MENNONOT: Issue #2Published: May, 1994 [Back to Mennonot Home Page] [Editorial] [Interview] [Forum] [Humor] Editorial: Growing PainsSheri Hostetler Some snippets: Issue #2 of Mennonot has finally made it out. I spent much of the time I should have devoted to issue #2 doing damage control for issue #1. I had the misfortune of being at home in Holmes County, Ohio, the week an article about Mennonot appeared in the Gospel Herald and got to relearn some old lessons in paranoia and shame... ...What surprised me more than anything was how easy it was for me — someone who prides herself on having shrugged off a good portion of the Mennonite superego — to feel such shame and loathing for having committed the sin of Mennonot. When I communicated these feelings to a friend later on she assured me that I was not crazy or spineless but merely socially conditioned to respond this way (oh, is that all?). She explained to me that anthropologists make distinctions between guilt-based cultures, in which social control operates through internal sanctions, and shame-based cultures, in which individuals are controlled by community censure. Obviously, many traditional Mennonite communities [are] shame-based culture[s]. I quote directly from the Dictionary of Sociology here, "Public shame reflects not only on the individual, but on family and kin, and there are, therefore, strong familial sanctions on deviation from communal norms. Shame as a mechanism of social control can only operate in small groups where visibility and intimacy are prominent, and is thus characteristic of village rather than urban existence, which is based more on guilt." ...I AM GLAD TO SAY that my bravado returned, and issue #2 is now in your hands.
Interview: theologian Gordon Kaufman -- "Giving up Big Daddy"Some snippets: The theology of Gordon Kaufman — Harvard professor, author of seven books, past president of the American Academy of Religion and generally one of the most well-respected theologians around — hasn't exactly received a warm reception among mainstream Mennos. Quite sad, since Kaufman's work tackles the most basic and important questions facing any religious (sort of religious, wondering if they're religious, sure as hell they're not religious) person today. Not surprising, though, because Kaufman pulls the rug out from under traditional ways of thinking about God. There would be a lot of people with bruised behinds in the Mennonite church if they took seriously what Kaufman is trying to do. Basically, Kaufman asserts that theology is and always has been a thoroughly human construction. Undergirding this assertion are core ideas about how we know what we know. All human beings operate out of "world pictures" — cultural and linguistic frameworks — that shape our experience, he says. There's no way we can live outside of these world pictures. In other words, we're not God. We're limited human beings with necessarily limited, particular ways of grasping the mystery of an infinite universe. (Seems downright humble, wouldn't you say?) Mennonot: How do you define faith within your theological framework? Kaufman: Human life is deeply embedded in mystery. We don't really know what we're here for, if anything, and we're very confused about what we ought to be and do. There's a lot of different views on these questions but no definitive answers to any of them. But we have to find some way to live in the face of the mystery. I view the various religious and philosophical conceptions as attempts to construe human life in the world in this way or that in face of the mystery. They're proposals — world pictures — about what human life is all about and how we ought to live. Mennonot: So faith is committing to live out of a particular world picture. What ways of life does the Christian world picture bring forth? What are some of the ethical values that would arise from living out of a Christian world picture? Kaufman: In the first place, there is a great deal of difference among Christians in understanding what the Christian symbols mean, how they should be interpreted, what significance they have for living. So that we can and have historically had communities that are committed to bloody crusades against infidels on the one hand, utter pacifism in the face of violence on the other and all kinds of positions in between. We need to think in terms of the great variety of ways in which this Christian symbol system has been used and, there again, make judgments about the ways it can be very destructive of human life and meaning and ways in which it can be supportive. Without such judgments, the symbol God is just too dangerous to use. It has caused a great deal of suffering in human history. Christian imperialism has been and still is a very repressive form of human and social organization. And we have to face that. Christians, or those who want to use these symbols, need to make judgments as to whether these symbols are even worth saving. In my view, there are resources in these symbols that are very important. But it's not worth saving them unless we very carefully sift out what is of value in them and what is very dangerously destructive in them. Mennonot: Some people might say the image of a God that's not apart from creation doesn't inspire much hope or trust -- that there isn't any purpose or direction to history if God is just a part of the natural order. Kaufman: Well, it's true that big daddy up in the sky is gone. And to the extent that the Christian tradition has educated us to want and need that big daddy, the picture I present is going to seem lacking in the kind of comforts many people are looking for. But in my view precisely that comfort is a distraction that keeps us from facing the issues we've really got to come to terms with.
Forum: responding to KaufmanSome snippets: Priscilla Stuckey: ...One of my presuppositions is Kaufman's — that all religious symbols are derived from human experience. So my first task in the dissertation is to show the historical rootedness of each of these gendered metaphors. Demonstrating their embeddedness in experience can help to unmask the incompleteness, the relativity, the sexist and racist presuppositions communicated through our religious pictures. But my feminist principles also include a commitment to locating and celebrating knowledge in and through our bodies, our practical experience and our admittedly limited visions. This might be akin to a Christian emphasis on incarnation — honoring the God present in everyday experience. My contemplative self, however, these days draws nourishment from the nondualist springs of Eastern and mystical thought. So I would go further than emphasizing incarnation to say not that God is present in our everyday experience, but that God in some sense is our everyday experience; the divine is located in, although not completely defined by, the human and natural world. SO I NEED TO GO FURTHER than Kaufman does in retrieving our limited religious pictures and accord them enough truth status to continue to evoke wonder and awe in us. My mystical studies and experiences suggest that humans have more access to metaphysical realities than Kaufman allows. To be sure, our metaphysical pictures are always thoroughly embedded in our limited human experiences, but the variety of pictures humans come up with need not void the truth status of those pictures. As the word nondualism suggests, "not two" — but "not one" either: our religious metaphors are not the "one" truth, for that is monism, a single standard of sameness in which there is no room for variety. And neither are they "two": hopelessly lost in relativity because varied and limited and finite. In the nondualist synthesis I seek, our religious metaphors are varied, rich, embedded in particular human experiences — and also powerful, challenging, reawakening us to mystery and wonder. J. Denny Weaver: ...While I agree with Kaufman's assessment of the misuse of Christian symbolism and Christian imagery, I have opted for a different kind of response. Instead of rejecting the political imagery, I would challenge people who call themselves Christians to take seriously the meaning of that adjective. Jesus taught nonviolence. His life and death exemplified it. He was not exploitative nor domineering nor oppressive. The life and teaching of Jesus demonstrate how God rules; they embody the way power is exercised under the reign of God. Rather than rejecting the idea of political imagery, I suggest that Jesus exemplifies and embodies a different kind of political imagery than that abused by traditional Christianity. Do we give up the idea of "God as personal" while retaining an idea of meaning/direction/will in history, or do we live with the tension of having a personal God with no recognizable "place"? Is it really possible, as Kaufman assumes, to separate being and action, ontology and function? Is it any more illogical to posit that God is there without a space to put God in, than it is to say that design/meaning/direction can reflect only impersonal evolutionary development of the universe? Given the fact that all language about God is metaphorical, and that each of these two models leaves us with something of a gap, it seems to me that the impulse to reject the idea of God as personal is not quite as great as Kaufman assumes. The discussion about the appropriate metaphor or model for God involves more than a world picture and the location of God and us in that world picture. It also has implications for the nature of humanity and the nature of the human predicament. To discard the idea of God as personal leaves Kaufman to assume and develop the idea that the solution to the problem of humanity must somehow be found within the scope of human existence. The implication is that the resolution of the human predicament, the fulfillment of humanity — salvation — will be an extension of what already is, rather than an extrication that human beings cannot accomplish entirely on their own. Observation of the human situation makes me less optimistic about this kind of own-bootstraps-theology than is Kaufman.
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