In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol "God" 1 Gordon D. KaufmanHarvard UniversityI am a Christian theologian. This does not mean, however, that I understand my work as being essentially a matter of explaining and defending Christian faith and the Christian set of symbols for interpreting human life and the world. The task of the Christian theologian is rather, as I (...) understand it, to scrutinize carefully, critically evaluate, and reconstruct (in whatever ways seem appropriate and necessary) the central Christian symbols, so they will encourage and support a faith and life appropriate for today. 2 In our time it is no longer sufficient for theologians simply to take it for granted that the basic structure and commitments of traditional Christian faith are--in all of their main lines--right and proper; and to proceed, then, to expound and reinterpret them in whatever ways seem intelligible and persuasive. Whatever may have been the value and justification of this sort of theologizing in the past, the crises of the twentieth century (to many of which Christian symbols, institutions, and practices have themselves contributed) have made it clear that thorough reassessment of the traditional Christian symbol-system, with an eye to its (possibly drastic) reconstruction or even to the total rejection of some of its principal features, is required--if it is to continue to contribute to human well-being, and to the well-being of the rest of life, on planet Earth. It is with this thoroughly critical and open understanding of the task of Christian theologians today that this contribution to our Buddhist-Christian dialogue has been prepared. And I hope a similar spirit will animate the responses to this paper, whether offered from the Christian or the Buddhist side of our conversation. I My assignment here is to examine the topic of "Christianity and Ecology." This is, of course, a very broad topic, much too large for a paper of this sort. I have taken the liberty, therefore, to confine my discussion to only one of the many questions that might be considered under this heading. The central symbol in terms of which Christian faith and Christian life (as well as most other western religious traditions) understand and order themselves is God, usually thought of as designating the creator and governor of the world, the only One to whom unqualified devotion, love, [End Page 3] and service are due. If we can come to some understanding of how this symbol has functioned in the past, and might be conceived properly to function today with respect to ecological concerns, we will have made a large step toward understanding the overall topic of Christianity and ecology. I am devoting this paper, therefore, to the question of "Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol 'God.'"Throughout my professional life I have been concerned with the problem of the continuing viability (or lack of viability) in our contemporary world of the symbol "God," as that symbol has been understood through most of western history (not only by Christians and Jews, but also by many humanists and secularists). And for the last thirty years or so, I have been reflecting on the issues which our growing ecological consciousness poses for our understanding of--and our ordering of life in terms of--this symbol. My earliest writing directly concerned with this question is in a paper entitled "The Concept of Nature: A Problem for Theology" published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1972. 3 In that paper I attempted to show that there is a fundamental tension--indeed, a conceptual and logical incompatibility--between, on the one hand, the understanding of God, and of the intimate relation of humanity to God (as seen in our western religious and philosophical traditions), and on the other hand, our growing awareness that human existence is essentially constituted by, and could not exist apart from, the complex ecological ordering of life that has evolved on planet Earth over many millennia. 4The main emphasis in that paper remains largely correct in my view. Hence, I would like to... (shrink)

Current discussions of “evidentialism” seem to presuppose essentially traditional theistic conceptions and formulations. For many theologians. however, these have become problematic because of (a) the rise of a new consciousness of the significance of religiouspluralism; (b) the emergence of theories about the ways in which our symbolic frames of orientation shape all our experiencing and thinking; (c) a growing awareness that significant responsibility for some of the major evils of the twentieth century must be laid to ourreligious traditions. Since recent (...) discussion of “evidentialism” continues to employ traditional symbols and concepts without sensitivity to these matters, it has not attracted much interest among contemporary theologians. (shrink)

Scientific evolutionary/ecological thinking is the basis for today's understanding that we are now in an ecological crisis. Religions, however, often resist reordering their thinking in light of scientific ideas, and this presents difficulties in trying to develop a viable global ecological ethic. In both the West and Asia religiomoral ecological concerns continue to be formulated largely in terms of traditional concepts rather than in more global terms, as scientific thinking about ecological matters might encourage them to do. The majority of (...) this article is devoted to the kind of reformulation of Western Christian conceptions of God, humanity, and the relation between them that is necessary to address this problem. The question is then raised whether similar critical thinking about religiomoral issues raised by today's evolutionary/ecological scientific thinking is going on in Asian religions and whether it would be too presumptuous (in view of our colonial history) for us Westerners to ask for such rethinking. This leads to a final question: Without such transformations in religious traditions East and West, is the development of a truly global ecological ethic really feasible? (shrink)

The four books under consideration in this article exemplify the impact of historical thinking on Christian thought. Friedrich Gogarten's essay on Demythologizing and History, while it is ostensibly intended to clarify some of the problems of the controversy between Rudolf Bultmann and his critics, is actually an analysis of the significance for Christian theology of two quite different ways of understanding the nature of history. Similarly, John Baillie's Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought makes very clear, particularly in the first (...) two chapters, that the whole conception of how God makes himself known to man has become radically different in the past generation or so from the views of centuries preceding: the dominant contemporary view holds that God reveals himself in and through the events of sacred history, not that he reveals eternal truths through the words of the Bible or the creeds of the church. Even the two French Roman Catholic symposia on mysticism and asceticism, though not explicitly concerned with the problem of history at all, nevertheless show the impact of the historical point of view. A central contention of the one is that all mystical experience must be mediated through the historical Christ if it is to be regarded as Christian, and the other is critical of any form of asceticism which involves a repudiation of historical life simply for its own sake: Christian asceticism must always culminate in a concrete historical love for one's concrete historical neighbor. (shrink)

This article has two parts, as the title suggests. The first sketches what I call biohistorical naturalism, a naturalistic position in which it is emphasized that the historicocultural development of our humanity, particularly our becoming linguistic/symbolical beings, is as central to our humanness as the biological evolutionary development that preceded (and continues to accompany) it. Apart from such a biohistorical emphasis (or its equivalent), naturalistic positions cannot give adequate accounts of human religiousness. The second part suggests that, although it would (...) not be consistent with biohistorical naturalism to continue thinking of God in the traditional supernaturalistic way as “the Creator,” it would be quite appropriate to understand God as the ongoing creativity (of truly novel realities) manifest in the long history of the universe, particularly in the evolution of life on Earth. (shrink)

The anthropocentric orientation of traditional understandings of Christian faith and life, further accentuated by the existentialist terms in which theology was articulated in mid‐century by Tillich and others, produced theologies no longer appropriate in today's world of evolutionary and ecological thinking about human existence and its embeddedness in the web of life on planet Earth. This problem can be addressed with the help of several new concepts that enable us to understand both humanity‐in‐the‐world and God in ways in keeping with (...) these present conceptions, thus providing a more intelligible and illuminating way of understanding Christian faith and life today. (shrink)

What is the origin of individual differences in ideology and personality? According to the parasite stress hypothesis, the structure of a society and the values of individuals within it are both influenced by the prevalence of infectious disease within the society's geographical region. High levels of infection threat are associated with more ethnocentric and collectivist social structures and greater adherence to social norms, as well as with socially conservative political ideology and less open but more conscientious personalities. Here we use (...) an agent-based model to explore a specific opportunities-parasites trade-off hypothesis, according to which utility-maximizing agents place themselves at an optimal point on a trade-off between the gains that may be achieved through accessing the resources of geographically or socially distant out-group members through openness to out-group interaction, and the losses arising due to consequently increased risks of exotic infection to which immunity has not been developed. We examine the evolution of cooperation and the formation of social groups within social networks, and we show that the groups that spontaneously form exhibit greater local rather than global cooperative networks when levels of infection are high. It is suggested that the OPTO model offers a first step toward understanding the specific mechanisms through which environmental conditions may influence cognition, ideology, personality, and social organization. (shrink)

In this article the concept of God as creativity (rather than as “the Creator”) is explored. Though creativity is a profound mystery to us humans, it is a plausible concept today because of its interconnectedness with the belief that our cosmos is evolutionary: new orders of reality come into being in the course of time. Three modalities of creativity are explored here: the initial coming into being of the universe (the Big Bang); the creativity manifest in evolutionary processes; the human (...) creation of culture. It is suggested that this creativity itself should be thought of as God: God is creativity. Thus God-talk is given a referent that is specifiable in terms of today’s understandings of the world and the human. God remains a profound mystery here, but one with a significant place in our modern understanding of the world and human life. (shrink)

Insofar as the knowledge of God is historical in kind, we are dependent directly upon the Bible as the record of that history in which he became known.

The most discussed and most significant issue on the religious scene today is whether it is possible, or even desirable, to believe in God. Mr. Kaufman's valuable study does not offer a doctrine of God, but instead explores why God is a problem for many moderns, the dimensions of that problem, and the inner logic of the notion of God as it has developed in Western culture. His object is to determine the function or significance of talk about God: how (...) the concept of God is generated in human experience; the special problems in turn generated by this concept (for example, the intelligibility of the idea of transcendence, the problem of theodicy) and how they are met; and under what circumstances the idea of God is credible or important or even indispensable. He does not try to prove God's existence or nonexistence, but elucidates what the concept of God means and the important human needs it fulfills. Four of the eleven essays have been previously published, at least in part; seven are completely new. (shrink)