CRT Session 3 27 May 2005

CRT embarked on examining the concept of God as developed within its interpretive community.

Background

1. In the first session on Liberation theology we talked about the importance of examining theology from the honesty and authenticity of our own experiences.
2. In the second session we looked into putting our experiences into a dialogue and forming an interpretive community. We also looked for sources of authority in Scriptures, Experience and Tradition
3. In this session, we tried to put into practice such a dialogue and see ways the concept of 'God' emerge within our own interpretive community.

Gathering Narratives

1. We gathered narratives that told us something about God from our own lives, from our experience with sacred texts and from our experiences as Christians.
2. Some of the stories include
a) Overwhelming sense of being loved and graced that incur into one's experiences
b) Cumulative sense of awe as one interprets the natural world and find orderliness, and synchronicity in other's experience of knowing the world
c) Sense of being home and belonging after personal experiences of breakup; a rest in respite.
d) Sometimes we experience God by being in the wilderness, without crutches and being alone
e) The bible presents very different pictures of God, sometimes one that develop with human/moral evolution.
[one narrative that I remember very well was a comment about the realization the order in the physical world is far more amazing than feeding 5000 with some fish and bread and raising the dead)

Interpreting our Narratives

1. We examined our pictures of God through our narratives and see what kind of images emerge. These images did
i) just present with us
ii) beyond the grasp of human instincts
iii) lover
iv) beyond words
v) cannot be explained by knowledge
vi) fulfillment of needs
vii) grace
viii) cannot be controlled
ix) total darkness
x) seems a fictional character (in the sense of one developed by writers)
xi) doubt
xii) syncrhonicity/ coincidence
xiii) very human
xiv) patient
xv) inherently contrasting
xvi) connected with struggles
xvii) doesn't care about the particulars of history
xviii) silent
xix) home
xx) rational
xxi) freedom
xxii) forgiveness
xxiii) love
xxiv) simplistic
xxv) synergistic/ symbiotic with human
xxvi) orderly
xxvii) intelligent design
xxviii) evolving
xxiv) purposeful
xxv) carries certainty
xxvi) wilderness
xxvii) fundemantal principles of the world
xxviii) flexible

2. We asked what we are certain that God is Not
i) it seemd that many of us wanted to say 'evil' but refrained
ii) these were the immediate gut responses
- Not judgemental
- Not hate
- Not Simple
- Not constant
- Not unreasonable
iii) when we compare our gut responses, we notice some possible contraditions (e.g. Not simple vs simplistic/ fundamental principles)

3. We examined our images of God again and tried to look for larger patterns. These patterns emerge
i) There is orderliness in God
ii) God is wilderness and chaos
iii) God is not unreasonable - there are large purposeful plans
iv) God is not constant
v) God reveals Godself cumulatively over time and over different communities
vi) God reveals Godself surprisingly at individual moments
vii) God has a certain nature and personality
viii) God is symbiotic to our own experiences (reversing the idea that God is 'out-there')
viii) God can be perceived with our senses and rationality
viii) God is beyond our senses and rationality

4. We looked at the paradoxes and identified some questions.
The questions that are asked
- How can God be home and yet calls us out into exile?
- How is God perceived and known and yet beyond the senses of our knowing (we'll keep the Cappadocian Fathers' answers oneside first)
- How is God orderly and yet totally messy?
- How does God have an eternal personality and yet seems to be changing?
- How is God eternal and yet imcomplete?
- How is God concerned about the big historical events and therefore indifferent to selfish individuals and yet care for each soul?

5. We tried to position ourselves on the scales of contradicting attributes
- Some of us liked the more experimental possibilities of God (incomplete, evolving, wilderness)
- Some liked the more traditional ideas of God (home, certainty, unchanging)
- Most find it difficult to put God on one end of the spectrum or the other

6. We tried to reason how it is possible to contain contradictions
a) One attempts at looking at time: the eternal vs the temporal. God may be eternal set with a certain personality; but in relating in time to people God relates flexibly, changing as needed with changed situations
b) Another looks at contexts: e.g. Justice, compassion, love and other 'bigger' attributes are expressed differently in different contexts
c) Another looks at God as consisting of fundamental priciples and other aspects of God accommodate with these fundamental principles. One such fundamental principle is love.
d) God is inherently contradicting to prevent us from making idols of God

Reflexive Development

We challenge ourselves to look at one image of God that provides challenge to us because
a) it is a new way of looking at God to me or
b) it challenges my existing way of looking at God
and we ask ourselves
'If I hold on to this particular image of God, how is it going to affect my life, my spirituality, my relation with others and my view of life?