Gary Dorrien writes, "God is the partisan, liberating power of the oppressed in their struggle for justice." But the country that prints "In God We Trust" on its money has trusted instead in teaching torture and state terrorism to Latin American armies at the Army School of the Americas. Here the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, foreground center, leads the annual demonstration against the school in Columbus, Georgia.

Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010

The Lure of Love Divine

In 1948 philosopher Bertrand Russell and Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston conducted a famous BBC radio debate on the existence of God. Copleston contended that God's existence was provable, and Russell disagreed. But the two philosophers readily agreed that God, if God existed, would be "a supreme personal being, distinct from the world and creator of the world."

That was too easy, and typical. Philosophy of religion debates about God's existence often rush past the great question of what God might be, settling for positions about an assumed God. The traditions of theology that speak to me undercut any such assumption that the nature of divine reality is readily definable.

Augustine put it best, cautioning that anything that one understands is not God. The apophatic mystical tradition of Meister Eckhart, Jan Ruysbroeck, and Nicholas of Cusa powerfully insisted that all ways of positively naming and describing God are inadequate, even as the experience of God's wisdom in the divine Logos and love in the Spirit are central clues to the divine mystery. God is objectively definable only negatively, as that which God is not. The neo-Calvinist tradition of theology fashioned by Karl Barth got to a similar emphasis by a very different route, stressing the incomprehensible otherness of the veiled source of revelation. God is the Wholly Other mystery whose holiness is violated as soon as God acquires a name.

In much of the liberal tradition of theological reflection to which I belong, an overconfident attachment to Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic experientialism caused liberals to downplay negative theology and the sense of God as ineffable mystery. As long as liberals thought that Western modernity was saving the world, most of them had little use for mysticism and mystery, and for decades they treated the Barthian revolt against liberalism as a reactionary throwback.

Much of liberal theology took the post-Kantian transcendentalist or Hegelian options of construing the great "I AM" of Exodus 3:14 as a sign of the identity of thought and being. Self-knowing Spirit arises through the dialectical realization and necessary movement of consciousness in its immediacy. Spirit empties itself into the world of sensuous particularity in its creation of the world as an experience of itself, creating a world by becoming an other to itself. God's self-consciousness knows itself in human knowing; reality is precisely the self-thinking of Spirit.

This tradition of transcendental idealism, epitomized in Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling and reformulated by Paul Tillich, remains a deep wellspring in liberal theology and in me. It (excluding Tillich) belongs to a broader tradition of process thought that includes Heraclitus, Theravada Buddhism, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and modern process theology. Becoming, event, and relatedness are fundamental categories of understanding in process thought. Events are the fundamental things, the immanent movement of creativity itself. God is the lure of love divine for creative transformation and the flourishing of life.

This is the first of three "God is" affirmations that I want to make. My life would be less complicated if I could just leave it there. But every word of this sentence must be qualified by apophatic caution, and unlike much of Whiteheadian theology, I do not believe that God and creativity compete for space, or that being-language necessarily goes with atemporal cosmology, or that the futurity of Jewish and Christian faith is built into the nature of things. God may be in process, but God must not be subject to process; otherwise God would be subject to passage. God is the creative power of being that makes possible the process of becoming, the dynamic Ultimate power transcending contingency and temporality. As Michael Wyschogrod aptly observes, process thought has a pronounced tendency to diminish the ethical import of Jewish faith by naturalizing it, turning the divine promise of an ethical futurity into something embedded in creation.

Above all, the crucial test of creative transformation is the keynote of all liberation theologies: the focus on overthrowing structures of domination and oppression. Liberation theology changed the subject to the liberation of oppressed peoples from oppression and dependency. Oppression is multifaceted, concrete, and particular. It does not reduce to concerns about the fair distribution of things, nor is it best approached within a universal theory of justice. Racism, sexism, exploitation, cultural imperialism, violence, and exclusion involve social structures and relations that include, but also transcend, problems of distributive justice. Thus, creative transformation is about overthrowing specific forms of domination and oppression, and God is the partisan, liberating power of the oppressed in their struggle for justice.

Gary Dorrien is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and professor of religion at Columbia University. His books include the three-volume series, The Making of American Liberal Theology, widely praised as the definitive work in the field.