Love's Availing Power: Imaging God, Imagining the World

Notes

133 x preface 1. Thomas Jay Oord appropriates this Johannine foundation in writing that “my own proposal of an adequate doctrine of God begins with the claim that love is an essential divine attribute.” See his Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010), 189. While insisting that “loving others is not an arbitrary divine decision,” Oord does recognize divine freedom in how God loves. I, too, will seek to retain a genuine sense of divine freedom, but the “category proper” of love modifies the meaning of freedom so that as love God knows not “freedom from relationship but freedom in relationship.” In “Putting the Cross in Context: Atonement through Covenant,” in Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 107–22, Marit Trelstad develops this understanding of relational freedom emphatically, drawing on the work of Jürgen Moltmann. 2. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 315. Jüngel does not underestimate the difficulty facing theology thus understood : “And in doing so, it must accomplish two things. It must, on the one hand, do justice to the essence of love, which as a predicate of God may not contradict what people experience as love. And on the other hand, it must do justice to the being of God which remains so distinctive from the event of human love that ‘God’ does not become a superfluous word.” 3. Jonathan Standjord, “What Contributions Should Teaching Theologians Make to the Life and Mission of the Church? How Is This Best Done?,” 124–33 in Lutherans and Theological Method: Perennial Questions and Contemporary Challenges, ed. David C. Ratke (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2010), 128. Standjord makes the point (125) that in this time of “enormous technological innovation and social shifts” the need for theological activity is increased. notes 134 notes to pages xi–3 4. In chapter 1 I will discuss Kierkegaard’s view of “the impossibility of direct communication ” as conveyed in Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 124–43. 5. See Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (London: Williams & Norgate , 1955). 6. Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). 7. In this book I occasionally cite prominent feminist theologians, such as Elizabeth Johnson and Sharon Welch, who have so much to teach us about God’s love. But my learning here has been too limited to make a major statement in print. Indeed, I am aware that feminist thought could have been a major part of the context for the contemporary coming together of Kierkegaard and Whitehead. There has been a remarkable confluence between feminist/womanist and Whiteheadian vitalities (for example, Marjorie Suchocki, Catherine Keller, Monica Coleman). Furthermore, feminist theologians have argued with and over the Kierkegaard corpus (for example, Sylvia Walsh, Wanda Warren Berry, Jamie Ferreira). Were I to stress that aspect of the context, I would find myself attempting with Kierkegaard what sixteen women have done in engaging Martin Luther in the Transformative Lutheran Theologies work already cited. I regret that this rich collection of essays was not available to me during most of the time I was writing these chapters. That volume advances the pathbreaking relational work of such women as Mary Solberg (Compelling Knowledge: A Feminist Proposal for an Epistemology of the Cross [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004]), and Deanna Thompson (Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004]). 8. Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 127. introduction 1. An alternative framing might be “subject/object.” 2. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990), 108. He offers this summary: “Human actions and experiences were mental or spontaneous outcomes of reasoning; they were performed willingly and creatively; and they were active and productive. Physical phenomena and natural processes by contrast involved brute matter and were material; they were mechanical, repetitive, predictable effects of causes; they merely happened; and matter in itself was passive and inert.” 3. See especially the second and sixth of the Meditations on First Philosophy in René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4. I have discussed this development somewhat...