Transfiguring God: telling the story of God in the postmodern world
I wrote this in the 1990s and in some ways it moves on from 'Holy Ground', though
I think it is a flawed work. Looking back, I see the Buddhist in me was not acknowledged
enough, leading to a book that some criticized for not representing a 'truly' Christian
approach. I hope to re-write the book someday as an explicit attempt at a (semi-)Systematic
theology relating the Christ event, and especially the resurrection, to a Buddhist
rather than Judaeo-Hellennic analysis of the world and the human condition. This
the approach I am grappling with in Emptied Heaven
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a core chapter in Microsoft Word format.
Click here to see the Synopsis or the Contents.
Numbers refer to the Chapters (see Contents)
1.Stories and rumours of, and appeals to God abound in today’s world, but we are
growing less sure of what, if anything, they are about. Despite a growing sense
of the need for spirituality, three crucial stories – our individual human stories,
the scientific story of the universe, and the Christian story of God become human
– are drifting further and further apart.
2.We have moved from a pre-modern world where the key question concerned what really
exists, through a modern world where the key question was what beliefs could be
justified, to a post-modern world where the key question is authentic experience,
and where I am on my personal journey. God correspondingly moves from God the summit
of being, thorough the God of true faith, to the God of inspiring story. We look
at various ‘biographies’ of God from the Bible onward, and ask the key question:
how far can the philosophical God of being, and/or the theological God of faith,
carry over into the postmodern (but also ancient) God of story?
3.We look more closely at postmodernism and distinguish a ‘nihilistic’ version for
which there is ‘nothing outside language’, from a ‘constructive’ postmodernism,
which allows language to reach outside itself in the process of constructing, imagining
and relating stories. This results in a Trinitarian circle between matter, consciousness
and idea, in which the simplifications of idealism (for which there is nothing outside
the story) and materialism (for which the story just tries to correspond with a
pre-ordered world outside) are equally to be resisted.
4.The central concept of transfiguration is introduced. Language and story operate
on various distinct levels, and reality itself, though shaped by the language we
use to describe it, can force a retelling of the story, opening up new levels or
being.
5.God relates to the world, according to Aquinas, as agent to action; or as the
highest-level subject of the world’s story. This enables us to reconcile the philosophical
God of Aquinas with the story God of the Bible, and develop a concept of revelation
that surprisingly – perhaps alarmingly to some! – combines features of pantheism,
agnosticism and revelation monotheism.
6.But God is sufferer as well as agent in relation to the world. Some popular current
notions of a suffering God are rejected, however, as we try to develop a more nuanced
understanding of the way God, like an artist, can paradoxically be remade by the
work he makes, without ceasing to be God. The incarnation essentially involves no
paradox other than this.
7.The idea of transfiguration enables us to translate the Chalcedonian understanding
of the ‘one person, two natures (not to be confused)’ of Christ into ‘one subject,
two stories (working on different levels)’. The incarnation flows in turn from an
understanding of resurrection as transfiguration. Modern cosmological insight enables
us to understand a world created from its end-point or goal, which is the moment
where the creation can be said to ‘happen’. The resurrection may be identified with
this end-point which is the creation of the world. The incarnation doctrine amounts
to permission to retell the story of God and the story of humanity in the light
of Christ and his resurrection. The three crucial stories – our human stories, the
story of the universe, and the story of God made human – are held together in the
resurrection.
CHAPTER 1. WHY GOD MATTERS AND DOES NOT MATTER
- Marginalisation of Religion in the Western Margins
- The task of rehabilitation
Four
- key Images of God.
CHAPTER 2. STORIES OF GOD — towards the Postmodern
- From Being through Knowing to Telling
- Biographies of God
- Can God
really have a story?
CHAPTER 3. IS THERE ANYTHING OUTSIDE THE STORY? — Variants of Postmodernism.
- The demise of modernism, or the end of ‘the Universe’.
- Beyond foundations:
towards the postmodern
- Ways in which language needs an outside.
- Trinity
CHAPTER 4. TRANSFIGURATION — Stories that open up new levels.
- Examples of Integration and Levels
- Transfiguration
- Divine and Human
CHAPTER 5. THE WORLD AS GOD’S STORY — how is God revealed?
- Pantheism, Agnosticism, Monotheism: can all be true?
- Three Ways of looking
at the World in relation to God
- God as in-formation
- Immanence and Transcendence:
the Body and Levels
- Ways of Parsing God and World
- God in Action
CHAPTER 6. GOD AS THE WORLD’S STORY — can the World do things to God?
- Three pointers from Auschwitz
- Evil and God’s Goodness
- A Suffering
God?
- The Enemy of Apatheia
- The Paradox of the Suffering God: towards
Incarnation
CHAPTER 7.THE STORY GOD AS THE STORY OF A HUMAN — Incarnation.
- Christological Snapshots
- The Story of God: the Story of the Human
-
Omega in the midst
- The Story of God and our human Stories
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