Abstract

Kaufman's God The Problem is a stimulating and important book in so far as it raises for us the problem ‘God’ has become for modern theology . In its attempt to bring clarity and precision to our understanding of ‘God’ however, I am much less sure as to its value. Indeed, it seems to me that Kaufman more often confuses the issues than clarifying them—although he does so in a very stimulating manner. The inconsistencies in his argument and the tensions between earlier and later pieces of work are more than trivial as Kaufman suggests in the preface . For example, in his discussion of ‘God as symbol’ he claims that it is possible to conceive God as living and active, one to whom men can pray with conviction and to whom they can cry in their hour of need . Yet in his discussion of the meaning of ‘act of God’ he denies the same. As he puts it in the latter essay, God is not one who, ‘“walks with me and talks with me” in close interpersonal communion, giving his full attention to my complaints, miraculously extracting me from difficulties into which I have gotten myself, by invading nature and history with ad hoc rescue operations from on high.’