A God worthy of our belief

Interview by TOM FOX

QUEST FOR THE LIVING GOD: MAPPING THE FRONTIERS IN THE THEOLOGY OF GOD by Sr. Elizabeth Johnson Continuum, 256 pages, $24.95

Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, distinguished professor of theology at Fordham University, talks with Tom fox about her new book, Quest for the Living God Mapping the Frontiers in the Theology of God. Of this book, Roberto S. Goizueta, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, wrote, "Karl Rahner had an abiding concern that much of Christian theology presented God ‘unworthy of belief.’ Here Johnson has given us a God truly worthy of our belief, fidelity, and love. Every word breathes with the author's own deep love of God, the church, and the world.”

Excerpts from the Fox’s interview with Johnson follow. You can listen to the full interview or read a transcript here: A God worthy of our belief.

Tom Fox: Allow me to start where many people probably start when they talk to you about your book, and that is the bad press that God has been getting recently, and even you allude to it early on in your book. Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion is giving God a bad time. Is this deservedly so, given his arguments?

Elizabeth Johnson: To talk about Dawkins, and also Hitchens, Harris, the others that are writing those kinds of books, simply gets me very frustrated because the God that they are denying existence to is not the God that most Christians even believe in. …

If I may say, atheists of the 19th and early 20th Centuries offered really serious intellectual challenges to the faith. I’m thinking if people hear the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. In dialogue with those atheists and their attacks on God, theologians have benefited because we have gotten new angles of vision into God and new ways of exploring who the living God is, new ways of bringing this to people.

These contemporary attacks, and they go by the name of the “New Atheists”, are very, very shallow and superficial. Truthfully for most theologians, there’s nothing to chew on there. There’s almost no way to have a dialogue with them because they’re not even talking about the same thing.

Tom Fox: Then let’s talk about your God, the God that you describe in The Quest for the Living God. Start with the title—why the living God?

Elizabeth Johnson: I did not want to just keep saying “God, God, God.” That summons up certain images to most people’s minds and I was trying to expand what the reference of the word “God” means in most people’s minds and hearts. The phrase “the living God” comes from the Bible. It’s found in the Psalms and the prophets.

It strikes me as a very wonderful, engaging, enticing adjective to describe God as alive, as on the move, as opening up a future, as full of beans, so to speak, as compared to the old, monarchical notion that is rather static. In scripture, they often compare the living God to a spring of living water or a well where the water is running clear.

Most times it connects with life, so the living God is the one who gives life, and all of the blooming, buzzing ideas that go with life are connected with that notion of God. So I was trying to make God seem interesting to people in general who think they know who God is, or they’re told who God is, and it sort of shuts down then.

Tom Fox:You write that we are living in a golden age of discovery, and that we have many, many vast new insights into this God from various experiences of people so that one point as I understand it, you’re saying in each era, we have new possibilities to discover this God and secondly, that this particular era that we’re living in is an especially rich moment.

So in your book, you lay out some of these experiences and again, I think what I’m picking up here and what seems to be evident in the book is that this God that you are writing about is coming out of the lived experiences of communities of people throughout the world.

Elizabeth Johnson:That’s absolutely right. For example, they’re the experiences of women, the experience of very poor people in Latin America, the experience of African-Americans coming out of slavery and so on. Those experiences are all within Christianity, but let me add the experiences of Christians, let’s say, in India, where they live in a wider religious framework in their culture.

All of these experiences have raised in people’s minds new sense of who the living God is, and then this becomes put into words by theologians and it seems to indicate that we should act a certain way and then they say it to the whole church because this is something too good to keep to only one group.

My take on what’s been going on in the last half century in the Church and in the churches ecumenically, is that the spirit is moving again and there are new, as you say, lived experiences of God. So as I say in the book, it’s moving here, our understanding of God, starts in the heart of people and goes into the head with communities of discourse that speak theologically, and then moves out into the hands, putting this into practice.

It’s not an ivory tower effort. That was the point I was trying to make all the way through the book. This isn’t coming out of scholars to begin with; this is coming out of communities of believers.

More about the Author

A sister in the congregation of St. Joseph who hails from Brooklyn, Elizabeth Johnson has been president of both the Catholic Theological Society of America and the American Theological Society.

She has served as a member of the national Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue, a consultant to the Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Women in Church and Society, a theologian on the Vatican-sponsored dialogue between science and religion, and on the Vatican-sponsored study of Christ and the world’s religions.

She is also the author of the much acclaimed She Who Is, as well as Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology, The Church Women Want, and Friends of God and Prophets. Today, Elizabeth Johnson is a distinguished professor of theology at Fordham University. Welcome, Elizabeth.

[Tom Fox is NCR publisher and editor emeritus and does podcasting for NCRcafe.org.]