“What wisdom does faith offer to individuals and communities facing the perennial problems of the human situation?”

 “What are human beings, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than God/the gods, and crowned them with glory and honor.”

--[SLIDE 1] Psalm 8:3b-5[i]

             Recently, as part of a major curriculum revision over at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia where I teach, the “area formerly called Practical” renamed itself the “Integrative Theology Area.”  This may not seem so radical to those of you at Gettysburg—your faculty have been organized in inter-disciplinary divisions for many years.  At Philadelphia, we are still grouped more traditionally according to 3 subject areas: Biblical, Historical-Systematic, and now “Integrative” theology Areas.   While this name change did not come without some controversy, both within and from the other Areas, it was occasioned by a recognition: that those of us who traffic most at the intersection of theology and the daily activities of ministry, do not merely apply or put into practice theologies that are handed to us by other more “systematic” theologians, or even handed down historically from doctrines in our traditions, but that our work, in fact, is constructive and systematic theology.  It is continually informed and shaped in mutual dialogue with the realities of daily life, and the human situation.  Just as other Areas could legitimately argue that we all do work that is biblical, and we all do work that is systematic, and practical, nevertheless, as inheritors of the 19^th century German “quadrivium” of  biblical, historical, systematic, and practical theologies, we all have our special emphases.  And the emphasis of the fields represented in our Area is, arguably (but hopefully not exclusively) the interdisciplinary task of integration of systematic, historical, constructive and biblical theology; of social, cultural, linguistic and a variety of other “secular” theories; and of Christian liberative praxis—which by definition includes a rhythm of action and reflection.

I admit I am pleased with the term “integrative,” not only because I was one of the ones who stumped for it and got my way(!), but because I believe that even in the most recent debates about the term “practical theology,” there is an unnecessary dualism embedded in the term “practical” itself.  Don Browning[ii] most recently, and Edward Farley,[iii] have argued that all authentic theology is at heart “practical in its import.”[iv] But in maintaining the language of practical theology, Browning also retains the duality of theory and (or theory vs.) practice.  He advocates for an inductive “practice-theory-practice” orientation, in which practice is recognized both as implicitly theory-laden, and offering a rich source, via “thick description,” for building theory.[v]   What Browning and Farley are trying to do is to show the complex and inextricable relationship between theory/theology and practice.  I believe that the term “integrative” takes this even a step further—signaling that theology, theory, and the things that Christians do as we live our lives each day, are deeply, perpetually, and mutually constructive.  Further, the claims human beings make ethically upon one another—each encounter with difference, each encounter with the unique face of the other (to borrow from the philosopher Emanuel Levinas[vi])—call us continually to draw from, and at the same time to reappraise and revise, our theological premises in light of whatever new form of love and justice this new “I-Thou”[vii] encounter demands.

            It may be argued, then, that all theology, but especially pastoral theology, which is concerned with care for suffering, must begin with human beings, and in particular, the pain and brokenness of the human condition (and indeed, all creation).  In Philadelphia, our guest lecturer the Rev. Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore of Vanderbilt University spoke on the theological themes of “facing frailty (sin),” and “salvaging sacrifice;” this morning, we heard Dr. Anderson speak to us on the themes of “blessed ambiguity,” and “ordinary awe.”  Both speakers, then, find primary inspiration in some of the deep themes of human life, with all its creaturely messiness and paradox.  As David Tracy[viii] has argued, drawing from Tillich,[ix] there must be, indeed, a mutual dialogue or “critical correlation” back and forth between theology and the human situation.  Pastoral theology always takes suffering as its starting place[x]—in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, “the open wound of life in this world.”[xi]   The classic pastoral functions, as articulated in the mid-20^th century (and amended in recent decades), immerse the pastoral theologian directly in this open wound, through a commitment to ministries of healing, sustaining, guiding, reconciling, liberating, and empowering.[xii]  So, I want to take as my starting point for this afternoon’s lecture, the inverse of the guiding question for today’s Hein-Fry lectures: not “What wisdom does faith offer to individuals and communities facing the perennial problems of the human situation?” but  “What wisdom does the human situation offer to faith,” and in particular, “What does our knowledge of human persons offer to theology?”—which, quoting Edward Farley, is the process of interpreting, thinking, and judging which faith itself engenders?”[xiii]

Taking human persons as the starting point is a reversal of more traditional theological approaches, in which an image of God is posited, and from that image, a theological anthropology is developed—following perhaps the reasoning that if God is prior to human beings as the Creator, and human beings are created in the “image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26, 27), then it makes sense to describe God first.  Theologians [SLIDE OF NICENE COUNCIL] thus have historically begun their systematic inquiries with the nature of God, drawing on revelation from Scripture, which is given a priori status as divinely inspired truth, and/or on tradition—the accrual of doctrine over time.  Theological anthropologies, that is, the theologically informed study of the nature of human beings, has always been addressed second, after the question of God’s nature.

All descriptions of God, however, are human fabrications, whether their authors acknowledge this or not, and most theologies carry an unconscious ideal image of the human as the template for a super-human God.  I would argue that this includes all portrayals of God, including biblical ones.  Even though as Christians we subscribe to a belief in the Bible as divine revelation, that revelation still was filtered through the available images and metaphors of its scribes and redactors, through their imaginative use of language and of oral tradition.  Sallie McFague has made cogent arguments regarding the metaphorical nature of theology, particularly in the imaging and naming of God.[xiv]  Psychoanalytic studies, by Ana-Maria Rizzuto and others, of the unconscious origins of individuals’ God imagoes in the internalized figures of one’s parents from earliest childhood[xv] [SLIDE OF DRAWING OF GOD] further reinforce the suggestion that most attempts to describe God, particularly in anthropomorphic terms, may rest as much in the unconscious regions of theologians’ psyches, as in any externally verifiable “truth” about what God is like.

In the west, it therefore comes as no surprise given the dual hegemony of patriarchy and northern European or white physiognomy, that the classic western portrait of God is a white, muscular male figure, with a flowing beard signifying that “He” is old enough to have pre-existed the rest of the world. [SLIDE “HEAD SHOT” OF GOD BY MICHELANGELO]

But if we accept a commonly held belief that human beings (and I would say all creation) are formed in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), then would it not be possible to begin with human nature (which, of course, all God images really are to begin with!) and approach the question of “What is God like?” from the bottom-up—or, to be less vertical, from the inside-out (or outside in?)

This has always been the (mostly unacknowledged) starting point for theology.  To make this assumption explicit entertains theology as a more humble enterprise.  We know about the created world and the human condition because we live within these realities.  Our powers of comprehension are limited even to describe these adequately, much less to describe God.  But to reflect on life in all its minute particularities may be the best starting point for coming to understand what God is like, at least “dimly, and in part.”  If we are truly made “in the image and likeness of God,” then we may best glimpse what God is like not in abstract imaginings that purport to convey transcendent, universal truths, but in the mirror of the most minute and particular manifestations of human experience and of creation itself [SLIDE OF JULIAN AND HAZELNUT], just as Julian of Norwich saw the created universe in a hazelnut, and Luther meditated on the glory of God in a single leaf.

So, to turn to the ancient question, addressed to God by the psalmist: What are human beings, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? [SLIDE OF ADAM AND EVE]

I will propose several characteristics of human beings as part of divine creation, recognizing that such a list can be partial and imperfect at best, and cannot escape being conditioned by my own social location as a white, married, professional class, middle-aged woman, and Anglican pastoral theologian:[xvi] [SLIDES FOR THIS OUTLINE:]

1)                 Human beings are part of creation and creation is good, therefore human beings are good.  Before original sin, there was original blessing, and we all still retain that spark of what the Quakers call “that of God within each person.”

2)                 Human beings are vulnerable.   Fragile, easily wounded, confused and tempted by the complexity of the world, and susceptible to straying away from our own highest good, we know ourselves to be “sinners from our mother’s womb” (Ps. 51)—living in a condition of alienation even while yearning for wholeness and light.  Herb’s discussion this morning of our human fragility underscores the poignancy of this truth of the human situation. 

3)                 Human beings are embodied.  Creation—with its atoms, molecules, cells, skin, leaves, scales, feathers, fur, hair and flesh (sarx - sarx)—is embodied.  Therefore, human beings live by, with, and in the enfleshed reality of our bodies.

4)                 Human beings are both alike and unique.  All parts of creation, animate and inanimate—stars, grains of sand, amoebas, newts, bluejays, elephants, cats—and therefore humans, are simultaneously, to quote anthropologists Clyde and Florence Kluckholn, and Ghanaian pastoral theologian, Emanuel Lartey, “like all others, like some others, and like no others.”[xvii]

5)                 Human beings are intrinsically relational.  All creation is interconnected.  Human beings thus are connected with all creation and with one another, knit into the entire fabric of creation, and interwoven in an unfathomably deep and wide “living human web”—to quote Bonnie Miller-McLemore, [our Hein-Fry lecturer in Philadelphia!][xviii]  Therefore, each human communicates with with and participates in a common humanity and a common existence with all creation, and also longs inwardly for connection and communion with the Creator.

6)                 Human beings are multiple, not unitary. The human person is more multiple, variegated, and fragmented than has traditionally been understood, either in traditional western portrayals of the human person as a somewhat heroic, solitary figure, or our own subjective sense of ourselves as a single, unified “I.”  Herb spoke wonderfully this morning about the blessed ambiguity of human existence.  In this afternoon’s lecture I will try to push the envelope even a little further, to go beyond some of the binary dialectics that pose paradox in our lives, to an even more multiple conception of human subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity.  Along with this…

7)                 Human beings are mutable, fluid, and in process.  Creation continues to evolve, change, and adapt, and new life springs up while old parts of creation decay and die.  Each individual life, including each human life, is likewise in a continual state of flux and transition.  

8)                 Human beings are loved beings.  Finally, creation is loved by the creator.  The very act of creation is the motion of Love itself, extending beyond itself, generously self-giving and spilling over into tangible and animate forms.  So human beings, like all creatures, are loved beings. To be human is to be loved.

9)                 Human beings are loving beings.  Therefore, above all, as creatures made in the image of God, human beings are endowed with the capacity for love. 

To sum up in one sentence, then, human beings are good, yet vulnerable; embodied; both alike and unique; intrinsically relational; multiple; mutable; loved, and therefore loving beings.  Examining these attributes one at a time, what more might be said drawing from the fields of psychoanalytic psychology, about the nature of God, in whose image we are made?  I don’t have time in this lecture today to go into all of these, but I will explore a few in more detail.

1) Human Beings Are Good.

            Christian theologians from St. Paul [SLIDE] (arguably the first “systematic theologian”) to the present day, have struggled to come to terms with the seemingly immutable reality that human beings “do not do the good [we] want, and the evil [we] do not want, is what [we] do.”  (Rom. 7:15, 19)  No pastoral theology, grounded in the care of suffering human beings, can ignore the problems of sin and evil.  The doctrine of Original Sin, particularly as elaborated by Augustine, is foundational in most mainline Christian theological traditions.  This doctrine, and what Paul Ricoeur calls the “Adamic myth”[xix] [SLIDE] of the primeval Fall of humans from perfect goodness, offer powerful metaphorical descriptions of the pervasive human sense of two simultaneous “truths” of existence: that there is a divine or transcendent force or reality in the world; and that human beings are somehow inescapably separated, even alienated from that reality and often feel themselves, in Ricoeur’s “primary symbols” to be caught up in the subjective existential experience of defilement, sin, and/or guilt[xx]--“standing under judgment,”[xxi] to quote Paul Tillich.

            Nevertheless, original sin need not be understood as the primary or defining characteristic of the human person.   Different strands of theological tradition over the centuries have taken differing understandings of the degree to which the Fall damaged or utterly eradicated the human capacity for goodness.  There are numerous Christian approaches to human sin, with views of human agency spanning a wide spectrum between a belief in total human moral freedom and a belief in total human depravity.  These views relate to a parallel spectrum of beliefs about the relativity or absoluteness of the separation between human beings and the divine.[xxii]  Christian theology, in all its many forms, however, is fundamentally rooted in the belief that God has acted in creation, in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and continues to act in the present movement of the Holy Spirit in the present world.  There is in Christianity a deep-seated and essential affirmation of goodness in creation, understood as occurring in the original primordial creation event, in the many accounts of God’s saving and healing acts in human history, and in the ongoing movement of God in creating, renewing, redeeming and blessing the world.

            Even within the metaphorical account of the Fall, the goodness of creation was primary, and included human beings.  God saw what God had made and declared it “very good.”  Before there was original sin, there was original goodness and “original blessing.”[xxiii] [HILDEGARD SLIDE] The human being was and is created in God’s image (Gen. 1).  Before any doctrine of original sin, there was original goodness.  Sin is the condition of woundedness, alienation from God and from others in creation—human beings are vulnerable, frail—yet goodness is prior, and goodness, we believe, will also always have the last word in creation.  To quote Ricoeur again, “However primordial badness may be, goodness is yet more primordial.”[xxiv]  Goodness is the foundation of all creation and the essential core of humanity.  At the core of the human person is a whole being moving toward growth and life.

2) Human beings are Vulnerable.

Vulnerability is the other side of this coin.  Herb spoke eloquently this morning about the paradoxical view of the human creature as both wondrous and fragile.  Even Jesus, while it has been argued that Christ, as God incarnate, was “fully human yet did not sin,” suffered temptation, got crabby with fig trees, humanly angry with money-lenders, and may be seen occasionally to have been corrected or instructed by new “I-Thou” encounters, such as the Syro-Phoenician woman who pointed out that “even the dogs eat the scraps from their masters’ table.”  Jesus, as God incarnate, suffered the ultimate torture on the cross, fully vulnerable to betrayal, oppression, abandonment, and pain.

My own theological leaning, with regard to human vulnerability, or frailty (including both sinning and being sinned against[xxv]) is, finally, toward an Augustinian view—not because I am so convinced by argumentation internal to the doctrine of Original Sin itself, but again because it makes the most sense from a convincing reading of the human situation, in this case, a psychoanalytic reading: All splitting, including a dualistic construct of good and evil, belongs to what British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called a “paranoid schizoid” world view.  Evil cannot finally be split off from one’s own doings and projected “innocently” onto another, or others.  The “depressive position” (Klein’s term for the developmental state in which integration can occur) acknowledges the tragic and poignant reality that all seeming opposites, including good and evil, are finally held together.  When splitting is healed, and projections are withdrawn and reincorporated into conscious life, to whatever extent that is fleetingly possible, evil may come to be understood as a tear in the very fabric of the good itself, and not something apart from it.  Especially in Augustine’s formulation of evil as the confusion of lesser goods for greater goods,[xxvi] this integrated view of evil is a convincing and tragic explanation for the complexity of human life.

This view of the complexity of the moral life incorporates what feminist theologian Wendy Farley has identified as the tragic dimension in human suffering: finitude, conflict, and fragility.[xxvii]  Acknowledging this complexity is not to abandon responsibility—on the contrary, to quote another feminist theologian, Kristine Rankka, “What a tragic view of reality and suffering might do, for example, is move one from self-blame or from the projection of responsibility to change things outside oneself, to a more mature realization of one’s own appropriate responsibility within a context of limitation and finitude.”[xxviii]  The depressive position relinquishes, albeit with sadness, the possibility of perfection, and acknowledges the seeming inextricability of evil from the very fabric of the good, and the ever-present reality of suffering, at least from this side of the Eschaton.

3) Human Beings are Embodied.

            The Christian theological tradition struggles with another inherited doctrine, that of the separation of soul and body.  [SLIDE OF FREUD] Whatever one’s bias for or against Freud’s views  of the human person, Freudian theory must be taken seriously precisely because of Freud’s insistence on the reality of life lived in the body—our animal nature, including sexuality and aggression as prime motivators of human behavior.[xxix]

            Contemporary neuroscientists, such as V.S. Ramachandran, have challenged Descartes’ “mind-body” split. [SLIDE OF DESCARTES]  Numerous feminist theologians have challenged Enlightenment mind-body dualism as perpetuating the subjugation of women's experience, and glorifying disconnected rationality at the expense of the lived experiences of childbirth, sexuality, dying, suffering, and surviving.[xxx]  God is in the body, not disembodied. [SLIDE OF GODDESS]   Feminist theologian Sallie McFague has offered the metaphor of the world itself as “God’s body.”[xxxi]  Womanist, that is, Black feminist, theology, in particular celebrates the power of sheer survival as a source of knowledge to inform and sustain faith.[xxxii]  God is experienced both in the community of solidarity, and within the self, as in Ntozake Shange's often quoted line of poetry: "I found God in myself and I loved her/I loved her fiercely."[xxxiii]

4) Human Beings Are Intrinsically Relational.

The great British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, wrote “There is no such thing as a baby.  There is only a mother and a baby.” [SLIDE]  If we extrapolate beyond the language of his time and place, of mothers and babies, or all parents and babies, we can understand this to mean that none of us is born in isolation.  We all have our personal beginnings in the very body of another human being, and as infants we “fail to thrive” without human touch.  The object relations theorists were correct in their reframing of Freud’s basic instincts, [LIZARD SLIDE] beyond the two drives of sex and aggression—to the fuller understanding that human beings are driven first and foremost by their desire to connect and remain connected to other human beings.  [SLIDE DAD & GIRL WALKING]

To quote Martin Buber, “In the beginning is the relation."[xxxiv]  Life begins in the matrix of "I and Thou."[xxxv]  Buber wrote, "It is not as if a child first saw an object and then entered into some relationship with that.  Rather, the longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles."[xxxvi] Thus, even our knowledge of self and others is not something we either discover or invent in a vacuum, a pure subjectivity, but is characterized by the multiple, subtle interactions and influences that we exchange with others every moment, from the time of our birth.  Our consciousness is better described as not just subjectivity, but as one dimension of, and participating in intersubjectivity.

Our relationality and our longing for connection finally extends to our deep desire for God, and God’s loving desire for us in return.   God uniquely created and bestowed human beings with the capacity for this relation, however obscured it may be by the brokenness of creation and the consuming preoccupations of daily human existence.  This intrinsic relationality between human beings and the divine may even be hard-wired into the human brain, as some neuroscientists have argued.[xxxvii]  Through prayer, and other ways in which we may become aware of the flow of connection between ourselves and the divine, we are able to enter into God’s passionate desire for us in relation.  To quote Augustine:[xxxviii] [SLIDE]

“[T]here is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner [person], where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is  bond of union that no satiety can part.  That is what I love when I love my God.”

While the patriarchal and vertical (top-down) elements of Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel fresco [SLIDE] may be critiqued in light of contemporary feminist and liberation theologies, this desire is depicted well here as intimacy, connectedness, and mutual reaching between God and Adam.

5) Human Beings Are Multiple.

With the concept of “intersubjectivity,” we now begin to engage more fully the contemporary postmodern “relational” psychoanalytic critique of classical psychoanalytic conceptions of the human.   At the heart of all psychoanalytic theories of human persons is a fundamental conception of the mind, and of human consciousness, as being constituted by regions of both conscious and unconscious mental contents.  Regardless of how each psychoanalytic school of thought theorizes the mechanisms by which certain thoughts, mental representations, or mental constructs are removed from conscious awareness, all psychoanalytic approaches to understanding the human mind, and how psychotherapy heals, depend upon the fundamental belief in an unconscious region of the mind, and by extension, the existence of unconscious dynamics between and among human persons.

For the most part, this model of consciousness and unconsciousness has been conceived of vertically, following Freud’s so-called “topographical model” [GRAPHIC SLIDE] in which conscious, preconscious, and unconscious reside in successive layers from top to bottom, with repression as the central mechanism for removing mental contents from consciousness.  While this model represented an important way of depicting the power of unconscious mental processes, its hegemony is now increasingly being challenged within psychoanalytic schools of thought. 

In particular, contemporary psychoanalytic theory challenges the centrality of the function of psychic conflict in Freud's concept of the formation of the unconscious.  Freud's concept of repression relied on “drive theory” to explain why mental contents had to be removed from conscious awareness.  Repression was a byproduct of psychic conflict—between the inner drives of sex and aggression, and the social demands of family and civilization—pressing the drives down and out of awareness for the sake of getting along with other people (and not being killed or castrated by them!)

In the generation after Freud, a theory called “object relations theory,” beginning with Melanie Klein, challenged this notion in favor of a model of splitting, motivated not by forbidden drives or terror of castration, but by unresolveable contradictions among fantasied and real experiences of parental provision and lack, our need for attachment to others, plus our real hunger and aggression.  [SLIDE – CIRCLE GRAPHIC]  It is unresolveable relational contradictions that create splits in mental life, over time populating an entire inner landscape with so-called "objects"—that is, strongly cathected (or attached) people, part-people and other objects of attachment that dwell in both conscious and unconscious regions.  These inner objects are further understood both to inhabit and to provoke different states of consciousness, with different accompanying affective (emotional) atmospheres and cognitive capacities, and also to be invoked by various shifts in the external environment that may have resonance with them.

Some contemporary psychoanalytic theories are now going even further in exploring a greater variety or multiplicity of mental states that may coexist at varying levels of consciousness within the same self or mind.[xxxix]  In relational theory, a new movement centered largely in New York, increasing attention has been given to dissociation as a nonpathological phenomenon, being placed alongside, or even replacing repression altogether, as the primary model of mental geography.  In a very recent article, Dr. Jody Messler Davies summarized this aspect of relational theory "that has begun to conceive of self, indeed of mind itself, as a multiply organized, associationally linked network of parallel, coexistent, at times conflictual, systems of meaning attribution and understanding."[xl]  In her words:

Not one unconscious, not the unconscious, but multiple levels of consciousness and unconsciousness, in an ongoing state of interactive articulation as past experience infuses the present and present experience evokes state-dependent memories of formative interactive representations.  Not an onion, which must be carefully peeled, or an archeological site to be meticulously unearthed and reconstructed in its original form, but a child's kaleidoscope [SLIDE] in which each glance through the pinhole of a moment in time provides a unique view; a complex organization in which a fixed set of colored, shaped, and textured components rearrange themselves in unique crystalline structures determined by way of infinite pathways of interconnectedness.[xli]

In this view, dissociation is not necessarily regarded as pathological per se, although it may become problematic, as in severe post-traumatic states in which continual experiences of fragmentation interrupt the normal sense of a seamless continuity of consciousness.  However, dissociation, or multiplicity, is increasingly being recognized as inherent in mental functioning, and not only as a result of trauma. The idea that the mind begins as a unitary phenomenon and is gradually fragmented by traumatic experience is increasingly being challenged.  Another relational analyst, Philip Bromberg, has observed:[xlii]

The process of dissociation is basic to human mental functioning and is central to the stability and growth of personality.  It is intrinsically an adaptational talent that represents the very nature of what we call 'consciousness.'  …There is now abundant evidence that the psyche does not start as an integrated whole, but is nonunitary in origin--a mental structure that begins and continues as a multiplicity of self-states [CROWD SLIDE] that maturationally attain a feeling of coherence which overrides the awareness of discontinuity.  This leads to the experience of a cohesive sense of personal identity and the necessary illusion of being 'one self.'"

Bromberg and others point to a body of psychoanalytically informed research based on infant observation. Researchers[xliii] have observed that the earliest experiences of the self appear to be organized around a variety of shifting self-states that encompass cognitive, affective and physiological dimensions, and appear to include internalized representations of relational or interactive experiences.[xliv]  A central aspect of the developmental process, then, consists of being able increasingly to move smoothly and seamlessly from one self-state to another with an increasing sense of self-continuity and an increasing capacity for self-regulation.  This process is facilitated (or not facilitated) by primary caretakers' responsiveness (or lack thereof).

6) Human Beings Are Mutable, Fluid, and in Process.

Human beings also move through the medium of time more changeably than even widely adopted developmental psychologies may have suggested.  To be human is to be in a continual state of flux and transition.  This assertion coincides with a related source of challenge to Freud’s topographical model, which is being advanced on the philosophical front by postmodernism.  Postmodernist thinkers have, from a slightly different vantage point than psychologists, also called into question the whole notion of a unitary self—in the words of Graham Ward, self and mind as "an undefined spatiality, like the contours of a perfume."[xlv]   Feminist writer and psychoanalyst Jane Flax presents a critique of modernist conceptions of a unitary self, as potentially repressive of subjugated inner voices.  Flax has written:[xlvi]

I believe a unitary self is unnecessary, impossible, and a dangerous illusion.  Only multiple subjects can invent ways to struggle against domination that will not merely recreate it.  In the process of therapy, in relations with others, and in political life we encounter many difficulties when subjectivity becomes subject to one normative standard, solidifies into rigid structures, or lacks the capacity to flow readily between different aspects of itself… No singular form can be sufficient as a regulative ideal or as a prescription for human maturity or the essential human capacity… [I]t is possible to imagine subjectivities whose desires for multiplicity can impel them toward emancipatory action.  These subjectivities would be fluid rather than solid, contextual rather than universal, and process oriented rather than topographical.  Emancipatory theories and practices requires mechanics of fluids [a quote from Luce Irigaray] in which subjectivity is conceived as processes rather than as a fixed atemporal entity locatable in a homogeneous, abstract time and space [Flax's reading of the Cartesian idea of the self].  In discourses about subjectivity the term 'the self' will be superseded by discussions of 'subjects.'  The term 'subject(s)' more adequately expresses the simultaneously determined, multiple, and agentic qualities of subjectivity."

Such postmodernist writers highlight the emancipatory implications of a nonunitary conception of self and mind, especially as they influence the social construction of self and others, and the resulting social construction of categories such as gender, race and class, and the distribution of power.[xlvii] 

Freud’s concept of the "return of the repressed" gives way to a more variable process in which we move in and out of multiple areas of our own knowing and unknowing. "Knowing" itself may be understood as more than cognition alone, or even cognitive and affective experience together, which is usually possible to verbalize, but also as nonverbal mental contents that are only symbolic, or pre-symbolic, the knowledge of the body and physical sensation--in Christopher Bollas' words as "the unthought known."[xlviii]  [SLIDE OF SPHERE] Aren’t these nonverbal and presymbolic ways of knowing the same regions of mind from which creativity springs?  Most of us who have been engaged in any kind of creative process, whether in music, art, or writing, or the “Aha!” of non-linear scientific “intuition” or “discovery,” will acknowledge the subjective experience of ideas, notions, and images, coming to us as if from beyond our everyday cognition, not necessarily from outside ourselves (although that is sometimes said, as in reference to inspiration by God or a muse), but from a different region of consciousness, of which we are only dimly aware, except perhaps in our dreams.  Creative ideas even seem to “arrive” into consciousness from multiple regions and senses simultaneously, as the artist Wassily Kandinsky wrote concerning the artistic process. [KANDINSKY SLIDE]]

7) Human Beings Are Loved Beings.

Being loved is not accidental or a mere possibility; it is a central part of the definition of being human.  This is true poverty of the spirit: recognizing that it is not through our own power, or accomplishments, or control over others that we are constituted, but through a recognition of the unconditional healing love of God that flows in us and through us to others in our lives.  Episcopal priest, psychoanalyst and spiritual director Phillip Bennett wrote, “In letting ourselves be loved, we return to our true Center, surrendering our fears again and again, discovering a new strength rising up within us even as our old false confidence falls away. At the very point of failing at our own self-invented fantasies of success, power and control, we find a small opening into the Greater Life—the narrow entrance through which we pass into the vast spaciousness of Love.”[xlix]

Human beings are profoundly known and loved by God.  This is the promise of Christian baptism—that we are beloved as God’s own children.  [SLIDE – FACE]  In the words of the Psalmist,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me,

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

You discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down,

And are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before,

And lay your hand upon me…

For it was you who formed my inward parts;

You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…(Psalm 139, 1-6)

It is the juxtaposition of being known and being loved that perhaps most distinguishes the love of God for each human person from the experience of human love, which is rarely so unconditional.  Human beings have experienced and described divine love as that love that does not depend on performance, perfection, or any human criteria.  God’s love for the creation, and for human beings, is not blind to any of the particularities of each life, but is poured out freely.  God does not turn a blind eye to human failures, disappointments, and negative behavior.  But God’s judgment is not condemnation or rejection.  To quote Phillip Bennett once more,[l]

How can we reconcile God’s love with God’s judgment?  The most satisfying answer I have found is that God’s judgment is God’s love, in its penetrating, unremitting power.  God’s judgment is never divorced from God’s love; it is not some angry part of God which is split off from God’s mercy and gentleness.  Instead, God’s judgment is the way we experience pure and constant love which sees and knows us to our core…God’s judgment is the penetrating aspect of God’s love, purging, purifying, stripping away tough old skin.  The judgment of love never injures our true self; it only releases it from constriction so that we may be the person we were created to be.

8) Therefore, finally, Human Beings Are Loving Beings.  [SLIDE – 2 HANDS]

As creation is loved by the Creator, and created in the image of the first Love, creation itself is inherently capable of sharing that Love, receiving the abundance of that love until it spills over in the form of continuing to live and propagate new life, into love of creation and the Creator. 

The “summary of the law,” to love God with all one’s heart and soul and mind and one’s neighbor as oneself (Matt. 22:37; Mk. 12:28; Lk. 10:25) is not only something that comes, like the law, as a Word to be learned and acted upon, but a part of the very definition of what it means to be fully human—the gift of desire for the other, the innate capacity for love.  This love is expressed both in the erotic movement toward life and its propagation, and in the care and stewardship of “the neighbor”—both the human neighbor, and the whole creation as neighbor.  What does love require, but to “do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God?” (Micah 6).

To conclude…

What, then, are the

IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY?

It has been impossible already to describe the human person without making reference to God—especially as we entertained the categories that human beings are both loved and loving.  The intertwining of the human and the divine is part of the essence of whatever we can possibly know, it seems to me, both about what it means to be human, and what that implies for what God is like.  As we embrace a model of greater complexity and multiplicity of the human mind, and an appreciation for the intersubjective, vulnerable, loving relation between and among human beings and the divine, this will finally lead us back to a more variegated, fluid, vulnerable, passionate, and intersubjective image of God, or imago Dei.

God, like us, is vulnerable, is wounded.  This is one of the profound truths of the Incarnation.  As Herb said this morning, “Jesus taught us that humility is more than a human feeling; it is the way of God with us.”[li]  For Christians, there is no clearer depiction of God’s vulnerability [REMBRANDT SLIDE] than that of God being born in a manger—an “earthworm lying in weakness, helpless without his mother,” as Herb quoted from Luther this morning[lii]—placed on a dusty straw bed surrounded by the breath of curious animals and frightened, uprooted human parents.  And for Christians, there is no clearer depiction of God’s woundedness than that of God hanging, tortured, on a 1^st century imperial Roman cross, betrayed and murdered by earthly powers and principalities.

Also, if psychoanalysis, postmodern philosophy, and brain science are all converging on a conception of the human being, and indeed, creation, as more multiple, complex, and in motion than we had previously thought (or been able to think because of our Enlightenment conditioning to unitary and reductionist models of truth), then might this not suggest a conception of a multiple, complex, and dynamic God?

In a rather straightforward analogy, the pastoral theologian James Ashbrook and historian of science Carol Albright [SLIDE - OUTLINE] have proposed the brain as a metaphor for God’s various “ways of being God:” the upper brain stem for an attending, ever-present God, the limbic lobes for a relating, nurturing God, the limbic system for a remembering and meaning-making God, the neocortex for an organizing and versatile God, and the frontal lobes for an intending and purposeful God.[liii]   They conclude with the mind-producing brain as an analogy for God as All-in-All, using the image  [SLIDE] of Frank Lynn Meshberger’s[liv] discovery of the brain in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam first published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1990.  The way these authors have drawn out this analogy of brain and God is both playful and respectful of the complexity of human experience.

For me, as an Anglican theologian, there is already a more evocative and compelling metaphor of multiplicity in ancient Christian theological resources, namely, the Trinity. [SLIDE OF RUBLEV ICON]

    In contemporary Trinitarian, process theology, and feminist theology, we find resources that support a theology of complexity, diversity and mutability.  Elizabeth Johnson, in the book She Who Is, describes how the very image of the Trinity is one that challenges unitary, totalizing images of God.[lv]  Using the Rublev icon as our exemplar, the Trinity offers a symbol or image of God as fluid, multiple, and profoundly relational and loving.  To quote Johnson:[lvi]

"At its most basic the symbol of the Trinity evokes a livingness in God, a dynamic coming and going with the world that points to an inner divine circling around in unimaginable relation.”

Notice how as you gaze on this icon, you are invited to join their circle at the table.

            Continuing from Johnson:

God's relatedness to the world in creating, redeeming, and renewing activity suggests … that God's own being is somehow similarly differentiated.  Not an isolated, static, ruling monarch, but a relational, dynamic, tripersonal mystery of love… Who would not opt for the latter?

In another trinitarian approach, postmodern theologian John Milbank argues for a "postmodern Christianity" that values diversity as a central organizing principle.  For Milbank, the Trinity is a sign of God as community, "even a 'community in process,' infinitely realized...'"[lvii]  He writes:[lviii]

Christianity can become 'internally' postmodern…I mean by this that it is possible to construe Christianity as suspicious of notions of fixed 'essences' in its approach to human beings, to nature, to community and to God, even if it has never fully escaped the grasp of a 'totalizing' metaphysics.  Through its belief in creation from nothing it admits temporality, the priority of becoming and unexpected emergence.  A reality suspended between nothing and infinity is a reality of flux, a reality without substance, composed only of relational differences and ceaseless alterations (Augustine, De Musica).  Like nihilism, Christianity can, [and] should, embrace the differential flux.

Milbank finds the expression of this Christianity not in formal creeds and doctrines about God but in practices, of community.  Community embodies a commitment to difference, but unlike nihilism, envisions the possibility of difference with harmony--borrowing from St. Augustine, a concentus musicus.[lix]

            For Milbank, it is desire (drawing from Augustine), and not what he calls "Greek knowledge" that is the mediator of reality.[lx]  Desire for the other reaches across the gaps, the "transitional space," to create a dymamic, intersubjective arena of creation. [SLIDE: CREATION TYMPANUM]  If we accept the concept of the relational dimension of consciousness and its construction, our theologizing, in a variety of faith traditions, may be similarly understood as a mutual, co-constructive, co-generative yearning between humans and the divine.[lxi]   What binds and heals in a relational model is not a vision of ultimate oneness, as in homogenization, but mutual desire and love that bridges toward the other, embracing difference.

In conclusion, faith in an incarnational God conceived as fluid, vulnerable, multiple, in motion, and in perpetual relation both with us and within us, emancipates us from constraining, static, monolithic notions of both God and human beings.  A multiple, relational theology it seems to me, is hospitable to an embodied conception of mind and self that gives room enough for the human person to encompass a wide capacity for relationality, both with other people, and with and among the inner selves that inhabit the                                     time and spatial dimensions of one's own lived life.  [SLIDE OF PURA GOA FESTIVAL, BALI]  The rigid hierarchy of consciousness and unconsciousness collapses, as we recognize that our creativity, art, and human nature itself, contain spheres of both rationality and irrationality, knowability and unknowability, of abstract thought, emotion, and animal sense, both within ourselves and in our relations with one another.  And that these are not fixed positions, but in continual flux as we move in and out of different internal and external states of pressure, desire, conflict, and union.

To conclude, in the words of T.S. Eliot (“Dry Salvages” from the Four Quartets):[lxii]

…Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.  These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

NOTES