I feel like I gave Liberal Theology: A Radical Vision, short shrift last time, so I want to delve into a some things that stood out and made me think.

I talked about tragedy before, but I want to highlight this remark he makes:

Tragedy is excluded as a Christian category and is replaced by a theology of sin that focuses on personal guilt, divine punishment, and substitutionary atonement. A radically liberal theology must find a way to affirm both tragedy and redemption. [page 52]

Later he writes:

If there is a divine comedy, it is a tragicomedy, a story of a crucified God who undergoes the suffering and conflicts that render historical existence tragic. To affirm tragic suffering in God is a deep revision of the classical metaphysics, which exempts God from the pathos of world. [page 52]

There is also what he writes about the relationship between Christianity, Christ and, culture – written within the larger context of what should be the relationship. The larger relationship includes questions such as, should Christianity (and this could apply to any religion) be above culture, be something beyond mere human affairs as befits something so intimately connected to the divine. Or, does it have an obligation to culture, to guide it down a path that will lead humanity to its salvation? And if so, should religion dominate culture, become inextricably intertwined in culture? Or something more subtle? This question seems particularly relevant as Rick Santorum takes a lead in national GOP polls. He clearly sees culture as something which should be forcefully dominated by religion by the force of law. This is very different from the more liberal view of religious interaction with culture exemplified by civil rights movements that use the moral authority of the church to give support to larger ideas of justice.

He actually comes up with five different paths:

Christ against culture – wherein belief in Christ is assumed to against culture.
Christ of culture – wherein Jesus is a ‘great hero of human cultural history,’ the creator of the values of Western civilization.
Christ above culture – ‘views Christ as the fulfillment of cultural aspirations and the restorer of the institutions of true society.’
Christ and culture in paradox – a complex one, but one that respects both the dictates of human culture (such as government and laws) and Christ while accepting the contradictions; though never explicitly said, the Christ’s remark about giving unto Caesar seems relevant here.
Christ the transformer of culture – is described as creative, with culture as a ‘perverted good’ (as opposed to an inherent evil) that can be transformed and redeemed.

Later, the author presents a new (to me) view of God’s interaction with the world, taken from a reading of Hegel (I told you, he loves Hegel), writing that ‘if God interacts with the world, God must take on the diversity of the world, just as the world takes on the oneness of God – a oneness that is not sameness but a perpetual play of many, unified in love.’ This brings to mind things like Liebniz’ monads or ancient Greek conceptions of the world as oneness, ideas which I never properly saw as at all compelling before, but I also never tried hard to understand how to resolve the contradictions before and this seems to give one way of doing so.

He writes of how Christ transformed the old view in a way particularly relevant to feminist theory:

He transformed the patriarchal concept of divine fatherhood into a maternal or nurturing concept of God. [page 74]

Another quote that struck me:

God acts redemptively in relation to nature both directly, as cosmic eros, and indirectly through human beings.

His writing about Spirit leads me to think of certain agnostic visions of God (such as God as being the sum of physical laws, which was, I believe Einstein’s view):

…Spirit introduces a principle of universality, the wholeness from which the spirit proceeds as God returns to godself from creating, indwelling and redeeming the world. The Spirit proceeds not just from Christ but from the whole world, from a diversity of religious figures and traditions as well as from diverse natural powers.

The author makes a connection between Buddhist ideas of detachment from the world (though he also admits that his understanding of Buddhism is limited) and the concept of Grace. The emptiness and letting go implied by what one might call the Buddhist theory of redemption correlates to the letting go implied by Grace. Each involves a certain detachment from the physical world as one touches an aspect of the divine.

Okay. I’ve rambled enough. I just felt I gave the whole thing short shrift the first time and thought I’d try and rectify that.

Go back about your business.