Jesus and Creativity

Gordon D. Kaufman

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780800696344
• eBook ISBN: 9781451408904
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Despite the fabled difficulties of traditional Christological terms, Kaufman seeks to re-envision the symbol of Jesus within the contemporary scientific worldview. Building on his notion of God as simply creativity, he here locates the meaning of Jesus' salvific story within an evolving universe and a threatened planet.

chapter one

Reconceiving the Jesus-Trajectory

From the very beginning of Christian faith, it was taken for granted that God was the ultimate point of reference in terms of which all human life—indeed, all reality—was to be understood. Christianity emerged initially within the context of first-century Judaism, a religious culture oriented and devoted to the God believed to be the creator of the world and its ongoing ruler and governor, as emphasized throughout the Hebrew Bible:

I am Yahweh, and there is no other.

I form light and create darkness,

I make weal and create woe,

I am Yahweh, who do all these things.…

I made the earth,

and created man upon it;

it was my hands that stretched out the heavens,

and I commanded all their host. (Isa. 45:6b–7, 12 RSV)

It was in this monotheistic religio-cultural context that Christian faith was born. Monotheistic religious orientations, as I have argued elsewhere (Kaufman 1993: ch. 6), tend to generate a three-dimensional world-picture: God is the ultimate reality in terms of which all else is to be understood; humanity is that self-conscious, confused, and inquisitive creation of God whose conflicted ongoing story—particularly in relation to God—is rehearsed, meditated on, scrutinized, interpreted, assessed, and revised; and the world is the overarching context within which this human life, with all its troubles, struggles, and triumphs, transpires. Christian faith, however—though born within this religio-cultural context, and understanding itself as a continuing monotheistic religious orientation—is four-dimensional: in its world-picture Jesus Christ is as indispensable a dimension as the other three.¹

From an early period it was maintained by at least some Christians (as the New Testament shows) that Jesus is of absolutely decisive significance for understanding both who or what God is and what human life is all about. Jesus was said to be, on the one hand, the definitive revelation of God, the very “image of the invisible God,” as Colossians 1:15 puts it.² On the other hand, it was claimed that Jesus is utterly human: “made like his brethren in every respect,” as Hebrews 2:17 (RSV) declares, and the very model of human perfection, “tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (4:15 RSV). This double significance of Christ was given dogmatic definition at the Council of Chalcedon (451 C.E.), where it was affirmed that Jesus was “perfect in Godhead … [and] perfect in humanness, truly God and truly human,… consubstantial with the Father in Godhead, and … consubstantial with us in humanness,… two natures … in one Person” (Hardy 1954:373, slightly altered). If our task here were to understand correctly the history of christology, we would, of course, have to puzzle out the meanings of all this quasi-mythical language; and that would be a long and complicated assignment.³ In my opinion, however, Christian theology should no longer be thought of as essentially a hermeneutical task, that is, as largely interpretation of traditional material. Although one cannot do theology properly without awareness and understanding of the main Christian traditions, its central task is essentially constructive: to put together a Christian world-picture (or some important features of that picture) appropriate, in a specific context, for orienting human life, reflection, and devotion. We cannot carry out this task, of course, without paying serious attention to the traditions that have informed Christian faith in the past. However, in the course of history, from the time of Jesus up to the present, great changes in and many variations of Christian faith and life have appeared, as Christians have had to adapt themselves repeatedly to new unforeseen circumstances. So our theological task today is to construct a Christian world-picture that can orient faith and life appropriately and effectively in today’s rapidly changing modern/postmodern world.

I

In my recent book, In the beginning … Creativity (Kaufman 2004), I suggested that in our world today the traditional defining notion of God as The Creator has become for many virtually unintelligible; and I suggested that such persons might, therefore, think of God simply as creativity (a descendant of that traditional idea).⁴ What does it mean to place our faith in God-as-creativity? And what does it mean to order our activities, lives, and worship in relation to God as so conceived? For monotheistic believers in our time, in my opinion, it is meaningful and helpful to think of creativity as the ultimate point of reference in terms of which life should be oriented; and in that book, therefore, it was argued that it is appropriate, in the widespread ordinary employment of the name God, to understand that it is creativity to which that name refers. Because the focus in that book was on these quite general concerns, very little was said there about Christian faith’s other major symbol, Jesus Christ.⁵ In the present book, however, I develop—in close connection with my proposal that we think of God as creativity—an interpretation of the correlative importance of Jesus, for those who wish to understand this creativity from a Christian point of view.

Before turning to that, we need to take note of some implications of the traditional understanding of God as the creator of the heavens and the earth, the creator of all things visible and invisible. The mark that came to distinguish God decisively from everything else was, as these phrases imply, creativity: everything other than God was created by God; God alone had self-existence, aseity. God was not thought of only as creator, however. Before the Israelites came to believe that their god Yahweh was creator of everything, they had known him⁶ as a mighty warrior (who brought the children of Israel out of Egypt and who overpowered the Canaanites, giving their land to the Israelites); and he was also a lawgiver, ruler, judge, and so on. All of these roles helped to fill in the picture of God as an almighty but nevertheless humanlike, male-gendered being. This thoroughly anthropomorphic conception of God had clear implications for the way in which men and women should live: they were expected to obey faithfully God’s commandments and his ongoing guidance (as loyal subjects of a good king would do); and they were expected to manifest grateful, loving, and worshipful responses to God’s glorious presence (as the recipients of a great benefactor’s largesse should do); and so on. These matters were not just general admonitions: their meaning was spelled out in detail in the legal sections of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), and faithful Israelites (as well as, later on, their Jewish descendants) sought to order their lives in accord with these detailed holy prescriptions. By keeping the Torah (those teachings given the Israelites by God) in focus, they would order their lives in accord with God’s will and would thus be oriented properly in the world. Only gradually, as the glory of the Israelite God was increasingly magnified in the consciousness and devotion of his worshipers, did he become understood as the creator of all that existed. So at the time the Hebrew Bible was put together and creativity had come to be the defining mark that distinguished God from all else, he was also believed to be active in, and supervisory over, the lives of his devotees in many respects. Humans have always had laws, ideals, institutions, hopes and expectations, ways of living and ordering life socially, politically, economically, and so on; in ancient Israel it was believed that all of these had been given by God, and they were to be obeyed as such. So God was not only the creator. God was also a ruler and mighty warrior, a lawgiver and judge (all humanlike characterizations). And God was the Holy One, source of all meaning and value. God was actively involved in the everyday life of the Hebrew people with whom he had made a covenant and to whom he had given the Torah.

With the emergence of Christianity, however—especially as it became a largely Gentile movement in the work of the apostle Paul and others, and moved beyond its Jewish origins—much of this orientation of life in terms defined by the Torah was changed, as the Christian gospel (the “good news” about Jesus Christ) supplanted Jewish circumcision and purity laws.⁷ The basic conception of God as the creator of the world was retained (although there was a considerable struggle in the early church about that matter), but the principal focus for the ongoing everyday ordering and orienting of human life became Jesus the Christ:⁸ his proclamation of the impending “reign of God”; his ministry of healing and caring for those whom others despised; his inclusive meal practices; his radical insistence on love for, forgiveness of, and reconciliation with not only one’s friends and neighbors but one’s enemies as well; his mysterious “appearances” to his disciples and others after his death. Jesus was obviously a very remarkable, charismatic figure, and it should not surprise us that what he lived and taught and endured filled the imaginations of his small group of close followers with memories and hopes, ideals and dreams of quite new possibilities for women and men. Ongoing Christian existence—discipleship to Jesus—involved a new transformed life oriented in terms drawn from the (developing) story and image of Jesus, whom Christians regarded as their Lord and whom they believed would soon be seen by all to be the Lord of the world, the Son of God, indeed the very incarnation of God on earth. As Paul put it in one of his early letters (drawing on what are thought to have been words of an older Christian hymn):

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. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil. 2:5–11)

Thus, the early Christians came to understand their living relation to God the creator as mediated to them in a decisively new and distinctive way: through Jesus Christ their Lord, the very Son of God. In this new situation, obedience to the elaborate legal prescriptions of the Torah no longer provided proper orientation in life and the world; God’s action in and through Jesus (that is, through the continuously developing image and story of Jesus) now provided the focus and frame of orientation for life on earth: the followers of Jesus were to take up ministries of reconciliation through which God was “reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).

In the early Christian movement Jesus was understood in a number of quite different ways, some of these very different from Paul’s views just cited. All of these, however, were expressed and formulated in what we today must regard as anthropomorphic (humanlike) ideas of God and the relation of God to humans. In this book (as well as in other writings of mine) these anthropomorphic ideas are displaced by the understanding of God as simply creativity (instead of a humanlike person thought of as The Creator). Thus, God will be regarded here as that utterly amazing mystery of serendipitous creativity manifest throughout the universe from the Big Bang onward, first in cosmic and biological evolutionary developments, and then ultimately producing—in part through the emergence of human creative activity—the human world of history, culture, highly complex levels of symbolization, and elaborate technologies. When we take up this standpoint, it is no longer appropriate to think in terms of the earlier anthropomorphic conceptions. And it becomes necessary, therefore, to reconsider the entire traditional christological development and understanding, conceiving it now in terms appropriate to the conception of God as creativity.

II

However awe-inspiring and beautiful the modern/postmodern story of the steadily developing creation of the universe may be, the notion of creativity by itself—like the notion of God the creator by itself—is not sufficient for developing a conception of God that can fully and adequately orient and order human life. In Judaism, as we have observed, God’s Torah provides central guidance on how life is to be ordered; in Islam similarly there is the Qur’an, also thought of as provided by God. And in Christianity there has been Jesus Christ—not a body of prescriptions and laws, but a human being who came to be thought of as the very incarnation of God on earth. These “additions”—going beyond God’s fundamental relation to humans (as creator)—were indispensable for the orienting and ordering of life. Creativity, as we will be thinking of it here, is that to which everything that exists is attributed—whether massive or infinitesimal, material or ideal, beautiful or ugly, valuable or useless, meaningful or meaningless, good or evil, true or false, and on and on. (The negative character of some of the items in this list will be discussed in a moment.) It is important to note that reference to creativity does not explain why things exist: “creativity” is simply the name—not the explanation—of an ultimate mystery that we humans have never been able to put aside and likely will never adequately understand: Why is there something, not nothing? Why does anything at all exist? Why has this amazing phantasmagoria we call the world come into being? The bare conception of creativity does not itself give us answers to any of these questions. It simply affirms that everything in this vast magnificent universe, so far as we know, has somehow come into being and therefore exists, and it may continue to exist for an indefinite period of time; but in no way does creativity explain why or how that has happened. Creativity—the coming into being of new realities—is an inscrutable mystery.⁹ In this respect it may seem to differ from the creative activity ascribed to the creator-God: God was thought of (anthropomorphically) as deciding to create this and that and then performing the act of creating, of bringing into being the new. That may seem to provide an answer to our question about why things exist. However, if one reflects on this matter, it will become clear that this act of God creating everything “from nothing” is no less a mystery than is bare creativity: we do not have any more knowledge about the activities of “the creator” (we have only the biblical legends) than we do of bare creativity.¹⁰

Since creativity is utter mystery to us, it cannot provide much guidance on most of the issues with which we must come to terms as we seek to orient and order our lives. For that we need stories and images, norms and standards and laws, values and meanings and criteria much more specific and definite. For Christians, from the earliest generations on, such guidance and inspiration has been found (as was just noted) in the lordship of Jesus Christ. If Christians today still find themselves looking to the image and story of Jesus for such significant orientation, it is because Jesus, like Socrates or the Buddha, impresses some men and women even today as a remarkable, in certain respects very attractive, indeed a charismatic figure, one who may still draw us to himself in a powerful way (as he did the earliest Christians and many others over the past two thousand years). Before we turn to that, however, we need to take ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: Reconceiving the Jesus-Trajectory
• Chapter Two: Christology: Jesus as Norm
• Chapter Three: Humans as Biohistorical Beings: Historicity, Creativity, Freedom
• Chapter Four: Creativity is Good News!
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects and Names
• Index of Scripture