In Face of Reality: The Constructive Theology of Gordon D. Kaufman by Thomas A. James (review)

The title of Thomas James's 2011 In Face of Reality: The Constructive Theology of Gordon D. Kaufman echoes the title of Gordon Kaufman's 1993 In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. Kaufman's theology evolved over his long career, but mystery became his principal metaphor for God. In substituting reality for mystery, James signals his central project, which is to argue that Kaufman's theology offers an objective God who "really acts in the world" (1).

For James, God's providential activity is a touchstone of Christian theology. However, he asserts, contemporary science has left little space for God to act. Most theologians have responded by: 1) limiting interaction with scientific findings to preserve traditional claims about God's activity, or 2) "collapsing talk of God's activity into a preferred version of modern cosmological theory" (2-3). By contrast, James finds in Kaufman's In Face of Mystery, a theology that mediates between these extremes. It "accepts the modern naturalistic conception of the world as a unified system of cause and effect" while also seeking to understand and reconcile God's activity with scientific evidence (32). Much of James's book is devoted to evaluating the success of Kaufman's mediating theology.

Based on his study of Kaufman's corpus, James offers the following interpretation. The agent-God of traditional theism acts from beyond the world and thus from outside of nature; while such a God, Kaufman grants, succeeds in helping us orient our lives, this God does so at the expense of our relationship with nature of which we are a part. Kaufman proposes focusing, instead, on the present as a way "through and around" the seeming incompatibility of nature and theism. God may be found, according to Kaufman, in the "intelligible connections between what we habitually presuppose about our world today and the logical features of God-talk in Western culture" (162, 77). Rooted in our present context, we can survey the real, "locally observable outcome of natural and historical processes" and among these, discern "intelligible connections." These "intelligible connections" provide us with indications of God's "quasi-teleological" (nonagential) creative and serendipitous activity (81-82). We can also discover "the emergence of patterns of order" and of humanizing trajectories in what has in fact "happened in the course of cosmic, biological, and human history." These patterns and trajectories accord "a significant but not dominant place to human life," and provide "principles of interpretation which can orient our perception of, and responses to what is going on around us" (106-7).

Potentially problematic for James's overarching project (to argue that Kaufman's theology offers an objectively real God) is Kaufman's decision to transmute, "for our purposes," physical phenomena and "cultural trends into patterns of purposive order." However, James explains, Kaufman merely seeks to attribute "metaphysical significance to the emergence" of these patterns, not to explain their causes or origins (106).

According to Kaufman, our imagination assists us in identifying "intelligible connections" in "natural and historical processes." Indeed, for Kaufman, all conceptions of God are imaginative constructs (33). Does this undermine James's central claim that, for Kaufman, God is objectively real? James argues that Kaufman treats imagination as an epistemological category, merely deploying it to highlight the constructed nature of human knowledge. As a result, James maintains, Kaufman's insistence that God is an imaginative construct is not tantamount to a denial of God's reality. Though one may grant that Kaufman does not deny God's reality, he does not affirm it, either. Kaufman remains consistently agnostic on this question. But because Kaufman's theology is compatible with claims about God's reality, James can legitimately claim that Kaufman's model of divine activity need not be construed metaphorically.

Based on Kaufman's commitment to linking real features of the world and of history to theistic claims, James suggests that Kaufman should be considered a classical theologian...