Is God a Problem? Modern Theology Faces Its Alternatives

The Christian Century, the venerable voice of liberal Protestantism, juxtaposed two significant obituaries in its August 23, 2011 edition - and both on the same page. The magazine published a respectful obituary of evangelical titan John R. W. Stott, identifying him as “a renowned and prolific author credited with shaping 20th-century evangelical Christianity.” After reviewing his 90 years of life and ministry, the magazine quoted S. Douglas Birdsall of the Lausanne Movement, who described Stott in this way: “The church was his great love. World evangelism was his passion. Scripture was his authority. Heaven was his hope. Now it is his home.”

The magazine’s other obituary marked the death of Gordon Kaufman, a professor of theology at the Harvard Divinity School for more than three decades, who died at age 86. Kaufman, the magazine reported, “had a profound influence on rethinking theology in naturalistic terms, arguing for a vision of God as the ‘profound mystery of creativity.’” Kaufman influenced generations of liberal theologians through his writings and teaching, serving as president of both the American Theological Society and the American Academy of Religion.

As a seminary student, I was assigned to read Kaufman’s 1972 work, God the Problem, a book that set forth Kaufman’s effort to bring Christian theology in line with modern thought. A frustrated seminary student in my class posted a sarcastic cartoon on the classroom wall, with the cover of Kaufman’s book changed from God the Problem by Gordon Kaufman to Gordon Kaufman the Problem by God.

The book is nothing less than a treatise for a purely secular theology. The entire concept of God, he wrote, “is problematical to men in many different senses and ways.” As he explained:

For the Judeo-Christian tradition, God has been the primary and fundamental reality with reference to which all of life - indeed all of creation - was oriented and understood. To our modern empirical, secular, and pragmatic temper, however, it has seemed increasingly dubious, ever since the Enlightenment, whether it is necessary or even reasonable to believe in such a transcendent Reality; human life can be adequately understood as an emergent from evolving nature, and the meaning of human existence can be found in the cultural values produced by man’s creative genius and the social interaction of which love is the profoundest form. Is not talk about God simply a vestige of earlier stages of man’s historical development which, however appropriate and necessary in its own time, is no longer relevant or useful in ours?

Kaufman argued that an entire array of intellectual problems made belief in a personal God impossible on modern terms. Human beings now consider themselves autonomous and belief in God “raises serious problems for man’s sense of moral autonomy.” He went so far as to argue that belief in God might be “in itself morally dubious.” To read more, click here.