David Tracy is professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. It is not surprising, therefore, that both Cobb and Tracy find resources for solving the problem of God in the very challenges of modernity. When one focuses on the character of theology as an academic discipline, several complications become apparent.
Basic theologies will usually be primarily concerned with showing the adequacy (or inadequacy) of a particular religious tradition's truth claim to some articulated paradigm of what constitutes. The systematic theologian's main task is to reinterpret others or his tradition for the current situation. On this reading, the "enlightened" bourgeois critic of the work of art is not superior to the work.
In summary, if this brief analysis is correct, then the public character of the work of a systematic theologian as a hermeneutic theologian can be justified. In helping to do so, these theologies clearly serve a truly public function in the full transformative sense of the word.
Talking About God: Doing Theology in the Context of Modern Pluralism by
David Tracy and John B. Cobb, Jr
The Analogical Imagination in Catholic Theology by David Tracy
Moreover, this passage is placed in the wider typological context of the document, in which two alternative types are described as rationalism and semirationalism (proof of the mystery). Rahner's and Lonergan's theologies can be interpreted by their neotranscendental formulation of the traditional Catholic analogical vision. Indeed, their transcendental version of the Catholic analogical vision of all reality remains, continuing to believe, an authentically modern and Catholic one.
Three widely shared conclusions from recent linguistic studies about the character and logic of metaphor have striking parallels with the lesser-known results of linguistic studies of analogy. More specifically, this parallel can be found in the proper analogical language of the Catholic theological tradition. Indeed, I have come to believe that this parallel applies to every step of metaphor analysis.
Analogy and Dialectic: God- Language by David Tracy
However, I fear that the discussion of real differences has not been supported by some key misinterpretations of the opposing view. The first important question that each side should address on its own basis is, in my view, a perfectly logical one: namely, whether the concept of "future" can be coherently understood in terms of actuality rather than possibility. If we accept the argument from the last chapter about the central semantic character of all properly analogical languages, then a new and truly promising line of discussion is open to all participants.
If this analysis of the situation is accurate, then a serious conversation between these two important analogous God-language traditions can be reopened, freed from polemics and on completely public terms that either party can accept in principle. The process tradition will benefit by becoming more aware of the very analogical character of its God-language, and thereby more concerned with articulating the more precise relations between its somewhat primitive distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic, when the real discussion and the real need exists to formulate a more complete process anthropology with greater precision. This moment of negative dialectic can be seen when Sigmund Freud exposes the illusion of the self-control of conscious rationality by analyzing the all-pervasive reality of the unconscious;
Nietzsche reveals the insane will to power that drives the genteel and urban value system of the Enlightenment thinker. In short, at best, the analogical language of God transcends the limitations of the aesthetic and the ethical stages of existence and reaches the truly religious—but pagan, not Christian—insights of "religiosity a." It cannot see the radical sin and guilt in every human heart; it will not face the infinitely qualitative distinction between God and sinful man; it retreats into increasingly desperate attempts to ignore the absolute paradox that God becomes man by building intellectual. 34;bomb in the playground of theologians," is the effect of a deeply Kierkegaardian negative dialectic that explodes on all analogical visions of the language of God with the demand: "Let God be God!" Paul Tillich's articulation of the Protestant principle remains. his great and consistent applied principle of negative dialectic from his earliest formulations through his method to.
When Jurgen Moltmann, faithful to this neo-orthodox program of negative dialectics, questions all analogical language in order to speak more of the Crucified God, he restates the central view of negative dialectics for the contemporary environment. If one grants, as I do, the central meaning and truth of the negative dialectic expressed in neo-orthodoxy, then what hope remains for any attempt—whether neo-Thomist or processional—to articulate an analogical language of God. When Rudolf Bultmann insists that theology still needs proper analogical language to speak of God in a non-mythological way, even though Christian theology must eliminate mythological language in fidelity to the presence of negative dialectics in the demand of the kerygma itself, then also he accepts the same insistence.
To recall the logic of the whole argument, the following steps are involved: the first chapter argued for the public character of theological language, including its classical systematic languages of analogy and dialectic; the second chapter outlined the character of the analogical imagination itself in order to clarify the real possibilities for its discussion; the third chapter specified the major.
God and the Scientific World View by John B. Cobb, Jr
Perhaps out of the current chaos can emerge a purer and truer understanding of God. The neo-naturalism I encountered in the faculty of the Chicago Divinity School seemed too accommodating to the unbelief of our time. It seems to be more the one possibility of belief that was open to me in the intellectual world of the late forties.
Others think of God as the cause of the whole of nature rather than the particular cause of particular events. Attention can therefore be directed to important human features of the world as the locus of divine causation. It is the erosion of the Newtonian vision that has made talking about God problematic in the modern scientific worldview.
Third, through causality analysis of root experiences we can arrive at an understanding of causation as a participant in. We should not be troubled by the fact that God's causal relationship with the world lies outside the work of science. For most of us, most of the time, the experience of God's grace and freedom in our lives is not clear and vivid.
Where there is no living awareness of God's presence as such, what features of the world can we reasonably assume are the result of his presence. Since nothing in the previous world can be the cause of the effectiveness of these possibilities, that matter transcends the world. To think of God as the cause of the efficacy of these possibilities is to think of God as a factor in the self-constitution of every experience, for that is what it means to be a cause.
To think of God as the cause of the effectiveness of new possibilities -- and thus the cause of freedom -- is, according to our earlier consideration of causality, to think of God as participating in the constitution of experience.
God and Buddhism by John B. Cobb, Jr
In this chapter I want to confront this answer to the scientific challenge with the challenge that arises in the study of the history of religion. To a certain extent, this expectation has been confirmed in the study of the world's religious traditions. Nevertheless, outside of the Western religions nurtured in Judaism, it is difficult to find the Christian God under other names.
He could point to a long tradition in the West of the via negativa, that is, the path to God through denial of. There is another and more fruitful possibility that requires a profound reconsideration of the Christian God. In doing so, some distinctive features of the biblical testimony of God have faded.
The movement to absolutize God at the expense of the world did not stop there. Omnipotence in this sense can only be attributed to the whole or the being of the whole. It is equally clear that the Bible does not regard God as the material cause of the world.
If we now ask whether God is the efficient cause of the world, the answer is surely affirmative. For example, in much of the tradition the efficient cause was believed to be outside the effect while containing it. The word, the light and the life communicated by God to the world are constitutive of the world as God's real presence in the world.
In the New Testament we read of the famous kenosis or self-emptying by which the Son of God became a man (Philippians 2:6-8).
God and Feminism by John B. Cobb, Jr
Such an experience requires a theological response that changes in language and conceptuality and in the understanding of the church and. One is simply repeating the word God. and to avoid using the pronoun. In the religious imagination of antiquity, the sexual character of the gods was far from subdued.
The use of the male pronoun and of male imagery was certainly not accidental. Given this history of the male imagination, it is no light matter to introduce female language and female images into our thought of God. Indeed, one of the complaints of women is that they are too much excluded from the attainment of such a transcendent personality.
In this, it was helped by the transformation of religious images and the growth of divine transcendence. My topic here is a male theologian's response to the feminist revelation of the masculinity of our traditional God. In the previous two chapters I have sketched elements of a doctrine of God as suggested in response to the challenges of the scientific worldview and of Buddhism.
Recent theology has recovered some of the balance that existed in Jesus' own understanding. It is also true that the image of the Kingdom is associated with ideas about it. I mention them here to say that the same adjustments to the concept of God are needed in the encounter with science.
Buddhism and feminism are also needed in response to the new awareness of the fragility of the planetary biosphere.
