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God: Experience and Mystery
Introduction
Since the 1970s the understanding of God in the various contexts of Christianity has been undergoing some significant changes. Political theology, radical theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, ecological theology, gay and lesbian theology, contextual theology, post-colonial theology, and other emancipatory theological projects have claimed new insights into God's mysterious presence in our world. As a result, images and concepts of God have been changing, traditional attributes of God (e.g. omnipotence, inability to suffer, aseity) have been questioned, and the trinitarian understanding of God has been reinterpreted in a number of different ways. During the same period, efforts have been made to retrieve some aspects of apophatic and mystical theologies from the past now in critical correlation to postmodern philosophical thinking and contemporary religious experience. Moreover, experiences of both the inter-religious encounter and the ongoing inter-religious dialogue have contributed to a different understanding and to changing images of God's presence in our world and promoted the challenge to traditional modes of referring to God in more or less exclusivist and static terms.
These new departures in reflecting upon God have also led to a renewed attention to the biblical understanding of God. Traditional biblical theologies have been questioned and new and more critical biblical theologies have been called for. Also major texts of the Christian traditions are being reexamined in terms of possible proposals for alternative ways of experiencing God and of thinking about the divine mystery.
This issue of Concilium would like to explore some of these recent ways of rethinking the Christian experiences of God in terms of their new quality, their methodological profile and their potential for renewing the Christain faith at the beginning of the new millennium. In a first move, a few recent experiences of God are described and assessed in order to grasp some among the changing perceptions of the divine mystery between, on the one hand, increasing globalization and, on the other hand, increasing [8] regionalization. In a second move, Christian traditions of thinking about God, biblical and postbiblical, will be reinterpreted in view of the contemporary changes, and vice versa. Finally, the concept of revelation as well as the truth status of these recent experiences of God are examined and the hermeneutical question asked how the Christian understanding of God may best be protected against immediatist and fundamentalist claims, on the one hand, and against traditionalist and relativist claims, on the other hand.
The editors wish to thank Seán Freyne and Giuseppe Ruggieri for valuable assistance during the preparation of this issue.
Werner Jeanrond and
Christoph Theobald