Those of us who had the privilege of visiting Professor
Kaufman’s home on Longfellow Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would never
forget Gordon’s hospitality and his wife Dorothy’s great cooking. Many of us
would remember the blue carpet in the living room, which the couple bought in
Hong Kong.
But the most memorable item in their home for me was the
silk scroll that Gordon’s parents brought back from their days as Mennonite
missionaries in China. It was dedicated to his father and has the Chinese
transliteration of his last name Kaufman, which means, “overflowed with
blessings” in Chinese.
My life has been overflowed
with blessings since meeting Kaufman and having him as co-director of my
dissertation. Kaufman had shown great interest in my work and told me that he
was conceived in China, though he was born in the United States. He had a deep
curiosity about Asia and had visited or taught in India, Hong Kong, China, and
Japan.
The most important legacy of Kaufman for theology is his
theological method, and particularly his understanding of theology as
“imaginative construction.” And Kaufman has offered us a very capacious
imagination indeed. Kaufman’s theological thinking had changed over time. While
his philosophical thinking has been much shaped by Kant, he has continued to
dialogue with different cultures and sciences.
One of Kaufman’s dialogical partners and friends at Harvard
was Edward Wilson, an expert on sociobiological and the life of ants. Wilson
sent him his illustrated 700-page exhaustive tome on ants when it was
published, and Kaufman proudly displayed it in his room.
In Creating Minds, Howard Gardner said that creative
people are distinctive in their abilities in bringing different bodies of
knowledge and thought together into fresh synthesis. Kaufman demonstrated his
abilities in navigating through theology, philosophy, natural sciences, and the
study of cultures and religions.
To develop a capacious imagination, one must be willing to
be self-conscious and self-critical. Kaufman’s constructivist method is not
satisfied with staying safely within theology formulated in the past, including
his own. His several books on God testify to his remarkable ability to
challenge his own thinking and move onto new horizons.
Over the years he continued to learn from his female
colleagues in the academy and his female students, who help him to understand
the limitations of anthropomorphic and andocentric images for God, such as
creator, Lord, king and father. His understanding of God as
“serendipitous-creativity” opens new avenues for dialogue with the natural
sciences and with ecofeminism.
His imagination was also nurtured by his sustained interest
and participation in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. His moves toward a naturalistic
Christianity open new possibilities for dialogue with Buddhism and other
traditions that have a more wholistic understanding of nature and the
interrelation of all beings. His biohistorical notion of humanity, for example,
may find resonance in Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing. Kaufman has
written a fascinating comparison between the Christian concept of God and the
Buddhist notion of emptiness.
The fecund imagination continued in his old age. His major
work In Face of Mystery was published in 1993, when he was sixty-eight.
As his students, we know that he had worked on it for many years, for we heard
it in lectures and saw him drawing the trajectories on the blackboard. He last
book Jesus and Creativity came out in 2006, when he was eighty-one years
old.
In the book On Late Style, the postcolonial critic
Edward W. Said discussed two different styles in the late works of musical and
literary artists. Some would continue to do what they are used to do since
their younger days. But there is a group of artists, including Beethoven, who
have produced works of such creativity that they stand in contrast with what is
popular at the time and becomes forerunners of what is to come. I would
characterize Kaufman’s late style in that category.
Kaufman has also used his imagination to directly address
particular social or ecological issues, such as Nonresistance and Responsibility, Theology for an Nuclear
Age, and his essays on ecological
consciousness and the human niche in the ecological order. In these books and
articles, he followed his teacher H. Richard Niebuhr’s example of treading
between theology and ethics to offer pragmatic wisdom and moral guidance.
Kaufman has not
created a particular school of thought. It is hard to generalize what his
students are doing for they are so different in their theological trajectories.
Many of his students have continued his legacy of posing radical questions to
the theological tradition and breaking new grounds.
I would like to
illustrate this by citing the works by some of his students of color and
international students. For example, Anthony Pinn finds Kaufman’s
definition of theology as a self-conscious human construction useful for
broadening the nature and tasks of Black theology. He has just published a new
volume on an African American humanist theology, entitled The End of God-talk.
Several of his Indian students, such as Christopher
Duraisingh, M. Thomas Thangarai, and Sathianathan Clarke have used what they
have learned from Kaufman to engage Indian cultures and religions. In fact,
Kaufman delivered his famous essay on “Christian Theology as Imaginative
Construction” in Bangalore, India, in 1976. Sathianathan Clarke has developed a
Dalit theology, using the drum as a metaphor for Christ in Dalits and Christianity.
I have worked on postcolonial feminist theology for many
years. With Joerg Rieger, I co-authored the newly-released book Occupy Religion, which presents a theology of the multitude.
Kaufman was a past President of the American Academy of
Religion. He was a mentor, wise counselor, and friend to many colleagues in the
academy.
As we remember his legacy, I want to tell you the
story of the last time that I have seen him. I went to his office in order to
send him a copy of the book Empire and the Christian Tradition, which I
have co-edited. The book was dedicated with gratitude to our teachers. He was
one of the persons to whom I wanted to dedicate the book. He was delighted to
receive the book. In the course of our discussion, he said that theology should
expand people’s horizons and not erect a fence to protect a narrow tradition.
This was the Kaufman I would always cherish and remember because from him, I
have received “overflowed blessings.”
* From remarks given at the panel “In Face of Gordon D.
Kaufman: A Legacy for Theology,” at the annual meeting of the American Academy
of Religion, Chicago, November 17, 2012.