveness is such a central theme
in the teaching of Jesus (consider the “Lord’s Prayer” or “Our
Father,” for instance, or the famous parable of the Prodigal Son
where the father instantly forgives his wayward son). But exactly
how did Jesus’ spiritual quest proceed, and when did he attain his
spiritual breakthrough to genuine insight about what he would
call the “Kingdom of God?” Mitchell tells us that
102 Gods after God

we know nothing about Jesus’ enlightenment experience,

which changed him from carpenter to Master, from “son of a
whore” to a son of God [something that all of us can
become]. . . .The experience may have happened at any time: as
he was hammering nails in his workshop, as he was walking on
the pebbly shore of the Sea of Galilee, perhaps as he was fasting
and meditating in the wilderness. The Gospel of Mark implies
that it happened while he was being baptized by John the Bap-
tist, and that may be the historical reality.10

We gain a bit more insight when Mitchell goes on to explain

We can use different metaphors to describe the experience that

changed Jesus. It is the kind of experience that all the great spir-
itual Masters have had, and want us to have as well. Jesus called
this experience “entering the kingdom of God.”We can also call
it “rebirth” or “enlightenment” or “awakening.” The images
implicit in these words come from experiences that we all
know: the birth of a child, the light of the sun, the passage from
sleep to what we ordinarily call consciousness. Any of these
images can be helpful in pointing to a realm of being which
most people have forgotten.11

Hence, Jesus is not the eternal Son of God come to Earth; he is an

ordinary human being who must attain his own enlightenment.
Nor is he a Savior who will atone for the misdeeds of others; he
is a spiritual master who will point the way that others must tread
on their own if they, too, wish to become a child of God in the
manner that Jesus has.
But just what does it mean to become a “child of God?” Here,
too, Mitchell gives a radical answer, for he reads Jesus’ “God” as a
reality closer to the Tao than to the personal, supernatural father
who intervenes in history to perform specific deeds and to reveal
himself to specific persons. Let us survey examples from Mitchell’s
book that suggest this approach. First of all, we recall that the Tao
Te Ching teaches that the eternal Tao is unnamable. So too with
Jesus’ God:“The portrait of Jesus that emerges from the authentic
passages in the Gospels is of a man who has emptied himself of
desires, doctrines, rules—all the mental claptrap and spiritual bag-
 Christ and the Tao 103

gage that separate us from true life—and has been filled with the
vivid reality of the Unnamable.”12 Of course, it is still possible to
say something about God and the kingdom of God:

What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the

love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present,
beyond longing. . . . Like all the great spiritual Masters, Jesus
taught one thing only: presence. Ultimate reality, the lumi-
nous, compassionate intelligence of the universe, is not some-
where else, in some heaven light-years away. It didn’t manifest
itself any more fully to Abraham or Moses than to us, nor will
it be any more present to some Messiah at the far end of time.
It is always right here, right now.That is what the Bible means
[in the Book of Exodus] when it says that God’s true name is
I am.13

In traditional Christian doctrine, of course, the kingdom of God is

viewed very differently. The Kingdom of God is God’s personal
rule over nature and history, when the wolf will lie down with the
lamb. It has begun, in a way, with the coming of Jesus but will not
come to full flower until the Second Coming of Christ at the end
of history as we now know it. It is also true, however, that many
translations of the Gospels have Jesus say that “the kingdom of
God is within you,” a translation that Mitchell fully endorses (a
few contemporary translations render this passage as “the kingdom
of God is among you,” in other words, in the person of Jesus and
in his mighty works).
Mitchell continues:

When Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, he was not

prophesying about some easy, danger-free perfection that will
someday appear. He was talking about a state of being, a way of
living at ease among the joys and sorrows of our world. It is pos-
sible, he said, to be as simple and beautiful as the birds of the sky
or the lilies of the field, who are always within the eternal Now.
This state of being is not something alien or mystical.We don’t
need to earn it. It is already ours. Most of us lose it as we grow
up and become self-conscious, but it doesn’t disappear forever;
it is always there to be reclaimed, though we have to search hard
104 Gods after God

in order to find it. . . . Entering the kingdom of God means feel-

ing, as if we were floating in the womb of the universe, that we
are being taken care of, always, at every moment.14

Mitchell confesses that “I am using the word God to point to the

ultimate, unnamable reality that is the source and essence of all
things.”15 In other words, we encounter a form of pantheism here,
where the divine is identified with the all, rather than with an
individual being. In commenting on the danger of religious
visions and experiences wherein one supposes that one sees God,
Mitchell says, “In any vision there is still a subject and an object;
we are here, the vision is there.”16 But God is not in fact a distinct
reality over against us: the kingdom of God is within us, and we
are within it, as within the womb of the universe.
But how, exactly do we reawaken our sense of the total pres-
ence of the kingdom of God, a sense, it will be recalled, that
Mitchell believes we all possessed in childhood? If we look to Jesus
as our guide, we recall that “he has emptied himself of desires . . .
[and] let go of the merely personal.”17 His way of being is distin-
guished by “disinterestedness and compassion.”18 What could be
more Buddha-like? “For Jesus,” says Mitchell, “the more we sur-
render, the more we are carried along in the current of God’s
love.”19 According to Mitchell’s reading of Jesus’, “Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God,” the pure in heart “aren’t
attached to [their] concerns; they have no self for selfishness to
stick to; hence they can be carried along in the clear current of
what is.”20 How Buddhist, and how very Taoist!
Although Mitchell’s book is obviously all about a re-transla-
tion of and commentary upon the four gospels that became part
of the official Bible of Christendom, he is well aware that con-
temporary scholarship has found many other gospels besides. Of
special significance is a cache of documents uncovered in 1945 at
a place in Egypt known as Nag Hammadi.With finds such as Nag
Hammadi, we know of gospels attributed to Peter, to Mary Mag-
dalene, and to Thomas, among many others. The Gospel of
Thomas has received special attention from scholars because it was
apparently written at least as early as some of the Gospels in the
 Christ and the Tao 105

Bible and yet expresses a quite different sensibility about Jesus. It

thereby tells us something about the lively pluralism of early
Christian thought and practice. Thomas emphasizes the notion
dear to Mitchell that the Kingdom of God is within us, indeed is
encompassing, and not simply external. Hence, Mitchell quotes
the following passage from the Gospel of Thomas:
Jesus said,“If your teachers say to you,‘Look, the kingdom is in
heaven,’ then the birds will get there before you. But the king-
dom is within you, and it is outside you. If you know yourselves,
then you will be known; and you will know that you are the
sons of the living Father.” (Thomas, 3)21

One of the most insightful commentators upon the nonbiblical

Gospels is the scholar Elaine Pagels. It is significant for our pur-
poses that, as she points out, when in the Gospel of Thomas Jesus’
followers ask him for instructions about how to pray, what to eat,
and other matters,“he answers only with another koan:‘Do not tell
lies, and do not do what you hate; for all things are plain in the
sight of heaven.’ In other words, the capacity to discover the truth
is within you.”22 A koan is a riddle posed by the Zen master to his
pupil, the intention of which is to move the pupil to new insight,
insight usually not available within the confines of ordinary logi-
cal and social convention.The most famous of all koans is the ques-
tion: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
There is something Taoistic in Mitchell’s account of Jesus’ atti-
tude toward morality.Think of the parable of the Prodigal Son. A
wealthy man has two sons, and the younger of them asks for his
inheritance and sets off on a life of waste and debauchery. After
sinking to a low point spiritually and morally, he decides to return
to his father’s house and ask his father’s forgiveness. But before he
can even enter the house, his father sees him coming down the
road, goes out to greet him with the greatest joy, and arranges a
lavish party for the son and his friends. Hearing of all this, the
father’s older son grumbles: hasn’t he always been the good son, the
one who stayed with the father and obediently served him, yet the
father never killed a fatted calf upon which the elder son and his
friends could feast? The father explains to his resentful elder son
106 Gods after God

that he has always loved him and that, indeed, all that the father
owns is the son’s as well. But this is a special occasion, for a son
who had been lost has now been found.
Interpretations of this parable usually focus on the younger son
and the father’s forgiveness of him. But contemporary biblical schol-
ars often tell us that Jesus’ intended focus was the elder son and his
reaction. It is this older son upon whom Mitchell comments:

The older son is a figure for the ordinary pious person, not for
the truly righteous. He is a good man, but not a wise one; that
is, he obeys God’s word, but the word hasn’t become flesh. Of
this kind of person Lao-tzu says:
When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.23

In other words, Taoism cautions against conventional morality, in

which one attempts to calculate tables of right and wrong and fol-
low them slavishly.The felt need to obsessively separate right deeds
from wrong ones overlooks the wisdom of the philosophy of ying
and yang: principles that appear contradictory—right and wrong,
male and female, hot and cold—are actually complementary and all
fit together into the unity that is the Tao.“The Master’s vision,” says
Mitchell,“comes from beyond good and bad.”24 Rather than trying
to serve an artificially calculated morality, one should shut down
the ego and allow the Tao to flow through one. Recall Chuang-
tzu’s advice: “Do nothing, and all things will end up being well
done.” Hence, Mitchell interprets Jesus’ attitude toward the Jewish
commandments this way: “The commandments are a means of
simplifying our life and preparing the way for eternal life; they are
not eternal life itself.When eternal life breaks through and lives in
us, we find that the commandments keep themselves.”25
Even Mitchell’s reading of Jesus’ view of the root of evil
sounds more Buddhist or Taoist than traditionally Christian.
Referring to the lost sheep in Jesus’ famous parable of the one
sheep who wanders off from the flock, Mitchell instructs us that
the “clear-minded way of seeing a wicked person [is] not as some-
one who ‘is’ wicked, but as someone who through ignorance has lost
 Christ and the Tao 107

his way.”26 The Buddha would agree; the Taoist would agree; even
Plato would largely agree. But traditional Christian doctrine
teaches that wickedness is not a function of mere ignorance but,
rather, of willful rebellion against God. For Christian dogma, to
know the good is not at all necessarily to do the good. Hence, the
Apostle Paul’s plaintive cry that he is a divided self: he knows the
good and even wants to do it, but cannot bring himself to do it.27
The real Jesus, asserts Mitchell, takes the compassionate route of
seeing the allegedly wicked person as simply ignorant; he or she is
simply not yet “awakened.”
Of course, the benighted Apostle Paul has come in for much
abuse over the years in the works of those looking for the real Jesus
hidden in what they take to be the muck of Christian tradition and
dogma. Nietzsche, disparagingly, called Paul the “first Christian.” It
is Saint Paul, after all, who lays out the whole doctrine of the neces-
sity of Christ’s atoning death on the cross and the notion that the
whole point of the Christian quest is to end up with eternal life
after death. According to Mitchell, Paul was spiritually “very
unripe. . . . He didn’t understand Jesus at all. He wasn’t even inter-
ested in Jesus; just in his own idea of the Christ.”28 This recalls Mar-
tin Scorcese’s wonderful 1988 film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’
The Last Temptation of Christ.29 There Jesus encounters Paul, played
by the gifted character actor Harry Dean Stanton, preaching his
version of the Christian message. Jesus points out to Paul that he
has it all wrong. Saint Paul’s response? He doesn’t care. He’s got a
good thing going; he knows what people want to hear. It is true, of
course, that Paul’s letters in the New Testament do not deal with
the teachings of Jesus much, if at all. Rather, they lay out Paul’s own
theology of what Christ has accomplished on behalf of sin.
Suppose that we end, appropriately enough, with “last things,”
the teachings on resurrection and life after death that traditional
Christian theology places under the heading of “eschatology” (lit-
erally,“reasoning about the end”). Here, too, Mitchell demurs from
the tradition’s approach. He sees no hint in Jesus’ teachings of the
doctrine of the human person being resurrected or living on as an
individual ego after death. Indeed, Mitchell refers to the “legends
of the resurrection” of Jesus himself as “poignant whistlings in the
108 Gods after God

dark!”30 The Prodigal Son’s coming to his sense’s and returning to

his forgiving father is, according to Mitchell,“the only kind of res-
urrection that Jesus ever spoke about.”31 Yet, Jesus did speak of
“eternal life,” and Mitchell has a place for it in his reading of Jesus’
message. Eternal life is, he says, “a synonym for ‘the kingdom of
God’: a life lived in such a way that the personality becomes trans-
parent and the light of God shines brilliantly through; a life lived
fully in the present moment, beyond time.”32 As for death, specifi-
cally Jesus’ own death, we can end where Mitchell himself does,
with a quotation from the Tao Te Ching:

The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and he has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn’t think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day’s work.33

The nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus came, as

we saw, to an ignominious end.Twenty- and twenty-first century
biblical scholars have much more sophisticated historical and liter-
ary tools at their disposal for ferreting out the historical Jesus.Yet
even this contemporary quest does not look particularly promis-
ing: the Jesuses produced by scholars such as Borg, Crossan, and
Brown all seem quite different from one another.34 What, then, of
Mitchell’s intuitive method for reclaiming from the Gospels a dis-
tinctive and spiritually wise voice? The truth of the matter is that
we seem to have no way to know whether Mitchell, or anyone else
for that matter, whatever method he or she might employ, has
found the “real” Jesus of Nazareth. Short of inventing a time
machine and traveling back to meet Jesus and listen to his teach-
ing, there seems no way to be certain of what the real Jesus taught.
 Christ and the Tao 109

And even then, who can say whether we would be wise enough
to grasp what Jesus really wanted to communicate?
But there is another way of approaching Mitchell’s, The Gospel
According to Jesus, and it is the way that is most pertinent to our
own concerns in this book. How does Mitchell’s reading fare, not
as a historical reconstruction of the teaching of Jesus, but as a rad-
ical theological/spiritual proposal, a proposal about how we ought
to construe the divine and live in harmony with it? In one sense,
it is a tried-and-true approach to the spiritual quest, informed by
classic Buddhist and Taoist sensibilities. And Mitchell’s view of the
divine is not wholly out of harmony with the views proposed by
Daly, Goodenough, and Kaufman. What is more, Mitchell ties his
reading of the divine much more closely to (his construal of) the
teachings of Jesus than do these other thinkers, which may be a
plus for those seekers who find Jesus a particularly attractive spir-
itual master or who want to stay connected, in however tenuous
or radical a fashion, to the Christian tradition.
None of this changes the fact, of course, that Mitchell’s whole
project presupposes that the great spiritual traditions of the world,
while not all just the same, do in fact largely agree on what con-
stitutes the spiritually mature life. And this is perhaps where the
greatest challenge to Mitchell’s project crops up. There are plenty
of historians of religions, especially in the present day, who want
to situate religions very particularly in their own historical times
and places of origin and of continual evolution. Those who
embrace this “historicist” approach may well look askance at
Mitchell’s whole undertaking and judge it as intellectually naive.
Maybe it is at this point that Mitchell, too, ought to become some-
thing of a pragmatist, a fellow-traveler with McFague and Kauf-
man: perhaps the definitive question is not whether Mitchell has
found the real historical Jesus, but whether Mitchell’s eclectic spir-
itual vision works, granting that even the notion of what works
may be relative to criteria proposed by different traditions.
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 — — 8

Gods and Goddesses:

Naomi Goldenberg and a New Polytheism

A
s is the case with Mary Daly, Naomi Goldenberg is inter-
ested in the interface between feminism and spirituality,
and she, too, is convinced that that interface necessarily
produces radically new notions of divinity. But it is Goldenberg’s
unique contribution to bring the psychoanalytic thought of Sig-
mund Freud and Carl Jung to bear on the discussion of feminist
religiosity and goddess-talk. While many feminists recoil from
Freud and Jung, given the undeniable sexist elements in their
thinking, Goldenberg rejects these sexists elements and then digs
for other dimensions of the two analysts’ thought, which she
believes are useful in the development of feminist spirituality and
feminist psychological strength.
Now it must be admitted that, in her more recent work, Gold-
enberg has felt fully comfortable calling herself an “atheist.” And
her research and writing have seemed to concentrate less on radi-
cal theology or thealogy:1

In the past few years, my work has turned away from what I
would term the “religious” psychologies, namely, Jungian and
post-Jungian, to classical psychoanalysis, Freudian and post-
Freudian. My old interests are still the same—myth in the mind,
women in myth and the world—but I’ve become less and less
able to mystify these topics, and I find myself increasingly inter-
ested in more materialist methods. I have begun writing about

111
112 Gods after God

what I now see as a flight from people in our theories, and in

our lives. I think there are ways in which psychoanalytic theory
can address the dehumanization in the world [the way in which,
for example, we begin to think of ourselves after the model of
the machine] and, I hope, help to slow it down.2

But this does not undermine the importance of her earlier

thealogical work. In addition, even in Goldenberg’s later, more
strictly Freudian undertakings, there are implications aplenty for
radical religious thinking.
We should note at the outset that Goldenberg is one of those
feminists who holds that traditions such as Judaism and Christian-
ity are hopelessly sexist; they are irreformable. She apparently
agrees with contemporary witches—practitioners of Wicca, for
example—that

when Jesus Christ set himself apart from women and sexuality,
he lost his connection with material joys and earthly dynamics.
Christianity, witches say, had to become a religion focused on
death, martyrdom, and self-denial. Life in this world had to be
devalued in favor of some vague notion of life after death.3

It is Goldenberg’s own contention that “theologians envision sal-

vation as up, out, and beyond, and call this hoped-for-state of dis-
sociation the ultimate reality. In fact, it is no reality at all but rather
a death-wish, which Christianity aptly symbolizes by a male dying
on a cross.”4
It is likely, according to Goldenberg, that “as we watch Christ
and Yahweh tumble to the ground, we will completely outgrow
the need for an external god.”5 However,“religion,” asserted Jung,
“can only be replaced by religion,” and Goldenberg, at least in her
earlier work, wholeheartedly agrees.6 But this new “religion” will
be much more focused on psychological dynamics than were the
traditional Western religions: “Feminist theology is on its way to
becoming pyschology.”7 And we ought to keep in mind that this
new way of theologizing that Goldenberg has in mind will be rad-
ical not only in its rejection and replacement of the God of Jew-
ish and Christian tradition, but also in that it will reject traditional
 Gods and Goddesses 113

sources of authority.An authoritative text such as the Bible will be

replaced, principally, by women’s own concrete experiences.
Let us begin, then, with what Goldenberg thinks ought to be
learned from the work of Sigmund Freud. It is easy for feminists
to reject Freud as a misogynist, a theorist who hypothesized that
women suffered from “penis-envy” and that they could never
develop the intellect as fully as men. The latter charge stemmed
from Freud’s thoughts about the famous “Oedipus complex,” in
which the young boy develops a sexual attachment to his mother
and fears his father, while the young girl is attracted to her father
and sees the mother as her competitor. One can only mature fully,
and thus set the intellect free, if one can break out of the Oedipus
complex. But it is much harder for women to break free, argued
Freud. Boys overcome the Oedipal attachment to the mother
because of their castration anxiety, an element of their fear of
reprisal by the father. But women, of course, do not suffer from
castration anxiety. Indeed, they long for a penis, or its substitute, a
baby. And without castration anxiety to free themselves from the
Oedipus complex, women will remain psychologically fixated on
that stage and intellectually stifled.
But we can look for elements in Freud—those elements that
constitute his critique of traditional religion—that are independ-
ent of the misogynist moments in his thought.“In the writings of
Sigmund Freud,” Goldenberg tells us, “‘religion’ had two key
attributes—the first was that it limited thought and the second
was that it was inextricably bound up with the image of a Father-
god.”8 How does religious belief limit the development of the
intellect? It inculcates absurd doctrines that have no proof of any
sort to back them up. The doctrines are believed simply because
one is taught by one’s forbears to believe them, and any impetus
to question them is squelched. The intellect can hardly be prop-
erly trained and sharpened in such circumstances. In The Future of
an Illusion, Freud declares that religious doctrines are believed
simply because people wish them to be true; they want to believe
in a God who can protect them from the terrors of nature, rec-
oncile them to fate and death (by providing life after death, for
example), and compensate them for putting up with society’s
114 Gods after God

rules and regulations (prohibitions that deny human beings the

satisfaction of their natural desires). Reasoning and evidence
never enter the equation.9
All of Freud’s major works on religion—The Future of an Illu-
sion, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism—make clear the
role of the father in Western religion.10 Historically speaking, reli-
gion began, Freud speculates, with the killing of a primal father, so
that a totem animal, and later a god, became an unconscious sub-
stitute for the slain leader. In terms of the development of the indi-
vidual, Freud notes that children need a father both to protect
them and to punish them when they disobey society’s dictates.
When one becomes an adult, one should face the harshness of
reality on one’s own, but religion prescribes a psychological imma-
turity in which one looks to the protection and direction suppos-
edly afforded by a cosmic father-figure, namely, God. The stifling
of the intellect figures in here too, for dependence on a father-god
dictates against our working beyond the Oedipal stage and thus
against “the primacy of intelligence.” Goldenberg explains that “in
Freud’s view, stagnation in the Oedipal complex meant psycho-
logical and thus intellectual stagnation.”11
These Freudian contentions certainly argue against the phe-
nomenon of traditional Western religion; such religion, for Freud,
is not only false but also destructive. But the same contentions may
actually serve as support for thealogy, the feminist turn to images
of the divine that eliminate the centrality of the father-god. Gold-
enberg points out that

when we contemplate the fall of the great father-gods, we are

contemplating the eradication of Oedipal religions. Freud had
hoped that psychoanalysis would eliminate father-gods
through scientific reasoning. But, in fact, feminism may prove
to be more effective. By challenging the authority of males on
Earth, feminists make effective onslaughts on male authority
in heaven.The feminist attack is probably more basic than the
one made by Freud. Freud’s insistence on male rule in the
family and in society does not challenge the image people
have of authority itself as paternal. Freudian theory still gives
real authority to males even though it argues against project-
 Gods and Goddesses 115

ing that authority to an external supernatural realm. Femi-

nism, on the other hand, challenges male authority at the basic
imagistic level.12

This is where feminist thealogy fits in, of course, for it can provide
very specific and powerful images which challenge the authority
of the father, namely, female images of the divine.
Freud would have us not simply overthrow the traditional
Western images of the father-god, but overthrow religious sensi-
bilities altogether. Here is where the thealogist would do well to
turn to the thought of Carl Jung, for Jung, it will be recalled,
opined that “Religion can only be replaced by religion.” But the
replacement piety that Jung has in mind is not faith in an external
deity, but a concentration on the internal dynamics of the psyche.
As Goldenberg titles chapter four of Changing of the Gods: “When
Fathers Die We All Turn Inward.” Carl Jung began as a disciple of
Freud. Eventually, however, he broke with Freud and, contra
Freud’s approach to religion, Jung argued that religion, recon-
ceived as an inward psychological phenomenon, was a prerequisite
to mental health rather than an obstacle to it.
What are the basics of the Jungian view of religion? Jung is par-
ticularly well-known for his theories of the collective unconscious
and archetypes. Retained in an unconscious common to the race,
says Jung, there exist powerful archetypes, such as the Hero arche-
type, for example.These archetypes in the collective unconscious are
not fully formed symbols; rather, they are tendencies or broad pat-
terns that get filled in by different cultures in different ways. The
Hero archetype, for example, is an image that helps the individual
undertake the quest for “individuation,” wherein she brings together
the various components of her psyche and experience in order to
form a unified and healthy psyche. In the West, Christ is a prime
example of the concretization of the Hero archetype.We ought not
to worry about a transcendent God who rules from on high, but
rather on the divine within. The old, traditional God, who forbids
us to share in his own freedom and binds us to his authority through
channels such as the Bible all gave way for Jung when, as a school-
boy, he had a strange vision of the city’s beautiful cathedral:
116 Gods after God

I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forth-

with into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me
the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high
above the world—and from under the throne an enormous turd
falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the
walls of the cathedral asunder.13
“God” has in fact broken the bonds of traditional piety and its
authority structure asunder. One can now turn inward, to some-
thing such as the archetypes.
Jung is quite willing to add feminine images to his treasury of
archetypes and symbols. For example, he is powerfully impressed by
the Roman Catholic doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary the
Mother of God into heaven and, as a result, can imagine or sym-
bolize the Godhead as a Quaternity instead of as a Trinity. In addi-
tion, Jung speaks of the anima and the animus as archetypes. The
anima is the feminine side of the male of the species hidden in his
unconscious, while the animus is a parallel masculine component
that a woman has the opportunity to put herself in touch with.
Before we proceed to draw upon Jungian components in the
construction of a feminist piety, however, we must note two sig-
nificant weaknesses in Jung’s thought, one material the other for-
mal. The material weakness, in other words, the weakness of spe-
cific content, is this: while Jung is, as we have seen, happy to
include feminine archetypes in his psychoanalytic theory, it turns
out that his reading of the feminine is decidedly sexist.The femi-
nine, glimpsed in the anima in the male unconscious for example,
is tied up with Eros or love and is decidedly lacking when it comes
to Logos, the power of mind and reason. Hence, Rosemary Rad-
ford Ruether, one of the most influential of contemporary femi-
nist religious thinkers, warns, in Goldenberg’s words, that “Jung
deserves adamant disdain because his theories about women are
more deceptive in their sexism than those of Freud.”14
But there is also an important formal weakness in Jung’s
thought as far as Goldenberg is concerned, specifically a weakness
built into his theory of archetypes. “I now understand,” she
explains, “that any way of thinking which posits the existence of
transcendent entities that direct human thought and behavior
 Gods and Goddesses 117

tends to be both antiwoman and anti-life.”15 Whether it be Plato’s

forms (the ancestor of the Jungian archetypes) or a transcendent
God, such notions of transcendent perfection can all too easily
become instruments of suppression and control. Something tran-
scendent always stands above me and outside me, and thus tends
to impose itself upon me.
But this does not mean that all is lost when it comes to uti-
lizing Jungian psychology as a resource for feminist spirituality.
What is useful in Jung is not what he has to say specifically about
the feminine, but rather his general notion of religious innovation
through symbols. Forget the allegedly universal, transcendent
archetypes, advises Goldenberg, and focus instead on the general
emphasis in Jung’s work on turning inward and utilizing the
human psyche’s power to create flexible stories, symbols, myths,
and images. We should rely here on our fantasies and upon our
dreams.This is where the real religious development of the psyche
takes place. Says Jung, “Myth is the revelation of a divine life in
man.”16 The religious imagery that a woman produces in her
dreams and fantasies should be followed through, allowed to
develop, and trusted as avenues to understanding and action. The
goddess or goddesses that can come into view in these processes
of dream and fantasy are indeed internal but are no less real for
that reason. For it is through our most important images that we
orient ourselves in the world. They provide our concrete vantage
points and motivations for action and thus, in the most practical
sense of the term, are profoundly “real.” Even historical images,
such as that of a matriarchal age in which women were supreme—
an image that can give women a sense of their own worth and
power—need not put us in touch with actual history in order to
be important and effective.17
Where might we find a concrete example of this sort of free
creation of one’s spirituality? According to Goldenberg, “Witch-
craft is the first modern theistic religion to conceive of its deity [or
deities] mainly as an internal set of images and attitudes.”18 If we
carefully examine contemporary witchcraft—a movement such as
Wicca, for example—we will note, says Goldenberg, twelve char-
acteristics that clearly demarcate it from traditional Judaism and
118 Gods after God

Christianity.19 First, of course, is the matter of female deities; god-

desses take the place of a male God. Second, there is no dualism
of body and soul.The body is not the “prison of the soul” as many
religions would have it, but a component of our reality as sacred
as the spirit.Third, nature is sacred.This is a theme we saw clearly
in Sallie McFague’s work, and it should be recalled what she took
to be its practical consequences for the ecological crisis, a crisis
not far from the thoughts of thinkers such as Ursula Goodenough
and Gordon Kaufman as well. Donald Crosby would chime in
here too. Fourth, the individual will is valued instead of sup-
pressed: the goal of the spiritual life is not to “lose oneself ” as
often seems to be the case in a religion such as Christianity.
Rather, one celebrates one’s unique, individual will. Five, practi-
tioners of witchcraft hold what Goldenberg calls a “spiraling
notion of time.” That is, witchcraft rejects the linear notion of
time found in Judaism and Christianity, a notion according to
which time starts with Eden, degenerates, and then moves under
divine providence to some definite end-point of history, such as
the Kingdom of God and the appearance of the Messiah (whether
for a first or second time). Instead, time is taken to have a circu-
lar, cyclic rhythm in which we should learn to live. Sixth, bodily
growth and decay too is cyclic. Death and decay are accepted as
natural, not as a cause for despair, and certainly not the result of
some original sin. The seventh characteristic that Goldenberg
mentions is precisely the denial of original sin in any form.
Eighth, one finds the (for Westerners) radical assertion that there
is no division of good and evil. One’s particular actions in specific
circumstances can be good or evil, but there are no moral
absolutes built into the nature of the universe. Nine, witches have
no sacred text. There is no authoritative scripture to quash plu-
ralism or to hinder the free play of images and dreams. Simi-
larly—this is the tenth characteristic—there is no rigid law of dis-
cipline in contemporary witchcraft. This is a function of a view
of who we are on our most basic levels: we are not cauldrons of
antisocial passions which must constantly be held in check.
Rather, attentiveness to the cycles of life is all that is required for
us to live beneficent lives. Eleven, sexuality is not controlled and
 Gods and Goddesses 119

repressed but, instead, is allowed to follow its own internal regu-

latory processes. Finally, in the twelfth place we find that play, and
even spontaneous humor, are characteristic of witchcraft and its
forms of worship, something largely unthinkable in the staid wor-
ship services of much of traditional Judaism and Christianity.
In contemporary witchcraft, then, we see what a piety looks
like that is built, not on notions of an external deity handed down
by patriarchal ancestors, but upon the practice of following the
leads of one’s own spiritual dynamics and developing the images
and fantasies that are part of one’s own creative spiritual work.
Even in this sort of highly internalized and psychologized piety,
we need not worry about chaos resulting; we can still have gen-
uine spiritual community, as movements such as Wicca show.The
key, suggests Goldenberg, is that while the content of different
individuals’ piety may vary, the (essentially Jungian) process is
largely the same.There is a sense of community that can arise from
individual questers engaging in the common process of finding
the goddess within.
When it comes to the question of thealogical “ontology,” that
is, the question of the being that the goddesses possess here, the
question of their reality, we must conclude that Goldenberg sug-
gests a radical line of thinking indeed. Suppose that we take Mary
Daly’s thought as a point of comparison. Daly, too, is a feminist of
course, and she is equally concerned with the power of the God-
dess as something that is within women. But Daly nonetheless
connects this power with something such as the “Ground of
Being” that encompasses all that is and allows it to be. And while
Sallie McFague bases her whole theology on our creation of
metaphors and models for the deity, she nonetheless wagers that
these images somehow correspond to a personal God who created
the universe and is beneficent toward it. Goldenberg, by contrast,
seems to look entirely to individual psychological processes and
fantasy for her account of the being of goddesses. Goddesses are
wholly the products of women’s fantasies and dreams. Of course,
these goddesses are, for Goldenberg, no less real for all of that.
Here Goldenberg might share at least a bit of common ground
with that indispensable pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, for,
120 Gods after God

speaking of our ideal ends, Dewey points out that “ends, purposes,
exercise determining power in human conduct.”20 For Golden-
berg, such powerful, reality-forming ideal ends can be derived
from the fantasies and dreams out of which feminist questers con-
struct their images of the Goddess.
If there is a danger in the goddess images that women can pro-
duce via the psychological powers uncovered by Carl Jung, it is
that women may turn around and render their own constructions
dogmatic and brittle. But Jung can be of help here, too, suggests
Goldenberg. He understood that it was important to keep one’s
images flexible and to keep moving along in the process of delv-
ing into one’s psyche and working with what is found there. In
short, if we avoid Jung’s sexism and his reading of the archetypes
as one more form of transcendent authority, he can provide fem-
inist religious seekers with both the tools for producing powerfully
real images of the divine within themselves and for preventing
those images from hardening into stultifying dogma.
If there is one topic where mining Jung’s thought, and even
modifying it, cannot produce the results that the feminist spiri-
tual quest requires, it is probably the importance of the human
body.We have already seen in other radical theologies the impor-
tance of the claim that we are our bodies and that those bodies
are inextricably tied up with the larger physical universe around
us. Radical theologies are seldom satisfied with the notion of a
transcendent God who is, for all practical purposes, independent
of his creation, or with the idea of the human person as a dis-
embodied thinking thing that has no need for the web of nature.
But Goldenberg appears to go even farther than some of the
other radical theologians we have considered in emphasizing the
absolutely crucial significance of the human body. For her, the
Gospel of John’s assertion, “And the Word was made flesh” is
backwards. We all begin as flesh; words come later.21 Or as Adri-
enne Rich so poetically puts it, “All our high-toned questions
breed in a lively animal.”22
Let us follow the psychoanalytic thread here for a bit, before
returning explicitly to thealogy. Goldenberg is inspired by some of
James Hillman’s insights about our embodiedness:
 Gods and Goddesses 121

Hillman suggests using animals as models for people. For

instance . . . he speaks of a cat as climbing a tree with “animal
faith.” He says “it loves the tree, loves itself, loves jumping and
climbing—no self-examination there, no introspection about
belief. Or it would stay home; or see a priest.” I think we would
probably be better off if we saw ourselves as less spiritual and
more animal.23

We all begin as flesh; words come later. But it turns out that
even words are much more bodily than traditional Western
thought has ever imagined. In psychoanalysis,“interest is focused
on the physical, emotional, historical contexts of words,
thoughts, and actions. . . .” Thus, Goldenberg assures us, “all lan-
guage is shown to be body language.”24 And if language is about
the body, it is also about the body in its environment, its interac-
tion with other bodies, for the body never exists in strict isola-
tion.The relationship between language and embodiment is use-
fully illuminated for Goldenberg by the work of Norman O.
Brown.

To reveal the live, collective body in which we all take part,

Brown thinks our language should be rich in image and sym-
bol. He understands metaphor to mean metamorphosis.
Speech that uses symbols is transformative because symbols
demonstrate linkages. Every symbol says that one thing is like
another and thus testifies to an unconscious conviction that all
things are interrelated. For Brown, speech alive with imagery
could lead to a broader sense of participation in human and
nonhuman environments. He reflects sporadically on the illu-
sory boundary between “body” and “world.” “The body . . . is
identical with environment,” he writes. Metaphor, for him,
functions to express the unreality of our separation from
nature.25

We have already seen the importance of symbol, metaphor, and

model in many of the thinkers whom we have considered. Brown
helps us to understand how those forms of language are expres-
sions of embodiment and connection with the larger world. Gold-
enberg continues,
122 Gods after God

Furthermore, according to Brown, metaphors show “a subter-

ranean passage between mind and body.” Every word begins
from a sense of particular physical being and reaches outward:
“No word is metaphysical without its first being physical.”
But in order to promote the connection between what is felt
to be mind and what is felt to be body, he thinks that lan-
guage must be allowed to evoke many meanings, to be poly-
valent and polymorphous [Wouldn’t Mark Taylor agree?].
Words must be allowed to flow into one another in order to
become new things and to foster an erotic sense of reality.
Brown appreciates the psychoanalytic method of free associ-
ation [part of the “talking cure” that is psychoanalysis].
Speech, he thinks, must be free to make associations, to form
attachments.26

This grasp of how language is tied to bodiliness and to the body’s

location in the larger web of nature provides our segue back to
feminist thealogy. For feminist thealogy draws upon words, images,
and symbols from women’s dreams, fantasies, and experiences to
create visions of the Goddess or of goddesses. Not only are these
goddesses bound up with women’s bodiliness and interconnection
with nature, the goddess symbol par excellence is, of course, that
of the Mother goddess.The Mother goddess is that universal body
from which our own bodies are imagined to come forth and that
embraces all that is in its divine womb.
Mother-matter-matrix [these terms are all related to the Latin
mater, mother].

“Woman” is the stuff out of which all people are made. In the
beginning was her flesh, and, after the beginning, she continues
to suggest human historicity, to suggest human connection to
and dependence upon the outside world. It is this deep mem-
ory of birth union, I think, which turns any serious reflection
on women into a reflection on the interconnection of human
beings with each other and with all the things which make up
the body of the world.27

Of course, different persons can imagine the Mother goddess

in different ways, and no one’s imagination is limited to the Mother
 Gods and Goddesses 123

goddess alone: the human psyche can bring forth a multitude of

goddesses and gods, of guiding divine forces. Some of the old
divinities may even hang on, suitably recontextualized:

I do not expect that the continued presence of male gods will

be harmful to women. Women experience psychic oppression
only when father-gods are touted as the sole images of the
highest religious value in a society.This condition defines patri-
archy, fosters scorn for women and dupes women into believ-
ing that they are innately inferior to men. However, when
father-gods are present within a panoply of psycho-religious
images, they can no longer enforce their former tyranny.
Women will be free to reconsider Christ and and Yahweh and
to find new places for them.28

Hence, we face an issue in Goldenberg’s thealogy that we have not

directly encountered before, namely, the possibility of a contem-
porary polytheism. Two kinds of polytheism are actually at issue
here: there is an internal polytheism wherein the single individual
comes up with a number of different images of deity, and an exter-
nal polytheism wherein different individuals imagine different
gods and goddesses. Goldenberg goes so far as to say that
“monotheism becomes increasingly untenable as we recognize the
rights of people to live out a variety of life styles under a variety
of rules.”29 Indeed, she predicts that “the claim that there is a uni-
versal God who dispenses universal experiences of His presence
will be recognized as the primitive notion that it is.”30 For Gold-
enberg, the replacement of monotheism is not just an inevitable
result of the dynamics of present-day culture and of the contem-
porary psyche and its creative powers. In addition, polytheism is
ethically desirable. She suggests that monotheists ought to “live
part of their lives as polytheists. A polytheist would be obliged to
acquaint herself or himself and her or his children with more than
one religious perspective in order to encourage the capacity for
empathy with people seen as ‘others.’”31 We shall have to deal with
polytheism again in our final chapter, where we shall juxtapose the
many different perspectives that we have studied in the first eight
chapters of the book.
124 Gods after God

What elements of Goldenberg’s thought might immediately

produce questions? Two issues come quickly to mind. First, there
is the matter of reducing the experience of the divine to the inter-
nal dynamics of the individual psyche. Now Goldenberg assures us
that the images produced by dream and fantasy are eminently
“real” in the real effects they have upon our perceptions of ourselves
and our world and the guidance they provide in negotiating our
way through life. Nonetheless, these images obviously do not pos-
sess the independent reality, a reality “external” to the self and its
imagination, that persons expect from their deities. Indeed, even
most of the other radical theologians whom we have studied
appear to invest their notions of God or Goddess, however imma-
nent they may be, with a bit more independent reality than Gold-
enberg allows.
Goldenberg is not without an answer to this potential cri-
tique, of course: the quality of externality in life-guides, whether
the God of traditional Judaism and Christianity or Plato’s forms or
Jung’s archetypes, are in fact destructive of the human quest for
meaning. That which is perceived as transcendent to the self can
only quash the free and independent development of the individ-
ual psyche; better images produced from within the psyche of the
individual than notions of a ruling transcendent deity who
imposes his will upon us from without. One suspects, however,
that thinkers such as Mary Daly, Sallie McFague, and Stephen
Mitchell, to name a few, would argue that one can have the best
of both worlds, namely, a deity that is more than merely a product
of the individual psyche but who is nonetheless fully immanent
within the self and the universe.
There is a second challenge that Goldenberg will inevitably
face, perhaps a more difficult challenge than the one just
addressed: the psychologies of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud are
taken with less than full seriousness by the majority of psycholo-
gists and psychiatrists today. A more scientific approach to the
mind has won out, with its ability to scan the intricate structures
of the brain and its reliance on a “medical” model that emphasizes
drug therapy for psychiatric ills. The theories of Jung and Freud
suffer from a lack of scientific rigor in that they can never really
 Gods and Goddesses 125

be tested, and thus never proven false or true. In the more techni-
cal jargon of the philosophy of science, Jungian and Freudian the-
ory do not produce sufficiently testable predictions for the theo-
ries ever to be capable of definitive “falsification.” And if there is
no way to test whether a theory might be false, the theory isn’t
really saying anything of scientific interest. Of course, if this scien-
tific standard were applied across the board, many of the assertions
of the theologians whom we have considered in previous chapters
might come up wanting. But perhaps the problem is a little more
severe in the case of psychoanalysis, especially in its Freudian vari-
ety. Freud’s notions of how things are repressed into the uncon-
scious, and of how the Freudian analyst can supposedly bring them
into the light of day, through dream analysis for example, strike
some critics as highly subjective (if not just nonsensical) and even
dangerous. My therapist might convince me that I have repressed
a memory of sexual abuse by a family member; I end up publicly
accusing the family member, all on the basis of my therapist’s pos-
sibly highly subjective interpretation of my dreams.Trenchant cri-
tiques of Freud on this subject and others have been mounted by
a host of contemporary writers.32
Of course, perhaps we should read Goldenberg in a more con-
structionist, pragmatic fashion, just as we suggested reading
McFague in a more constructionist mode than she herself may
intend. That is, rather than interpreting Goldenberg’s claims as
dependent upon the literal and scientific accuracy of Freudian and
Jungian analyses of the psyche, perhaps we should suppose that
those analyses function in her work just as sources for one’s own
inspired construction of symbols and images that can guide the
spiritual quest. Freud and Jung are wonderfully imaginative com-
mentators on the human condition. Perhaps they are artists more
than scientists, and, as such, they open new vistas for our spiritual
vision.The proof of the pudding here, in good pragmatic fashion,
is in the actual tasting. In other words, let us go ahead and forge
our spiritual symbol-guides on the basis of Freud’s and Jung’s artis-
tic visions and then simply check to see whether those symbols
prove productive (at least by one’s own standards of spiritual pro-
ductivity) in our quests.
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 — —9

The Future of Radical Theology

W e have considered eight diverse examples of radical

theology.These are proposals that are radical insofar as
they reject, to differing degrees, the notion of a super-
natural personal being who intervenes in human history and inso-
far as they self-consciously free themselves from traditional sources
of religious authority such as creeds and scriptures. In chapter one,
we considered the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-cen-
tury antecedents of contemporary radical theologies, and we
explored some of the reasons for both the origin of radical the-
ologies and their continuing production in the present day. But
what of the future of radical theology? Surely by examining eight
different and important instances of radical theology, we are in a
position to make some judgments about both potential strengths
and weaknesses in the whole notion of radical theology, strengths
and weaknesses that will ultimately determine whether radical
theology will continue into the distant future or, rather, is destined
to fade away.1 Will the “first world” come to be divided simply
between rigorously traditional and fundamentalist religious sensi-
bilities on the one hand and purely secular consciousness on the
other? Or will there continue to be a place, not only for radical
popular movements such as New Age spirituality, but also for rig-
orously thought out radical religious proposals?
We shall begin with a consideration of what the eight theolo-
gies we have considered hold in common.To the extent that there

127
128 Gods after God

is strength in numbers, these commonalties presumably bode well

for the future of radical theology. As already noted, they all share,
in some measure, a rejection of the notion of a supernatural per-
son who intervenes in the world and of traditional sources of reli-
gious authority. All of them seem to emphasize the immanence of
the divine, the fact that the “Kingdom of God” is, at least poten-
tially, within each one of us rather than outside of us. We started
with Mary Daly. Drawing selectively and cautiously on Paul
Tillich’s notions of the divine as the “power of being” and the
“ground of being,” Daly pictures the divine as intimately con-
nected with women’s being and the larger natural world in which
women, like all living things, find themselves situated. Finding
Being within women themselves and their experiences powerfully
exemplifies both the rejection of traditional Christian notions of a
transcendent Father-God and of traditional sources of authority.
Daly expects women to find Goddess in the spinning of their own
life webs, not in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church of
her upbringing. Indeed, for Daly, Christianity, with its Son of God
on the cross, is a religion of death rather than of life.
Mark C.Taylor, too, surely has no interest in traditional religious
authority. In fact, his book represents a kind of nontheological the-
ology, an “a/theology.” Taylor stands in the line of those thinkers
such as Thomas J. J. Altizer who speak of a “secular theology.” And
Taylor’s thought certainly emphasizes immanence. He focuses, after
all, upon language and dubs it the divine milieu, that within which
all of our meanings arise and pass away. Everything that we can think
and experience is encompassed within this milieu. But rather than
saying that the divine is within us, and that language is merely a tool
at our disposal, it would be truer to say that we are not only “in”
language, but are products of the intersection of various currents of
language. The element of immanence is only reinforced here by
noting that language is not ethereal for most deconstructionists, but,
finally, material. While language can never be a substantial “thing,”
an entity that is present-to-hand for our manipulation, it neverthe-
less, especially as text, partakes of the physicality of existence.
Immanence and spirituality surely go hand in hand for Ursula
Goodenough. Recall that, while Goodenough can find symbolic
 The Future of Radical Theology 129

meaning through participation in traditional Christian services of

worship, nature itself is for her the object of spiritual contempla-
tion.There is no divine being who designed and created the world
and who steps in to control the ongoing processes of nature.
Rather, in Goodenough’s “religious naturalism,” the religious ele-
ment is precisely the sense of wonder and awe that spring from
mindfulness toward the natural world. She speaks of her “covenant
with Mystery.”There will always be a sense of awe and mystery—
sometimes even terrifying mystery—before the vastness of the
physical universe and in the face of questions such as “Why is
there anything at all, why not simply nothing?” Scientific knowl-
edge, far from being antagonistic to spirituality, only strengthens
the possibility of mindfulness toward nature and allows us ever
deeper into the complexities of the physical world.While he is not
a scientist and is less attuned to the specifically scientific approach
to nature, Donald Crosby is in a host of other ways Ursula Good-
enough’s fellow traveler. He, too, looks to nature alone as the
proper object of our religious concern. Religious naturalism is a
radical theology indeed, for the very word “theology” can only be
used in a symbolic or extended sense: the holy arises not as some-
thing totally outside ourselves, such as the God and the gods of
old, but in the relationship that can exist between ourselves, if we
are mindful, and our purely physical home. A large part of this
emphasis on the spiritual as immanent can find practical instanti-
ation in ethical sensitivity to ecological issues.
Sallie McFague may seem the most dubious of our candidates
for inclusion in the thought-world of “radical theology.” She
holds, however tentatively, to the notion of a personal being who
has created the universe and acts beneficently toward it. But there
are many reasons for including McFague in our survey. First, even
her adherence to a personal God seems more a wager than an
absolute certainty.We have, she is willing to assert, but the scanti-
est of information about the being of God. Furthermore, her God
is thoroughly noninterventionist . Second, far from being tied to
traditional sources of authority such as the Bible for her concep-
tions of the divine, her whole theological program is imaginatively
to create new metaphors and models for God. Those models and
130 Gods after God

metaphors are chosen not on the basis of authority, but on prag-

matic grounds.And such metaphors and models always combine an
“is” with an “is not” in what they have to say about the divine.
Third, the particular metaphors and models that McFague proposes
put a premium on the notion of divine immanence, as is evident
with what might well be called her “keystone model,” the world as
God’s body. Fourth, McFague’s emphasis on immanence and her
connection of the divine with the whole web of life leads her, like
Goodenough, to emphasize the need for ecological sensitivity: reli-
gion is no longer simply about the salvation of the individual soul,
but about the salvation of the whole world of nature in which the
individual is ensconced. Finally, in our critique section in the chap-
ter on McFague, we suggested that it might be well to push
McFague to face up to the implications of her radical convictions
and see her theology in more constructionist terms.
Gordon Kaufman’s theology is radical in that it sees theologi-
cal propositions arising not from authorities on high but from
human theological construction, construction guided by prag-
matic concerns. There is certainly a place for transcendence in
Kaufman’s theology, for he emphasizes the need for a notion such
as God to relativize all of our human thinking and doing. But this
practical or “functional” notion of transcendence is perfectly com-
patible with what can only be deemed an immanent God: Kauf-
man identifies his God with the serendipitous evolutionary cur-
rent that led to human life and that, he wagers, pushes toward
ever-greater humanization. He, too, sees a major component of
theology today as the attempt to fashion notions of the divine that
aid us in caring for the natural world.
Stephen Mitchell provides a particularly fascinating twist on
radical theology. He begins with Jesus of Nazareth and the four
Gospels of the New Testament. What could be more traditional
than that? But, as we have seen, Mitchell’s reading of Jesus and the
Gospels is anything but traditional. First of all, he eliminates any
portions of the Christian tradition that picture a harsh, resentful
supreme being who sends sinners off to hell. Indeed, his “God”
turns out to be something much more like the power that flows
through all that is, a force that manifests itself not as a God with-
 The Future of Radical Theology 131

out, but a God that is within us and all else that exists. In fact, we
found strong parallels between Mitchell’s “God” and the Tao. And,
of course, we read his Jesus as essentially a Zen master. In order to
attain enlightenment or salvation, then, one does not look with-
out to an external God or to external authorities, but within: the
Kingdom of God is within you. Once again, we can sense, if some-
what less directly here, a concern about the world of nature, for
the Zen-like spirituality espoused by Mitchell would presumably
have us see the things in nature not as mere objects for us selfishly
to manipulate, but as realities that ought to be appreciated in their
simple “suchness.”
Naomi Goldenberg should have no difficulty establishing her
radical credentials. Her Goddess is thoroughly immanent, an imag-
inative response to psychological forces and possibilities. There is
no suggestion whatsoever in her thought that the divine is an
independent being outside the human psyche. One would do bet-
ter looking to one’s dreams and fantasies than to traditional scrip-
tures in order to get in touch with this divine. Goldenberg’s theal-
ogy bears only the slightest resemblance to the Jewish or Christian
theologies of old. Indeed, she is, in the end, more comfortable with
a contemporary polytheism than with monotheism
We cannot but put these commonalties on the credit side of
the ledger in considering the prospects for radical theology. The
fact that these thinkers, from a variety of backgrounds and diverse
angles, hammer away at the same themes—human initiative in
conjuring up the divine (or at least our awareness of it); freedom
from traditional sources of religious authority; the immanence of
God; the interconnection of God, self, and the natural environ-
ment—surely suggests that these themes carry significant weight
in our culture today. There is a widespread spiritual longing to
which these radical theologies respond, albeit more on the level of
theoretical analysis than on the level of practical piety.
But, alas, if the commonalties go in the credit column, we
must not overlook the very significant differences among these
eight proposals and consider the possibility that the differences
belong in the debit column. In order to see the potential problem
or challenge here, let us set up a contrast with radical theology by
132 Gods after God

looking back to two of the more traditional theologies of the

twentieth century—we shall use Christian examples here—and
note a crucial assumption with which they both operate. The
Swiss Calvinist theologian Karl Barth wanted no part of any proj-
ect that interpreted the Christian proclamation through philo-
sophical categories, schools, or movements. He held that, thanks to
God’s own initiative, we can rely almost directly upon the revela-
tion of God in Jesus Christ, attested to in the Scriptures. Adher-
ence to a philosophical school would only block that access with
our own puny and selfish human efforts to manipulate God. By
contrast, the great Roman Catholic thinker Karl Rahner read the
Christian message through the lenses provided by the classic
thought of the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas
(and the philosophical tools that he borrowed from Aristotle and,
to a lesser degree, Plato) along with insights provided by the eigh-
teenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant and more contempo-
rary movements, such as what philosophers dub existentialism.The
theologies these men produced were very different from one
another. Their followers could, and in some cases continue to,
wrangle mightily over their varying perspectives. Yet, there is an
all-important fact to keep in mind here: neither of these two thinkers
would ever question the fact that they were both talking about one and the
same God. Each was attempting to describe the God who created
the universe, led the Hebrew people to the Promised Land,
appeared definitively and brought salvation in Jesus Christ, and is
present in the Christian Church. The arguments were only over
how best to come to know this God and to describe him.
The eight radical thinkers whom we have studied obviously
employ diverse tools, from deconstructive criticism, to psycho-
analysis, to science. But here is the crucial difference between their
work and the work of more traditional theologians such as Barth
and Rahner: it is not at all clear that our eight radical theologians are
each talking about the same divinity. Indeed, it seems quite clear that
they are often talking about quite different Gods.
Perhaps Mary Daly’s immanent Being has something in com-
mon with Stephen Mitchell’s Taoistic version of God. And it may
be that Sallie McFague’s immanent, beneficent divine power is not
 The Future of Radical Theology 133

entirely unlike the ultimate that Daly and Mitchell have in view.
But surely Mark Taylor’s divine milieu, which is essentially lan-
guage, is wholly different from what Daly, Mitchell, and McFague
have in mind! And Naomi Goldenberg turns to psychological
forces and fantasies for her glimpse of the divine and finds many
gods and goddesses. None of the other seven thinkers whom we
have examined looks to the depths of the psyche as the site where
the divine is to be found.
Gordon Kaufman and Ursula Goodenough are both attuned
to science and nature, and Donald Crosby clearly shares their focus
on nature.While Sallie McFague spends a great deal of time talk-
ing about the divine reality that empowers nature and about con-
cern for the natural world, she does not actually identify God with
nature. But Gordon Kaufman does seem to want to identify God
with the particular evolutionary trajectory in nature that has led to
human beings and that, he hopes, will push for our ever-greater
humanization. Yet, Kaufman’s focus on nature is distinct from
Goodenough’s. She would be suspicious of the teleological ele-
ment that Kaufman, via a kind of faith, imports into his vision of
the evolving universe. For Goodenough, there is no teleology, no
plan or intended trajectory behind the way in which the universe
and life unfold. And while she and Kaufman share an interest in
“mystery,” their use of the term is different. Goodenough’s sense
of mystery is in many ways aesthetic: it arises out of a sensitivity to
the beauty and overpowering grandeur of the universe. Kaufman,
by contrast, uses the word “mystery” to refer to what we do not
know about reality, to our ignorance about what the universe is
finally all about. And Crosby’s position, in turn, is different from
that of both Goodenough and Kaufman, thanks to the distinctive
metaphysic that he employs.
Mary Daly’s Be-ing,Taylor’s divine milieu, Goldenberg’s psy-
chologically derived gods and goddesses, Kaufman’s evolutionary
trajectory toward humanization, and Goodenough’s awe-induc-
ing nature are, simply stated, each different “Gods,” not simply
different perspectives on one and the same deity. The arguments
that could be instigated among these theologies would be more
akin, then, to arguments among Christian thinkers, Hindus, and
134 Gods after God

devotees of the sun god, than they would be like the arguments
between Barth and Rahner.
Let us consider three possibilities with respect to these differ-
ences and the future of radical theology. First, the fact that, at least
in some cases, the different radical thinkers come up with thor-
oughly different divinities could be taken to show that radical the-
ology is nothing more than a pointless “shooting in the dark.” On
this view, radical theologies are intellectual responses to inchoate
spiritual longings in contemporary society, and the responses
themselves are ultimately just as inchoate. Because the radical the-
ologians do not share and cannot agree about adherence to any
traditional principles, nor do they see eye to eye on any particular
philosophical starting points, they tend simply to cancel out one
another’s claims. At the very least, the lack of agreement suggests
that radical theologies are purely conjectural: they possess no reli-
able hold on reality.To be fair to the radical theologians, of course,
we should recall that some of them claim that notions like com-
ing to an “objective” grasp of reality are naive and no longer of
interest. These theologies would self-consciously embrace human
imagination and initiative in conjuring up the divine. But if the
radical theologians of this stripe cannot even agree upon how that
human initiative should be employed or exactly where it should
lead, one cannot feel a great deal of confidence about the future
of radical theologies.
The second possible interpretation of the situation might be
dubbed “different strokes for different folks.” Perhaps for those
individuals who are attuned to the highly pluralistic character of
contemporary “first world” society, there is no problem with the
differences among the radical theologians’ deities. You may be
attracted to Taylor’s notion of language as the divine milieu, while
I favor Mitchell’s Taoistic God. But rather than feeling that our dif-
ferent views are at loggerheads, each calling into question the
validity of the other, we simply recognize that there are many dif-
ferent ways to pursue one’s spiritual quest, each perfectly valid. At
first blush, this approach might appear to have something in com-
mon with the line often pursued by modern and contemporary
Hindu thinkers.You may be devoted to the god Genesha, while I
 The Future of Radical Theology 135

give my allegiance to Krishna. But we understand that we are both

ultimately up to the same thing, for Genesha and Krishna are but
different manifestations, each a different avatar, of the one, incom-
prehensible Godhead, Brahman. But, in fact, our second possible
approach to the differences among radical theologies is distinct
from the Hindu case, for the different radical deities do not in fact
all point to one deity in which they are all united. Mitchell’s God
is just a different divinity than Taylor’s divine milieu. Perhaps this
is perfectly acceptable in theory, at least to some of the radical the-
ologians. Again, some of them make no claim to be grasping the
divine in and of itself (if it even makes sense to speak of such a
thing). Rather, they are perfectly happy to confess that they are
operating from a very particular vantage point and with a unique
spiritual agenda, and that they are pragmatically responding to par-
ticular problems in particular situations. The fact that other the-
ologies point in quite different directions is not cause for concern.
In addition, it should be recalled that there do appear do be some
themes that unite the majority of the radical theologies we have
explored: the theologian wishes to be free of the constraints of
authority and tradition; there is a strong commitment to divine
immanence; along with the focus on immanence often comes a
firm belief that spirituality means attunement to and care for the
natural world as well as its many human inhabitants.
There still remains a problem to be confronted in this, sce-
nario, however. Perhaps, according to the radical theological mind-
set, it is perfectly acceptable for different theologies to champion
genuinely different Gods or Goddesses. But if different questers
embrace different radical theological proposals, will any of those
proposals attract enough followers, a so-called critical mass, for the
proposal to live on into future decades? Of course, perhaps that is
not what is at issue in talking about the future of radical theology.
Maybe particular radical theologies do not need to survive, but
rather the whole radical theological attitude and the process
through which radical theologies are generated will survive: we
should not expect Goldenberg’s particular thealogy to survive, for
example, but we should expect individual thinkers to continue to
produce thealogies out of the same motives and with some of the
136 Gods after God

same attitudes that characterize Goldenberg’s thinking. Radical

theologies by their very nature respond to particular times and cir-
cumstances instead of being bound to past times and conditions.
While we are on the “critical mass” issue, there is another mat-
ter that must be confronted. Not only do radical theologies face a
challenge in attracting sufficient followers due to the diversity of
these theologies, but they also face a challenge because of what
they are unable to deliver to spiritual questers. Now, on the one
hand, we have already suggested at the beginning of this chapter
that radical theologies are obviously responding to real concerns
among at least some members of our culture. But, on the other
hand, the majority of persons who look to religion and theology
will most likely expect to find the boon of miraculous divine
interventions and, especially, the prospect of life after death. But
the radical theologies we have considered are, by in large, simply
unwilling to think of the divine in terms of interventionism and
as a being who has prepared a supernatural realm for human
beings after death. One may take comfort in returning at death to
the larger physical cosmos in a fashion different from one’s partic-
ipation in that cosmos during life. But this is less than what the
majority of religious seekers seem to desire. Radical pieties of a
popular sort, as opposed to radical theologies or theoretical pro-
posals, are willing to countenance supernatural solutions to our
problems as human beings, as is evident in some of the rituals—
rituals that some might regard as magical spells—available in radi-
cal feminist pieties.2 But the radical theologies we have considered
cannot deliver. It is the “critical mass” problem, then, due both to
the diversity of radical theologies as well as to their inability to
deliver miracles such as life after death that is the biggest challenge
to this second scenario, the “different strokes for different folks”
approach.
One can imagine a third scenario which, though it does not
help us with the problem of radical theologies’ inability to offer
life after death, seems to promise a way around the problem of the
diversity of radical theologies, a problem that prevents any one
theology from attaining a critical mass of adherents. Perhaps rather
than different persons adopting different ones of the radical the-
 The Future of Radical Theology 137

ologies we have considered, the individual religious seeker will

find it advantageous to adopt many of the proposals at once.Tay-
lors’s deconstructionist a/theology gives us crucial insights into the
nature of our very selfhood (such as it is); Daly’s thought provides
a powerful bulwark against sexism and a potent sense of our con-
nection with the power of being that allows all beings to be; Gold-
enberg provides us with clues as to how we can utilize our own
ability to dream and fantasize in order to be put in touch with
goddess-like powers; and so on. What this would amount to, of
course, is something momentous, namely, a switch from the
monotheism that has been a bulwark of Western religious culture
to a new form of polytheism. Different Gods and Goddesses can
illuminate different dimensions of our being and diverse responsi-
bilities in the world of which we are a part.
Monotheism is not simply about a certain metaphysical claim,
that is, that there is one God, but also about a whole way of organ-
izing the self and its existence that correlates with that metaphysi-
cal claim. The essential Jewish confession of faith is the Shema,
found in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament: “Hear, O Israel: the
lord is our God, the lord alone.You shall love the lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
(Deuteronomy 6: 4–5) The famous twentieth-century Christian
theologian Paul Tillich came up with what turned out to be an
influential definition of faith and religion based on this confession.
According to Tillich, faith should be defined as “ultimate concern.”
Your ultimate concern is that one unconditional concern around
which all of your other concerns are organized.This is not a defi-
nition of faith or religion in the ordinary sense, for it does not “fill
in the blanks” and tell us just what particular beliefs or activities are
associated with faith. Almost anything can become one’s ultimate
concern; it is whatever one holds onto to orient one’s living and
face life’s challenges. Of course, as a Christian theologian, Tillich
argues that the only proper object of ultimate concern is God. Mak-
ing anything other than God my ultimate concern is to fall into
idolatry, the devotion to something less than God with a fervor that
only devotion to the true God deserves. Wealth, for example, or
extreme nationalism such as occurred in Nazi Germany, can be
138 Gods after God

ultimate concerns, but they are bound to lead one astray and result
in disappointment, if not disaster.
Notice the assumption behind Tillich’s thinking: faith is about
devotion to and orientation via an object of faith that is absolutely
one.And this suggests, in turn, that the human self, ideally, is a per-
fectly unified reality: the absolutely singular object of ultimate
concern organizes my life so that all the pieces fit together around
that concern.3 But in this third scenario we are obviously moving
toward a new sort of polytheism, and as a consideration of Tillich’s
notion of faith as ultimate concern makes clear, the move from
monotheism to polytheism is not just a matter of how one con-
ceives the divine but also of how one conceives and experiences
the self. As Taylor and his postmodern fellow travelers would have
it, the self now becomes “de-centered,” no longer perfectly unified
around some center. It is centered neither around a modernist
confidence in reason as the lynchpin of selfhood, nor around a tra-
ditional notion of the one God who has created me and before
whom I stand.
Back in 1974, at the tail end of the radical movement known
as the “death of God theology” (surveyed in chapter one), David
L. Miller published his book, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the
Gods and Goddesses.4 Though he did not have at his disposal all of
the jargon of later postmodernist thought—expressions such as
“de-centering,” for example—Miller talked about the “radical plu-
rality of the self.”5 And he well understood that “multiple centers”
for selfhood go hand in hand with polytheism.6 Now Miller’s
book probably cannot provide an infallible guide for our own dis-
cussion of a polytheism that embraces a multitude of radical reli-
gious perspectives. For one thing, Miller essentially limited himself
to a polytheism that embraces the symbolic value of just the Greek
gods and goddesses:“This way of seeing is through the eyes of the
Gods and Goddesses of ancient Greece—not Egypt, not the
Ancient Near East, not Hindu India, not Ancient China or Japan.
Greece is the locus of our polytheism simply because, willy-nilly,
we are Occidental men and women.”7 Thus, there is a double dif-
ference between what Miller had in mind and what we are con-
sidering here. First, we are by no means confining ourselves to the
 The Future of Radical Theology 139

perspective of Greek myth.8 Second, while Miller was thinking in

terms of a polytheism that is immediately connected with practi-
cal piety, we are contemplating embracing a host of different the-
oretical or theological perspectives on the divine (with conse-
quences for practical piety presumably to follow). Nonetheless,
Miller provides an important service in uncovering the link
between embracing a multitude of gods and recognizing the self
as having a multitude of centers.
The fact that both David Miller and Naomi Goldenberg speak
of polytheism on what might be termed “a symbolic level”—dif-
ferent Gods and Goddesses can metaphorically stand for different
dimensions of the self and its experience—lends a certain plausi-
bility to their proposals. But, as already indicated, this third sce-
nario that we are contemplating is about embracing different the-
oretical perspectives on the divine, which could then lead to a
multiple, polytheistic strategy on the level of practical piety too.
This may be harder to pull off than what Miller and Goldenberg
have in mind. One can always use a multitude of different
metaphors to describe the same thing without running into con-
tradiction: the poet can employ a host of different metaphors to
describe the sea without the poem breaking down in hopeless
confusion. On the theoretical level, however, things are different.
Can I really combine Taylor’s deconstructive a/theology with
Goodenough’s religious naturalism, for example? While for Good-
enough natural science is the royal road to the sacred,Taylor, good
postmodernist that he is, would most likely regard natural science
as simply mistaken in its confident claims to describe the world as
it really is in and of itself. Science, for many thinkers who call
themselves postmodernists, is just one more narrative for describ-
ing our experience, no more qualified to get at nature in itself than
any other narrative. In short, while there may be no difficulty in
embracing a symbolic polytheism that is internal to one particular
theoretical framework—Sallie McFague proposes a host of differ-
ent models for God, and Naomi Goldenberg encourages us to
produce a plethora of different symbols out of our fantasies and
dreams—it is a different matter altogether simultaneously to
embrace a host of different radical theologies, that is, theoretical
140 Gods after God

analyses of the divine. A multitude of metaphors need not clash

with one another; a multitude of different literal analyses of divin-
ity cannot be embraced at one and the same time without the
problem of simple contradiction and logical nonsense (recall that,
while a thinker such as McFague is centrally concerned with
metaphors and models, her theoretical account of how metaphors
and models work is not itself metaphorical; it is literal).
Of our three scenarios, then, the second, despite the challenge
it faces of attaining a critical mass for any one radical theology,
appears to be the most promising.The first scenario suggested that
different radical theologies are so different from one another that
they, in effect, cancel out one another’s claims to truth, however
“truth” be understood.The third scenario had an individual seeker
embracing a whole collection of different radical theologies, but
this seemed to promise nothing more than contradiction and con-
fusion. The second scenario, it will be recalled, was “different
strokes for different folks.” Some questers will be attracted to one
sort of radical theology, other questers to other kinds. But let us
return to a potential problem discussed above in our treatment of
the second scenario: will any of the individual theologies gain
enough adherents to attain that critical mass of followers and of
conversation which will allow the theology to develop and thrive?
Or, rather, are each of the individual theologies that we have
examined destined to be of help to only a small number of rela-
tively isolated persons, and thus doomed to pass from the scene
relatively quickly? One possible response to this question, as sug-
gested above, is to say that while the particular radical theoretical
perspectives that we have studied will indeed each be short-lived,
the basic attitudes that generate them—for example, that the
divine is found in how bold women spin out their lives; that the
language that generates our selfhood and meaning-world is the
key to our quest; that one should look to the mystery of nature for
spiritual sustenance; that our dreams and fantasies are the key to
our spiritual fulfillment—will continue unabated, given the
dynamics and demands of contemporary first-world culture. But I
am not sure that even just these attitudes, which are still relatively
specific and theoretically sophisticated, can really get traction in
 The Future of Radical Theology 141

our society if they are not attached to and supported by any larger
movements or institutional entities.
Of course, we can point to some movements of significant, if
still modest size. Feminist radical theologies can find a home, for
example, in movements such as Wicca and in other, smaller femi-
nist spirituality groups that have sprung up in communities around
the Western world. Similarly, radical theologies that focus on what
might be called an “ecological piety” can presumably attach them-
selves to the numerous ecological action groups that are so much
a part of the contemporary scene.And there is the Unitarian Uni-
versalist Association, a religious community with over one thou-
sand congregations in North America that happily embraces
sundry spiritual quests, including, one presumes, different radical
theological perspectives attempting to comprehend such quests
intellectually. On the academic level, the Highlands Institute for
American Religious and Philosophical Thought provides an insti-
tutional framework for the discussion and furtherance of radical
theology, especially naturalistically oriented theologies.
But we must also wonder about a possibility that I shall call
radical theology’s “institutional parasitism.”This is a phenomenon
that is most likely to occur in the United States, but could also
occur in other first-world countries that maintain at least a cultural
undercurrent of traditional Jewish and/or Christian belief. The
United States is an unusually pious country compared to its
postindustrial fellow travelers.A vast majority of Americans report
believing in God as well as in the afterlife—belief in God has hov-
ered around 90 percent in the polls for decades—and around
40 percent of Americans report attending church or synagogue
regularly (though evidence has been collected recently that sug-
gests that poll respondents exaggerate their attendance).9 This
intense American piety keeps religion and spirituality alive in the
culture, and it means that religion will be taken with seriousness.
In addition, it suggests that radical theologies can perhaps remain
viable insofar as they draw upon this general seriousness about
religion and spirituality in the culture.
More exactly, radical theologies can stay viable just insofar as
they have strong traditional religious institutions in terms of which
142 Gods after God

they can indirectly define themselves. This parasitic relationship

with vital, traditional religious institutions can take at least two
forms. First, there is the hostile relationship in which a radical the-
ology defines itself over against a traditional community and draws
much of its energy from the critique of that community. We see
this to some extent, surely, in the work of Mary Daly. Her theol-
ogy or thealogy would make little sense without the Roman
Catholicism that she pictures as oppressive and death-dealing. Lib-
eration requires something from which to be liberated, and while
Daly has in mind a whole culture of sexism, institutional religion
plays a not insignificant role in the culture of oppression that she
reacts against.
The second parasitic relationship that aids radical theology is
the sort illustrated by Ursula Goodenough. In The Sacred Depths of
Nature, Goodenough is clear about the fact that she actually par-
ticipates and finds sustenance in a traditional Protestant church
community. But it is obvious from her radical theology that tradi-
tional religion and God-talk function for her almost entirely on a
symbolic level.The point, however, is that the continuing vigor of
traditional religion in America provides a viable context over
against which or alongside which radical theology can define itself
and live. Radical theology can react to that context either in an
attitude of powerful protest, or as a symbolic starting point for its
own work.
Are there any problems with this parasitism? There is indeed
one potential problem, one that might be called the “problem of
intellectual dishonesty.” In order to illustrate how this problem can
arise, let us go back another time to the thought of Paul Tillich.
Tillich can easily be viewed as a precursor of radical theology.
While Tillich rejected death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer’s
suggestion that Tillich was the father of the death of God theol-
ogy, he did reportedly tell Altizer to remember that the “real
Tillich” is the radical Tillich. In his major work, the three volume
Systematic Theology,Tillich recast the central doctrines of the Chris-
tian faith in a highly philosophical form—Tillich was eclectic in
his philosophical predilections—that he believed would make
them relevant in the contemporary world.10 As we have already
 The Future of Radical Theology 143

had occasion to note (in discussing Mary Daly), Tillich spoke of

God, for example, not as a discrete supernatural being, but as the
“ground of being,” or the “power of being,” or “being-itself,”
which underlies all that is and allows it to be. He never tired of
reminding his listeners and readers that God is not simply one
being among others. Indeed Tillich claimed that, technically
speaking, God does not “exist,” since existence is a property of
things. God is not a thing. Rather, God gives things their existence.
In the 1950s and 1960s,Tillich was at the height of his influ-
ence. Many a Protestant preacher, having studied Tillich in semi-
nary, used a version—perhaps a watered-down version—of
Tillich’s vocabulary from the pulpit. Believers could feel up-to-
date by talking about God as the “ground of being,” of faith as
“ultimate concern,” and of the salvation wrought by Christ as
“New Being.” But what was the exercise in which these believers
were actually participating? It seems evident that many of them, if
not most, continued to believe in the same old traditional God—
one existent being among others, albeit a supernatural being—and
the same Christ; they simply used Tillich’s fashionable vocabulary
to name these traditional objects of faith. In reality, though,
Tillich’s vocabulary was not simply a way to dress up traditional
Christianity in contemporary garb, but was meant to offer a radi-
cal reinterpretation of Christian faith. Hence, we have an example
of intellectual dishonesty, however unintentional.
This is precisely the danger that accompanies the parasitism
of radical theology. I may adopt something like Gordon Kauf-
man’s language about God as the serendipitous creativity that
leads to the species homo sapiens and furthers its humanization,
but if, at the same time, I am a participant in a traditional religious
community or was raised in such a community, Kaufman’s lan-
guage may really function for me as a way to have my theologi-
cal cake and eat it too.That is, Kaufman’s vocabulary allows me to
believe that my notion of God is up-to-date and scientifically
sound, but I am really still thinking of the old supernatural king
of my childhood piety. Thus, the phenomenon of radical theol-
ogy’s parasitism upon more traditional, thriving religious institu-
tions is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it brightens the
144 Gods after God

prospects for radical theology’s own survival by attaching it to a

powerful, well-established religious community. But, on the other
hand, it presents the temptation of intellectual dishonesty by
allowing one to utilize the vocabulary of radical theology with-
out actually embracing the full meaning of that vocabulary. To
some skeptics, this also means that radical theology is really sim-
ply a “half-way house” for those without the intellectual integrity
to give up religion altogether. In other words, I was raised with a
traditional belief in God but now have serious doubts about such
belief. Yet, I want to hold onto the comfort that theistic belief
provided me. Hence, I embrace a radical theology as a way of
“kind of ” rejecting God and “kind of ” holding onto God.
Where do all of these considerations leave us in our attempt
to predict the future of radical theology? Clearly, radical theology’s
prospects are not unambiguously bright. We are assuming that its
only possible path is that of “different strokes for different folks.” I
will embrace Mitchell’s Taoistic God, while you become a devo-
tee of Goodenough’s reverent approach to nature.There is a crit-
ical mass problem, both because radical theology is divided into so
many separate proposals and because no radical theology can offer
traditional religion’s miraculous responses to the ills that flesh is
heir to. Furthermore, while institutional parasitism may help keep
radical theologies alive, it may also simply be a route to intellec-
tual dishonesty.
On the other hand, the future is not entirely bleak either.We
began this chapter with a consideration of all that our eight exam-
ples of radical theology have in common, and we concluded from
that not inconsiderable commonality that these radical theologies
are responding to important currents in contemporary first-world
culture. It is those cultural currents that we should now think
about in more depth, for it is my contention that in those currents
we shall find the key to the inevitability of radical theology. Recall
our survey of radical theology in chapter one. There we saw that
there has been an essentially unbroken line of radical theologies in
the West from the seventeenth century to the present. A key cul-
tural component in this story is, of course, the phenomenon of
secularization, the process through which traditional religious
 The Future of Radical Theology 145

institutions loose a good deal of their social and political clout.

Secularization placed the economic sphere in the center of soci-
ety, evicting the Christian church from the ground it occupied in
the Middle Ages. This allowed, in the first few centuries of the
modern period, for the Jewish Emancipation: non-Christians were
no longer automatically relegated to the status of second-class cit-
izens. The door was eventually opened for a full-blown religious
pluralism, a dynamic that has only strengthened as we have moved
through more recent centuries. Hence, the United States is not
only governed by the principle of the separation of church and
state; it is host to countless different religious confessions.
Secularization during the eighteenth century wore the face of
the Enlightenment, that philosophical movement that emphasized
reliance on reason, and a narrow concept of reason at that. In the
Enlightenment, religion was under attack, and, as we saw in chap-
ter one, radical theology took the form of the stripped-down and
religiously unimaginative philosophy known as Deism. In today’s
postindustrial culture, religion seems to be flourishing, from evan-
gelical or “fundamentalist” Christianity to New Age spirituality.
Yet, once again, this does not suggest that secularization has come
undone: the aforementioned religious pluralism is proof of that. It
is the Enlightenment form of secularization that has faded, not sec-
ularization as such.
As the pluralist dynamic expands (and perhaps secularization
too, as multinational capitalism—the economic center of soci-
ety—gets stronger and stronger), there will be an inevitable impe-
tus to do radical theology.Why? Because the existence of so many
different religious traditions side by side within a single society
calls into question each of them. Suppose that I am a traditional
Christian. I base my Christian affirmations on the contention that
Christianity is founded upon divine revelation. My Muslim neigh-
bor obviously holds many beliefs different from mine, but she, too,
asserts that her tradition is the result of divine revelation.There is
no way to prove that one of us is right and the other wrong. We
have two options. Either we can turn inward, refusing to explore
other religious convictions, or to think about how they might call
our own beliefs into question. Or we can see the necessity of
146 Gods after God

pulling back from some of our own traditional religious certitudes

and embracing a radically modified religiosity.The first way repre-
sents intellectual timidity and can even lead to hostility between
and among religions, as contemporary world events are making
all-too-clear. The second way is the more productive of the two,
both intellectually and socially. Insofar as this is the case, radical
modification of traditional belief seems inevitable in contempo-
rary first-world societies.
Another factor leading to the conclusion that radical theolo-
gies are, and will continue to be, inevitable is the ongoing, indeed
growing, authority of science in our culture. Some commentators,
perhaps especially those who style themselves postmodernists,
attempt to obfuscate the fact of this authority. It is true, first of all,
that the Enlightenment notion of science was, as has already been
noted, excessively narrow and rigid. The assumption that every-
thing could be reduced to Newtonian physics turned out to be
naive. Furthermore, while an event such as Darwin’s formulation
of the theory of evolution could be interpreted as a threat to tra-
ditional religious belief, as evidenced in the famous Scopes trial of
1925, traditional Judaism and Christianity have, for the most part,
made their peace with science in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The Vatican, for example, has long made its acceptance
of the theory of evolution clear.This harmony of science and tra-
ditional religious belief has resulted largely from a “good fences
make good neighbors policy”: it has been agreed that science and
religion do not overlap in their interests and thus cannot come
into conflict. More recently, a goodly number of traditional the-
ologians, and some scientists as well, have attempted to break
down the fences and show that science and religion can actually
be integrated; far from conflicting, they each contribute an essen-
tial component to a larger unified worldview. Thus, for example,
theologians have struggled mightily to show that the notion of
divine action within the physical cosmos does not violate the sci-
entific principle of the conservation of energy.11
But for all of the valiant attempts to make traditional religious
assumptions cohere with contemporary science, that task becomes
more difficult everyday. For example, when cosmologists first
 The Future of Radical Theology 147

began talking about the universe beginning in a “big bang,” tradi-

tional theologians eagerly embraced the idea as proof of the bibli-
cal view that God created the universe “in the beginning” and that
the universe is not eternal. But more recent cosmology suggests
that, at the very small dimensions called the “quantum level,”
notions such as causality and the ultimate origin of the universe in
time break down, in which case one cannot meaningfully speak in
the traditional fashion about God creating the universe.12 Where
evolution is concerned, scientist Timothy Ferris tells us that “mas-
sive extinctions—events in which the majority of species suddenly
disappeared—punctuate the fossil record.”13 It is estimated that
99 percent of all the species that have ever lived on the face of the
Earth are now extinct. Is this any way for a loving deity to care for
his creation? Again, some neuroscientists claim that they have now
gotten to the point where they not only can pinpoint where so-
called religious experiences originate in the brain, but they can
actually induce them. A person identifying herself as irreligious
can be made to have essentially the same experience as the most
dedicated mystic, simply by stimulating the former’s brain.14
All of this indicates that the story of science and religion is far
from over, and that the only way in which the two can cohere in
an intellectually honest fashion, as opposed to simply ignoring one
another, is for religious persons radically to modify their convic-
tions. Radical theologies—at least those that do not veer off into
bogus New Age metaphysics—can live in perfect harmony with
contemporary science; it is unlikely that, in the long run, tradi-
tional theologies will be able to do so. It is unsurprising that the
famous paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould expressed nothing but
contempt for the idea that traditional religion could be brought
together with science. In his Rocks of Ages, the late scientist argued
strenuously for the “good fences make good neighbors” approach.
What is more, even in his separate-but-equal interpretation of sci-
ence and religion, he found it necessary to radically modify what
we mean by “religion,” reducing it essentially to morality.15 For if
religion is about a personal supernatural being who acts within his
creation, then religion pronounces on scientific topics, and reli-
gion simply gets those topics wrong.16
148 Gods after God

Where do all of these considerations leave us, then? First, we

must readily admit that the prospects for radical theology are by no
means unambiguously clear.We have considered a number of sig-
nificant challenges which radical theologies face, and there is no
way to know for sure whether they will succeed in meeting these
challenges and will continue on into the future. But we have also
seen considerable evidence that radical theologies are inevitable in
our culture, evidence that ranges from radical theologies’ ability to
respond effectively and honestly to thoroughgoing religious plu-
ralism, to their adaptability to the contemporary scientific world-
view. And if the history of the modern and postmodern periods is
any guide (and if we do not confuse the whole phenomenon of
secularization with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment), the
unbroken line of radical theologies from the seventeenth century
to the present day certainly bodes well for the future of radical
theologies. Indeed, the history of modernity and postmodernity
displays a radical theological tendency that may well possess an
unstoppable inertia.
 Notes

Preface
1. See, for example, George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Reli-
gion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadephia:Westminster, 1984); Rad-
ical Orthodoxy, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward
(New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999); Hans Urs von Balthasar,
The von Balthasar Reader, ed. Medard Kehl and Werner Löser, trans.
Robert J. Daly and Fred Lawrence (New York: Crossroad, 1982).
2.“Thealogy” is a termed coined by feminist thinker Naomi Gold-
enberg. It derives from the Greek thea, “goddess,” instead of from the
Greek theos, “god.”

Chapter One. Introduction

1. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-
Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 16. Spinoza’s
statement can be found in Book V, proposition XIX of his Ethics.
2. At the end of this chapter, as well as in some of the chapters to
follow, we shall consider something of what is meant by the “postmod-
ern” attitude.
3. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment:An Interpretation:The Rise of Modern
Paganism (New York:Vintage, 1966), p. 374.
4. Quoted in Gay, Enlightenment, p. 396.
5. Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy, vol. 7, part 1
(Garden City, New York: Image, 1963), p. 195.

149
150 Notes to Chapter One

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kauf-

mann (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 95. The quotation is from Niet-
zsche’s Gay Science.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 198.The quota-
tion is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
8. New Revised Standard Version, National Council of the
Churches of Christ, 1989.All subsequent biblical quotations are from the
NRSV.
9.Thomas J. J.Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1966), p. 17. Emphasis mine.
10. Altizer, Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 44.
11. Ibid., p. 103.
12. Ibid., p . 81.
13. William Hamilton, The New Esssence of Christianity (New York:
Association Press, 1961), p. 66. Hamilton’s title echoes two famous works
from an earlier time, philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1841 book, The
Essence of Christianity, which argues that God is merely a projection based
upon our own human attributes (trans. George Eliot [New York: Harper,
1957]), and theologian Adolf Harnack’s more pious book of the same
title which appeared in 1900 and sought to get back to the simple and
essential teaching of Jesus (translated into English as What is Christianity?
trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders [New York: Harper, 1957]). The biggest
influence on Hamilton, however, as he himself confesses, is the German
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote while in a Nazi prison about
the possibility of a “religionless Christianity.” See his Letters and Papers
from Prison (London: SCM Press, 1953).
14. Hamilton, New Essence, p. 108.
15. William Hamilton, “The Death of God Theologies Today,” in
Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death
of God (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 28.
16.William Hamilton,“Thursday’s Child,” in Radical Theology and the
Death of God, p. 92.
17. Altizer, Gospel of Christian Atheism, p. 147.
18. Paul M. van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), p. 103.
 Notes to Chapter Two 151

19. Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Con-

temporary Judaism (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. x.
20. Religious traditionalists might well point out that fundamental-
ism and religious traditionalism are not the same, though it should be
admitted that they overlap in some areas. Fundamentalism is an invention
of early-modern and modern Christianity and is a reaction to what are
seen as the corrosive forces of the contemporary world. In America, for
example, fundamentalism has been especially antagonistic to science and,
as in its battle with Darwin, has frequently defined itself by its opposition
to science. Science is clearly a modern phenomenon. In contrast to fun-
damentalism, “traditionalism” can be defined as a desire to stay true to a
religious tradition that has been passed on for many centuries. That tra-
dition, it will be argued, need not contradict the present age but, rather,
can be contemporary with every age.

Chapter Two. Immanent Be-ing

1. Mary Daly, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 1.
2. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father:Toward a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).
3. Ontology (from the Greek on, “being”) is the study of being. In
a philosopher such as Daly, it means exploring not just individual beings,
but the very power of Being that allows beings to exist.When we ask the
question,“Why is there anything at all, why not simply nothing?” we are
on the road to ontology.
4. Daly, Outercourse, p. 74.
5. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 135.
6. Ibid., p. 136.
7. Daly, Outercourse, p. 326.
8. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).
9. Mary Daly, with Jane Caputi, Webster’s First New Intergalactic
Wickedary of the English Language (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 63.
10. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 49.
152 Notes to Chapter Two

11. Daly, Outercourse, p. 322.

12. See Mary Ann Stenger, “A Critical Analysis of the Influence of
Paul Tillich on Mary Daly’s Feminist Theology,” Encounter 43 (1982):
219–38; Laurel C. Schneider,“From New Being to Meta-Being: A Crit-
ical Analysis of Paul Tillich’s Influence on Mary Daly,” Soundings 75
(Summer/ Fall 1992): 421–39.
13. Daly, Outercourse, p. 159.
14.Thomas J. J.Altizer, one of the most famous “radical theologians”
of the 1960s, saw Tillich as the father of the death-of-God theology, an
accolade that Tillich vehemently rejected. The work of Daly and others
(sister feminist thealogian Carol Christ, for example) does seem to lend
support, however, to the claim that Tillich is the father of radical theology
in a more general sense.
15. The most important sources for this summary are Paul Tillich,
Systematic Theology, vol 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
and Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven:Yale University Press,
1952).
16. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 23.
17. Daly, Wickedary, p. 64.
18. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 38.This is an early work in which
Daly has not yet standardized her way of writing words such as “Be-ing.”
19. Mary Daly, Quintessence . . . Realizing the Archaic Future (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1998), p. 230.
20. Daly, Pure Lust, p. 400.
21. Daly, Wickedary, p. 96.
22. Daly, Quintessence, p. 54.
23. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 391.
24. Ibid., p. 6.
25. Daly, Pure Lust, p. xii.
26. Daly, Quintessence, p. 95.
27. Ibid., p. 175.
28. Ibid., p. 186.
29. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 413.
30. Daly, Pure Lust, p. 301.
 Notes to Chapter Three 153

31. Ibid., p. 271.

32. Daly, Outercourse, p. 122.
33. Ibid., p. 322.
34. Daly, Pure Lust, p. ix.
35. Daly, Quintessence, p. 95n.
36. Daly, Pure Lust, p. 163n.
37. Daly, Outercourse, p. 105.
38. Ibid., p. 208.
39. See Daly’s critique of postmodern philosophy in Quintessence, pp.
134–44.
40. Quoted in Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes,“About the Schizophrenia in
Women’s Beings:A Re-Reading of Mary Daly,” Feminist Theology 6 (May
1994): 67.
41. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota, 1984), p. xxiv.
42. Melissa Raphael, “Thealogy and the Call of the Wild,” Feminist
Theology 15 (May 1997): 72.

Chapter Three. Language as Divine Milieu

1. Postmodern, deconstructive theology can easily be considered a
fully formed subgenre of radical theology. For a most helpful overview of
the implications of postmodernity for religion in general, and Christian-
ity in particular, see Paul Lakeland, Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a
Fragmented Age (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997).While the Taylor book
we are about to examine is generally acknowledged to be the most
important founding work of deconstructive theology, the intellectually
adventurous may wish to look at other works as well, such as Thomas J. J.
Altizer et al., Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982);
Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1995); Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Phi-
losophy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990). Although his theology is
unique, some commentators also take the work of Robert P. Scharle-
mann as a crucial instance of postmodern, deconstructive theology. See
154 Notes to Chapter Three

especially, The Being of God:Theology and the Experience of Truth (New York:
Seabury, 1981), and The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991).
2. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James
Strachey (New York:W.W. Norton, 1966), p. 284.
3. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 9.
4.The technical terminology here works as follows: the “sign” is the
word being used; the “signified” is the meaning that the sign is supposed
to communicate; and the “referent” is the actual reality or thing to which
the sign points.
5. Quoted in Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6.
6.Taylor, Erring, p. 10.
7. Quoted in Taylor, Erring, p. 46.
8. Ibid., p. 53.
9.Taylor, Erring, p. 54.
10. Ibid., p. 92.
11. Ibid., p. 91.
12. Ibid., p. 105.
13. Ibid., p. 106.
14.Taylor, Erring, p. 105.
15. Ibid., p. 108.
16. Ibid., p. 112.
17. Ibid., p. 116
18. Ibid., p. 116.
19.Taylor, Erring, 123.
20. Quoted in Taylor, p. 135.
21.Taylor, Erring, 136.
22. Ibid., p. 138.
23. Ibid., p. 143.
24. Ibid., p. 144.
 Notes to Chapter Four 155

25. Ibid., p. 147.

26.Taylor, Erring, p. 147
27. Ibid., p. 150.
28. Ibid., p. 152.
29. Ibid., p. 157.
30. Ibid., p. 172.
31.Taylor, Erring, p. 174.
32. Ibid., p. 176.
33. Susan E. Wennemyr, “Dancing in the Dark: Deconstructive
A/theology Leaps with Faith,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
66 (Fall 1998): 577.
34. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt,
1999).

Chapter Four. Sacred Nature

1. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xvii.
2. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1923).
3. Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature, p. xx.
4. Ibid., p. 9.
5. Ibid., p. 10. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York:
Basic Books, 1977), p. 144.)
6. Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 11.
7. Ibid., p. 12.
8. Ibid., p. 12.
9. Ibid., p. 29.
10. Ibid., p. 46.
11. Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 64.
12. Ibid., p. 75.
156 Notes to Chapter Four

13. Ibid., p. 73.

14. Ibid., p. 50.
15. Ibid., p. 59.
16. Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 47.
17. Ursula Goodenough and Paul Woodruff,“Mindful Virtue, Mind-
ful Reverence,” Zygon 36 (December 2001): 585.
18. Goodenough and Woodruff, “Mindful Virtue,” p. 586.
19. Ibid., p. 587.
20. Ibid., p. 588.
21. Ibid., p. 593.
22. Donald A. Crosby, A Religion of Nature (Albany NY: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2002).
23. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, p. 12.
24. Ibid., p. 21.
25. Ibid., p. 75.
26. Ibid., p. 82.
27. Ibid., p. 118.
28. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, p. 120.
29. Ibid., p. 159.
30. Paul Jerome Croce, “Beyond the Warfare of Science and Reli-
gion in American Culture—and Back Again,” in Religious Studies Review
26 (January 2002): 33.
31. Barry A. Palevitz, “Falling Off a Tightrope: Compromise and
Accommodation in the War Between Creationism and Evolution,” in
BioScience 50, i. 10 (October 2000): 926. Expanded Academic ASAP, Info-
Trac (June 2, 2003).
32. Crosby, A Religion of Nature, p. 46.
33. Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s)
Report (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 13.
34. Philosophers have debated freedom of the will versus determin-
ism seemingly forever, certainly since long before modern science
appeared on the scene. One of the problems is that we often lack a clear
notion of what freedom of the will even means. Note, for example, that
 Notes to Chapter Five 157

freedom of the will cannot mean that the will is totally free of any causal
influences: that would mean that our actions are thoroughly arbitrary, that
is, without any reasons behind them. Certainly this is not what we mean
by human freedom to decide. Another problem is how we view deter-
minism: we usually think of it as meaning that our decisions are forced
upon us monolithically by some single external force, as when a mugger
holds a gun to my head and forces me to hand over my wallet. In this sit-
uation I am clearly not acting freely. But one can think of the human
decisions flowing from the wholly determined causal nexus of brain
activities as involving something very different from a case such as a
mugging where my action is determined externally, that is, by something
outside what defines my identity, and where my action is determined by
a single force, such as the gun put to my head. Suppose that all of my
actions are indeed determined by the causal nexus of the brain in inter-
action with its environment.This would mean that my actions are deter-
mined by an extraordinarily complex set of causal inputs, including all of
the facets of my personality, my values, my commitments, and so forth
(which can, of course, all be understood in terms of biochemical and
electrical activity in my brain tissue). But might not this kind of deter-
minism be exactly what I mean by freedom of the will, a scenario in
which my decisions are not arbitrary, nor determined by some one
external force, but converge out of the whole set of factors that make me
who I am? In this sense my decision, while causally determined, is really
my decision.

Chapter Five. God and Pragmatism I

1. Sallie McFague, Models of God:Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear
Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), p. x.
2. McFague, Models of God, p. xi.
3. Ibid., p. xiii.
4. McFague is not averse to using the term “pragmatic” to describe
her approach. For instance, she focuses her theology on “ethical or prag-
matic concern.” The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis,
MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), p. 81. Again, “the main criterion for a
‘true’ theology is pragmatic.” Models of God, p. 196n. 13.
5. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Min-
neapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993), p. 22. Emphasis added. McFague’s distance
158 Notes to Chapter Five

from traditional theological doctrine is indicated by the fact that she can-
not accept either “an incarnational Christology [the idea that Jesus of
Nazareth is God in the flesh, God become man], or a canonical [officially
authoritative] Scripture.” Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of
God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. x.
6. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, p. x.
7. Ibid., p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 186. Recall from chapter one that Dietrich Bonhoeffer
was a Lutheran theologian martyred by the Nazis.
9. For an insightful argument according to which it is this rejection
of scriptural authority that most separates McFague from the conserva-
tive, “post-liberal” theologian George Lindbeck, see Terrence Reynolds,
“Walking Apart, Together: Lindbeck and McFague on Theological
Method,” in The Journal of Religion 77, no. 1 (January 1997). Expanded
Academic ASAP, InfoTrac (June 2, 2003). In other ways, suggests
Reynolds, their theological methodologies are surprisingly similar.
10. Sheila Greeve Davaney, Review of Models of God:Theology for an
Ecological, Nuclear Age, in Religious Studies Review 16 (January 1990): 37.
11. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, p. 134.
12. Ibid., p. 101.
13. Ibid., p. 42.
14. There is at least one sense in which McFague’s theology might
be viewed as more skeptical and radical than that of Mary Daly: McFague
emphasizes the “is not” of all metaphors applied to the divine, something
that she believes Mary Daly neglects. See McFague, Metaphorical Theology,
p. 159.
15. Ibid., p. 23.
16. Ibid., p. 73.
17. Ibid., p. 108
18. McFague, The Body of God, p. 14.
19. Ibid., p. 89.
20. Ibid., p. 145.
21. Ibid., p. 148.
22. Ibid., p. 181.
 Notes to Chapter Six 159

23. McFague, The Body of God, p. 181.

24. Ibid., p. 167.
25. Ibid., p. 162.
26. Ibid., p. 162.
27. Ibid., p. 23.
28. McFague, Models of God, p. 65.
29. Ibid., p. 38.
30. Ibid., p. 169.
31. Ibid., p. 103.
32. Ibid., p. 109.
33. McFague, Models of God, p. 127.
34. Ibid., p. 129.
35. Ibid., p. 130.
36. Ibid., p. 131.
37. Ibid., p. 163.
38. McFague, Models of God, p. 159.
39. Models of God, p. 169.
40. Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love
Nature (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), p. 37.
41. McFague, Super, Natural Christians, p. 38.
42. Ibid., p. 14.
43. Ibid., p. 134.
44. Lawrence S. Cunningham, review of Super, Natural Christians, in
Commonweal 125, no. 16 (September 25, 1998): 28. Emphasis mine.
Expanded Academic ASAP, InfoTrac (June 2, 2003).
45. Cunningham, Review of Super, Natural Christians, 28.

Chapter Six. God and Pragmatism II

1. See John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT:Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1934).
160 Notes to Chapter Six

2. Sallie McFague, “Cosmology and Christianity: Implications of

the Common Creation Story for Theology,” in Theology at the End of
Modernity: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Kaufman, ed. by Sheila Greeve
Davaney (Philadelphia:Trinity Press International, 1991), p. 30 n.13.
3. Gordon Kaufman, God—Mystery—Diversity: Christian Theology in
a Pluralistic World (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1996), p. 180.
Emphasis mine.
4. Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the
Concept of God (Philadelphia:Westminster, 1981), p. 22.
5. Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 331.
6. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, p. 232. Emphasis mine.
7. Ibid., p. 312.
8. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination, p. 16.
9. Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, p. 78.
10. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination, p. 82.
11. Ibid., p. 74.
12. Ibid., p. 32.
13. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, p. 308.
14. Kaufman, God—Mystery—Diversity, p. 102.
15. Standing behind my account of metaphor and symbol here—an
account that is, I believe, consistent with McFague’s use of the terms—is
Paul Ricoeur’s classic study of metaphor and symbol in his Interpretation
Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth,TX:Texas Chris-
tian University Press, 1976).
16. At some points Kaufman does not seem willing to embrace an
entirely pragmatic approach to theology and give up on the distinction
between our perception of God and some “real” God who exists inde-
pendently of our perceptions of God.Thus, in his earlier work he speaks,
for example of the “real” God versus the “available” God. See, for
instance, Gordon Kaufman, An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula,
MO: Scholars Press/American Academy of Religion, 1979), p. 70 n.12.
17. For Kaufman’s critique of thinking of the ultimate in terms of
human characteristics, see pp. 270–72 of In the Face of Mystery.
 Notes to Chapter Six 161

18. Kaufman, God—Mystery—Diversity, p. 9.

19. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, p. 43.
20. Kaufman, God—Mystery—Diversity, p. 99. Emphasis mine.
21. See Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, Chapter 17.
22. Ibid., p. 285.
23. Ibid., p. 284.
24. Ibid., p. 283.
25. Ibid., p. xii.
26. Not everyone would agree with Kaufman on this matter, of
course. Consider, for example, physicist Steven Weinberg’s notorious
observation, mentioned in our chapter on Goodenough, that the more
we learn about the universe, the more “pointless” it seems.
27. See, for example, Kaufman, The Theological Imagination, chapter
four.
28. Ibid., p. 136.
29. Ibid., p. 144.
30. Ibid., p. 144.
31. Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, p. 383.
32. Kaufman, The Theological Imagination, p. 145. Kaufman’s list of
possible candidates for spiritual guidance seems a bit quick and haphaz-
ard: Julius Caesar, after all, was an ambitious military conqueror, and
Henry Ford was a notorious anti-Semite as well as a man willing to hire
thugs to beat up protesting workers.
33. See chapter 12, “Religious Diversity and Religious Truth,” in
Kaufman, God—Mystery—Diversity.
34. See, for example, Mikael Stenmark, “Science and a Personal
Conception of God: A Critical Response to Gordon D. Kaufman,” in
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71 (March 2003): 175–81.
35. See Kaufman, God—Mystery—Diversity, p. 137.
36. Robert Cummings Neville, Review of In Face of Mystery:A Con-
structive Theology, in Theological Studies 54, no. 4 (December 1993): 752.
Extended Academic ASAP, InfoTrac (June 2, 2003).
162 Notes to Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven. Christ and the Tao

1.Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans.W. Mont-
gomery (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
2. Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus: A New Translation
and Guide to his Essential Teachings for Believers and Unbelievers (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991), p. 6.
3. Quoted in Mitchell, Gospel According to Jesus, p. 4.
4. Mitchell, Gospel According to Jesus, p. 8.
5. Ibid., p. 9.
6. Ibid., p. 9.
7. Ibid., p. 8. Emphasis mine.
8. Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, with Foreword and Notes, by
Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 1.
9. Mitchell, Tao Te Chiang, p. 114.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Ibid., p. 40.
12. Ibid., p. 13.
13. Ibid., p. 10.
14. Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, p. 11.
15. Ibid., p. 72.
16. Ibid., p. 130.
17. Ibid., p. 13.
18. Ibid., p. 14.
19. Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, p. 75.
20. Ibid., p. 160.
21. Ibid., p. 146.
22. Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New
York: Random House, 2003), p. 54. It is interesting that Pagels cites
Stephen Mitchell as one of the persons who provided helpful comments
on her manuscript as it was in process. See Pagels, Beyond Belief, 187.
23. Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, p. 228.
 Notes to Chapter Eight 163

24. Ibid., p. 152.

25. Ibid., p. 233.
26. Ibid., p. 222.
27. See Romans 7: 18–24.
28. Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, p. 41.
29. The original novel is Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of
Christ, trans. P. A. Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).
30. Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, p. 18.
31. Ibid., p. 223.
32. Ibid., p. 219.
33. Quoted in Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, p. 272.
34. On this problem, see my Imaginary Christs:The Challenge of Chris-
tological Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

Chapter Eight. Gods and Goddesses

1. Recall that the Greek theos in our word “theology” means god,
while the Greek theas in “thealogy” means goddess.
2. Naomi R. Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh: Feminism, Psy-
choanalysis, and the Resurrection of the Body (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1990), p.
108.
3. Naomi R. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the
End of Traditional Religions (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1979), p. 105.
4. Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh, p. 211.
5. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 25.
6. Quoted in Goldenberg, The Changing of the Gods, p. 47.
7. Goldenberg, The Changing of the Gods, p. 25.
8. Naomi Ruth Goldenberg, The End of God: Important Directions for
a Feminist Critique of Religion in the Works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
(Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1981), p. 19.
9. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Stra-
chey (New York:W.W. Norton, 1961), chapter three.
164 Notes to Chapter Eight

10. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion; Totem and Taboo:
Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics,
trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952); Moses and
Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York:Vintage, 1959).
11. Goldenberg, The End of God, p. 32.
12. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 36.
13. Quoted in Goldenberg, The End of God, p. 55.
14. Goldenberg, The End of God, p. 39.
15. Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh, p. 71.
16. Quoted in Goldenberg, The End of God, p. 77.
17. See Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 89. Cf. Cynthia Eller,
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory:Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women
a Future (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2000).
18. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 88.
19. See Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, pp. 111–14.
20. John Dewey, A Common Faith, p. 48.
21. Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh, p. 6.
22. Quoted in Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh, p. 95.
23. Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh, p. 110.
24. Ibid., p. 3.
25. Ibid., p. 38.
26. Ibid., p. 38.
27. Ibid., p. 202.
28. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 82.
29. Ibid., p. 129.
30. Ibid., p. 117.
31. Goldenberg, Returning Words to Flesh, p. 68.
32. See, for example, Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend,
ed. Frederick C. Crews (New York:Viking Press, 1998).
 Notes to Chapter Nine 165

Chapter Nine.The Future

of Radical Theology
1. In my When God Becomes Goddess:The Transformation of American
Religion (New York: Continuum, 1995), I concentrate on one particular
form of what might be called “radical theology,” what I dub a feminist
“enactment theology.” In chapter five of that book, I engage in an analy-
sis of the possible future of (at least this one version of) radical theology,
an analysis that is both more technical and more thorough than what I
am undertaking here.
2. See, for example, Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess
(New York: Crossroads, 1993), chapter six, “Magic and Other Spiritual
Practices.”
3. Tillich would say that, while the self is ideally or “essentially” a
unity or centered, the fact of fallenness or sin means that, in fact, the self
constantly struggles to hold its various dimensions in harmony. See Paul
Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957).
4. David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and God-
desses (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
5. Miller, New Polytheism, p. ix.
6. Ibid., p. 11.
7. Ibid., p. 80.
8. Naomi Goldenberg notes that Miller’s approach is characterized
by a “limited cultural horizon.” Goldenberg, The End of God, p. 121
n.142.
9. See Andrew Walsh, “Church, Lies, and Polling Data,” in Religion
in the News 1 (Fall 1998): 9–11
10. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1951–63).
11. It is a basic principle of physics that energy and matter can be
neither created nor destroyed; they simply change their form. But if talk
of God acting within the physical world is to be more than just using
God-talk as a poetic veneer over purely natural processes, then God must
add something new to the equation: energy must be introduced from
outside the closed system that is the whole physical world. This would
violate the conservation law. Nancey Murphy’s work on this problem is
166 Notes to Chapter Nine

exemplary, a problem that she believes can be solved. See, for example,
Nancey Murphy,“Divine Action in the Natural Order: Buriden’s Ass and
Schrödinger’s Cat,” in Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on
Divine Action, ed. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and Arthur R.
Peacocke (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications, and
Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1995).While I
admire Murphy’s intellect and her leadership in this endeavor, I believe
that her project ultimately fails.
12. See Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s)
Report (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), p. 247; and William R.
Stoeger, “Key Developments in Physics Challenging Philosophy and
Theology,” in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark
Richards and Wesley J.Wildman (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1996), p. 197.
13. Ferris, Whole Shebang, p. 175
14. See Sharon Begley,“Searching for the God Within:The Way Our
Brains Are Wired May Explain the Origin and Power of Religious
Beliefs,” in Newsweek (January 29, 2001), p. 59; and Sharon Begley,“Reli-
gion and the Brain: In the New Field of ‘Neurotheology,’ Scientists Seek
the Biological Basis of Spirituality. Is God All in Our Heads?” in
Newsweek, (May 7, 2001), pp. 50–57.
15. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Full-
ness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
16. For an excellent refutation of attempts by traditional Christian
thinkers to harmonize their faith with contemporary science, a refutation
written by a reputable physicist, see Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found
God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst,
New York: Prometheus, 2003).
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Crosby, Donald A. A Religion of Nature. Albany: State University of New
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 Index
Altizer,Thomas J. J., 7–8, 9, 128,
142, 152n.14, 153n.1
Aquinas,Thomas, 15, 76, 77, 79,
132
Aristotle, 44, 132
Augustine, 30, 77, 79
Bacon, Francis, 70
Barth, Karl, 93, 132, 134
Begley, Sharon, 166n.14
Berger, Peter, 14
Blake,William, 34
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 54, 150n.13,
158n.8
Borg, Marcus, 96, 108
Brown, Norman O., 121–22
Brown Raymond, 96, 108
Bultmann, Rudolf, 93
Christ, Carol P., 21, 152n.14
Christ, Jesus, 7–9, 54–55, 56, 59,
63, 64–65, 70, 71, 72–73, 79,
89, 90, Chapter Seven, 112,
115, 123, 128, 130–31, 132,
143, 157n.5
Chuang-Tzu, 100–1
171
Copleston, Frederick, 5
Crews, Frederick C., 164n.32
Croce, Paul Jerome, 48
Crossan, John Dominic, 96, 108
Cunningham, Lawrence S., 72
Damasio, Antonio, 155n.34
Darwin, Charles, 146, 151n.20
death, 30, 32, 33, 35, 41, 65, 78,
107–8, 112, 118, 136
de Man, Paul, 21
Derrida, Jacques, 21, 25, 27–29,
32
Descartes, René, 2, 4, 5, 25
Dewey, John, 53, 75–76, 81,
119–20
Einstein, Albert, 49
Eller, Cynthia, 164n.17, 165n.2
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 6, 20
ethics, 44–47, 53, 61, 66, 69, 70,
72, 106, 123, 129
Ferris,Timothy, 49, 147, 166n.12
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 150n.13
Franklin, Benjamin, 4
172
Freud, Sigmund, 27, 111, 113–15,
116, 124–25
Frost, Robert, 35
Galileo, 2, 16
Gay, Peter, 4
Geertz, Clifford, 14
goddess, 19, 20, 21, Chapter
Eight, 128, 131, 133, 135, 137,
138–39
Gould, Stephen Jay, 147
Greeve Davaney, Sheila, 21, 55
Hamilton,William, 8–9
Harnack, Adolf, 150n.13
Hawking, Stephen, 48
Hillman, James, 120
image. See metaphor
James,William, 53
Jefferson,Thomas, 4, 97
Jung, Carl, 111, 115–17, 119, 120,
124–25
Kant, Immanuel, 88, 132
Kazantzakis, Nikos, 107
Lakeland, Paul, 153n.1
Lao Tzu, 100, 106
Lindbeck, George, ix
Luckmann,Thomas, 14
Lyotard, Jean François, 21, 22
metaphor, 34–35, 46, Chapter
Five, 75–86, 102, 111, 112,
114–18, 119, 120, 121–25,
128–30, 139, 140, 142,
158n.14, 160n.15
Milbank, John, ix
Index
Miller, David L., 138–39
mindfulness, 42–43, 69, 129
Murphy, Nancey, 93, 165n.11
myth. See metaphor
Neville, Robert Cummings, 93
New Age spiritualities, x, 20, 37,
127, 145, 147
Newton, Isaac, 2, 49, 146
Niebuhr, H.R., 30
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6–7, 8, 9, 26,
27, 107
Otto, Rudolf, 38–39, 46, 77
Pagels, Elaine, 105
Palevitz, Barry, 48
Pascal, Blaise, 39, 86–87
Paul, Saint, 7, 107
Peirce, Charles Saunders, 53
Plato, 28, 107, 117, 124, 132
pragmatism, 53–56, 61, 69, 70, 71,
75–76, 77, 86, 109, 119, 125,
130, 135, 157n.4, 160n.16
radical theology, defined, ix, 9–12,
53–54, 127
Rahner, Karl, 132, 134
Raphael, Melissa, 23
Reynolds,Terrence, 158n.9
Rich, Adrienne, 120
Ricoeur, Paul, 160n.15
Rubenstein, Richard, 9–10
Ruether, Rosemary Radford,
116
Ryokan, 98
Scharlemann, Robert P., 153n.1
Schneider, Laurel C., 152n.12
Schweitzer, Albert, 96
 Index
science, 2, 11–12, 26–27, 36,
Chapter Four, 56, 58–59,
61–64, 66, 70, 71–72, 77–79,
81–82, 83, 86, 87, 92–93, 114,
124–25, 129, 132, 133, 139,
143, 146–48, 151n.20,
156n.34, 165n.11
Scorcese, Martin, 107
Shakespeare,William, 57, 82, 83
Spinoza, Baruch, 1, 3
Stenger, Mary Ann, 152n.12
Stenger,Victor J., 166n.16
Stenmark, Mikael, 161n.34
Stoeger,William R., 166n.12
symbols. See metaphor
Tillich, Paul, 15–17, 19, 20, 37,
80, 85, 128, 137–38, 142–43,
152n.14, 165n.3
173
Tindal, Matthew, 3
Toland, John, 3
traditional monotheism, defined,
1
Voltaire, 4
von Balthasar, Hans Urs, ix
Walsh, Andrew, 165n.9
Weinberg, Steven, 39, 41, 49,
161n.26
Wennemyr, Susan, 35
Whitehead, Alfred North, 51
Winquist, Charles E., 153n.1
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 72
Woodruff, Paul, 42–43
Wyschogrod, Edith, 153n.1
Yeats,William Butler, 22
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RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Gods after God

An Introduction to Contemporary Radical Theologies
Richard Grigg
Gods after God provides an accessible introduction to a wide range of contemporary radical theologies.
Radical theology can be defined as talk about the divine that rejects the notion of God as a super-
natural personal consciousness who created the world and who intervenes in it to accomplish his
purposes. In addition, radical theologies tend to reject the absolute authority of traditional sources of
guidance such as the Bible and the tradition of a church. Richard Grigg demonstrates that there is a
discernible stream of radical theologies beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing to the
present. He explores a host of rich and lively contemporary radical religious positions, including the
radical feminist theology of Mary Daly, the deconstructive theology of Mark C. Taylor, the religious
naturalism of Ursula Goodenough and Donald Crosby, the pragmatist approaches of Sallie McFague
and Gordon Kaufman, the Taoist interpretation of Jesus of Stephen Mitchell, and the feminist poly-
theism of Naomi Goldenberg. This in-depth examination asks, in unflinching terms, what challenges
radical theologies face and whether they have a realistic chance of surviving in American society.

“This book represents an exceptionally important claim, namely that there is a lengthy tradition
of nonsupernaturalist religious thought or theology that has much to offer and very likely that has
staying power.” —Delwin Brown, author of Boundaries of Our Habitations:
Tradition and Theological Construction
Richard Grigg is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Sacred
Heart University. He is the author of many books, including Imaginary Christs: The Challenge of
Christological Pluralism, also published by SUNY Press.

State University of
New York Press
www.sunypress.edu