Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew

10 What Does God Still Do?

10 What Does God Still Do? F THEODlCY has been the major human problem requiring us to rethink our images of God, science has been its intellectual counterpart. The Bible and Talmud unhesitatingly describe what God did, does, and will yet do. Modem science, by its mathematical descriptions of nature's operation, explains why things work and even why they "must" do so. It depicts creation as a self-contained, lawful process and thereby dispenses with the need for God as a causal factor in nature; why should we multiply causes beyond the minimum necessary for explanation? But if God really does nothing, God is nothing, and if God does very little, then God deserves scant attention, so atheism and religion's irrelevance have become common among us. Liberal understandings of religion came into being partly as the response of believers to the scientific worldview. Almost all began by abandoning efforts to establish God's metaphysical role in a strictly causal world, process thought being the great exception. Rather, the liberal theologians commonly coupled an acceptance of the scientific worldview with a denial of positivism's capacity to plumb the richness ofhuman experience. They created a hermeneutic that translated traditional depictions of what God does into human action or experience. Revelation became discovery, sin became error, judgment became self-criticism, atonement became self-acceptance, and so forth. This humanocentric piety had the virtue of making believers radically less passive before God and their clergy and empowering them with personal responsibility for their spiritual welfare and their society's betterment. Self-reliance, individual or humanity-wide, became the supreme virtue, making God a marginal figure in this theology. Demythologizing Science as True Explanation Time and experience have thrown increasing doubt on the two assumptions of this modem demotion of God. The idea that mature people can assume most of the functions God once performed reflects an optimism that seems illusory today. And the faith that the Western physical sciences and mathematics as good as describe 135 10 What Does God Still Do? F THEODlCY has been the major human problem requiring us to rethink our images of God, science has been its intellectual counterpart. The Bible and Talmud unhesitatingly describe what God did, does, and will yet do. Modem science, by its mathematical descriptions of nature's operation, explains why things work and even why they "must" do so. It depicts creation as a self-contained, lawful process and thereby dispenses with the need for God as a causal factor in nature; why should we multiply causes beyond the minimum necessary for explanation? But if God really does nothing, God is nothing, and if God does very little, then God deserves scant attention, so atheism and religion's irrelevance have become common among us. Liberal understandings of religion came into being partly as the response of believers to the scientific worldview. Almost all began by abandoning efforts to establish God's metaphysical role in a strictly causal world, process thought being the great exception. Rather, the liberal theologians commonly coupled an acceptance of the scientific worldview with a denial of positivism's capacity to plumb the richness ofhuman experience. They created a hermeneutic that translated traditional depictions of what God does into human action or experience. Revelation became discovery, sin became error, judgment became self-criticism, atonement became self-acceptance, and so forth. This humanocentric piety had the virtue of making believers radically less passive before God and their clergy and empowering them with personal responsibility for their spiritual welfare and their society's betterment. Self-reliance, individual or humanity-wide, became the supreme virtue, making God a marginal figure in this theology. Demythologizing Science as True Explanation Time and experience have thrown increasing doubt on the two assumptions of this modem demotion of God. The idea that mature people can assume most of the functions God once performed reflects an optimism that seems illusory today. And the faith that the Western physical sciences and mathematics as good as describe 135 136 A POSTLIBERAL THEOLOGY OF JEWISH DUTY nature's reality has lost both its social and intellectual credibility. One sees the postmodern reaction against scientism most spectacularly in the vogue of New Age speculation and experience. In the multifariousgroups that eclectically blend ancient and contemporary spiritual practices to open us to truth and power, beliefs and rites often acquire virtue in proportion to their divergence from scientific explanation. Less extremely, science has been thoroughly discredited as our savior because the...