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On Kaufman's Problem God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
Kaufman's God The Problem is a stimulating and important book in so far as it raises for us the problem ‘God’ has become for modern theology (theologians, believers, etc.). In its attempt to bring clarity and precision to our understanding of ‘God’ however, I am much less sure as to its value. Indeed, it seems to me that Kaufman more often confuses the issues than clarifying them—although he does so in a very stimulating manner. The inconsistencies in his argument and the tensions between earlier and later pieces of work are more than trivial as Kaufman suggests in the preface (xi). For example, in his discussion of ‘God as symbol’ he claims that it is possible to conceive God as living and active, one to whom men can pray with conviction and to whom they can cry in their hour of need (113 f). Yet in his discussion of the meaning of ‘act of God’ he denies the same. As he puts it in the latter essay, God is not one who,
‘“walks with me and talks with me” in close interpersonal communion, giving his full attention to my complaints, miraculously extracting me from difficulties into which I have gotten myself, by invading nature and history with ad hoc rescue operations from on high.’ (196)
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References
page 189 note 1 Published by Harvard University Press, 1972. All references to Kaufman will be included in the text of the essay.
page 190 note 1 In Hick, J., The Existence of God, Macmillan, 1964, p. 246.Google Scholar
page 190 note 2 Jeffner, Anders, The Study of Religious Language, S.C.M., 1972, p. 15. See also pp. 46, 47.Google Scholar
page 192 note 1 Conze, E., Buddhist Wisdom Books, George Allen and Unwin, 1958, p. 84.Google Scholar
page 192 note 2 In this Kaufman's thesis is precisely that of Gilkey's in Naming the Whirlwind. See for example pp. 10, 11; 191; 232 passim. Kaufman is aware of the affinities but denies identity of purpose or approach. (8 n.l) He claims that ‘instead of attempting to ground talk about God directly on itself or in its own terms, so to speak, he seeks to found it on what he takes to be man's inherently religious nature (essentially the Schleiermacher-Tillich position), which he attempts to show betrays itself even in our secular existence.’ (8 n.l)
This is a fair analysis, but a comparison of Kaufman's own claims on the following pages, 93, 94, 99, 100, 256, passim, suggest a greater similarity of his thought to Gilkey's than he is willing to grant.
page 192 note 3 See also p. 82.
page 194 note 1 See also p. 58.
page 196 note 1 MacMurray, John, The Structure of Religious Experience, Faber and Faber, 1936, pp. 53, 54.Google Scholar
page 196 note 2 Otto, Rudolph, The Idea of The Holy, O.U.P. 1958, p. 117.Google Scholar
page 197 note 1 In the final analysis then Kaufman's position seems to be basically that of H. D. Lewis, only stated much less clearly. See for example, Lewis's Our Experience of God pp. 12, 124, 204, and Philosophy of Religion, pp. 150.
page 197 note 2 See McLain, F. Michael, ‘On Theological Models’, Harvard Theological Review, 62, (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar McLain refers there to Kaufman's position as ‘residual cartesianism’ (162). Kaufman responds to the criticisms of McLain in the preface, admitting a one-sided conception of the issue (xiv), but also claims that the defects due to this distortion are well balanced in his discussion of God as ‘agent’. (chapter 6) McLain similarly tries to develop a model in terms of which ‘God’ can be understood, in terms of ‘agency’—only for McLain the model is a teleological rather than an interpersonal one. I am not sure, at this point, whether either of them escapes the difficulties that ‘agency’ talk involves however. In this respect see Kai Nielsen's criticism of Donald Hudson's similar program, in Contemporary Critiques of Religion.
page 198 note 1 In this Kaufman faces the same criticism as has been levelled against Gilkey by Ferré, F.. See Ferré, F. ‘Renewal of God-language?’, Journal of Religion, 1972, especially p. 304.Google Scholar
page 198 note 2 See p. 193 above.
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