A woman sits in the rabbi’s study. Her son is dead at nineteen, a car on the 405 at two in the morning, and she has come with the question that predates the Book of Job. She does not raise her voice. She asks where God was.<\/p>\n
Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924\u20131974) puts two terrors in that room with her. The first is the body. The boy is meat now, and so is she, and so is the rabbi across the desk, and every creature that ever drew breath has come to the same end. The second terror is worse, because a man can almost bear his own death if it counts for something. The second terror is that it counts for nothing. The universe runs on whether or not the boy lived. A hero system answers both terrors at once. It tells a man how to die and still win, how to lend his small life to something that does not perish, so that the grave becomes a door and not a wall. Every culture sells one. Every clergyman is a salesman of the local model.<\/p>\n Bradley Shavit Artson<\/a> (b. 1959) holds the dean’s chair at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and has spent a career building a model unlike the one most of his congregants were raised to expect. The expected model is old and strong. It says God is King of the Universe, all-knowing, all-powerful, outside time, lacking nothing. Maimonides (1138\u20131204) gave the Jewish version its iron frame. That God cannot change, because change means He was once less than perfect or will become so. He cannot suffer, because suffering is a lack, and He lacks nothing. He cannot be moved by the woman’s prayer, because to be moved is to be altered, and the perfect admit no alteration. You pray to that God to change yourself. He is the fixed point, and the hero attaches his perishing life to the one thing in the cosmos that does not perish.<\/p>\n Artson refuses that God. He calls Him an idol.<\/p>\n The refusal grows from a wound and from a library. The wound is the one in the study, multiplied across a century that produced Auschwitz and the boy on the freeway. The library is process theology, and Artson is its most visible Jewish exponent, the author of God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology and Renewing the Process of Creation: A Jewish Integration of Science and Spirit. The argument cuts at the root. A God who could have stopped the car and chose not to is not worth worshiping. So Artson surrenders the divine power to stop the car. His God does not coerce. His God lures. He works the way a melody works on a listener, the way a teacher works on a student who remains free to refuse. He is woven into the becoming of things, not perched above it, and He grows alongside the world He calls forward. He felt every minute of the boy. He loses nothing. The dead are held in His unfading life. That is Artson’s answer to the mother. Not a King who could have intervened and declined, but a companion who suffered the loss with her and carries her son forward in a memory that time cannot erode.<\/p>\n Watch what happens to a single sacred word inside this system, and then watch the same word in the systems built against it. Take power.<\/p>\n For the Reformed pastor working in the tradition of John Calvin (1509\u20131564), power is sovereignty. It is the decree that stands before the foundation of the world, the will that elects and reproves and answers to no court. The boy died because the decree included his death, and the pastor’s comfort, hard as flint, is that nothing fell outside the plan. To worship is to bow before a will you cannot question and call it good. Power means the absolute capacity to ordain.<\/p>\n For the Marine on his third deployment, power is the capacity to impose. It is the round that finds the target and the order that moves the column. A man earns his place in that hero system by becoming an instrument of force aimed well, and his immortality is the flag, the unit, the name read aloud at the next muster after he is gone. Power is what you do to the enemy before he does it to you.<\/p>\n For the hospice nurse at the end of a double shift, power has reversed its meaning. Her hero system is built on the thing the Marine and the Calvinist both flee. She has no decree and no round. Power, for her, is the discipline of not fixing, of sitting with the dying and refusing to lie to them, of managing the pain she cannot cure. She earns her significance by presence in the face of the very helplessness the other systems exist to deny.<\/p>\n For the founder in Menlo Park, power is leverage and scale, the capacity to move a million users with a line of code, to outlast death by building a thing that runs after the body quits. He prays, if the word fits, to growth.<\/p>\n For the Hasidic rebbe, power flows downward through a channel. The tzaddik does not own it. He conducts it, drawing abundance from the upper worlds into this one, and his court orbits him because he is the conduit, the place where heaven touches the street.<\/p>\n Five men, five women, one word, and it splits into five different things, each of which holds together only inside the system that gives it weight. Artson’s redefinition is a sixth. Power, in the God of becoming, is persuasion. It is the strength to invite without forcing, to call without compelling, to suffer the refusal of the beloved and keep calling. Inside his hero system this reads as the highest power, the love that will not coerce because coercion is the weakling’s tool. Carry that same sentence into Calvin’s study and it reads as blasphemy, a God demoted to a suggestion. Carry it to the Marine and it reads as defeat. Carry it to the founder and it does not parse at all. The word does not travel. It means what the system needs it to mean, and the systems do not need the same thing, because they are built against the same two terrors from different ground.<\/p>\n The honest measure of a hero system is the cost it cannot see on its own books. Artson sees most of his. He knows he has traded the omnipotent rescuer for the suffering companion, and he names the trade as a gain. He would rather have a God who is true and weak than a God who is strong and a liar about the freeway. He has read the objection a thousand times and answers it without flinching. That is real intellectual courage, and it sells well to the educated congregant who could not believe in the King anymore and was about to leave the building. Artson built a door for that man to stay.<\/p>\n The cost his theology cannot price sits one floor below the argument. A God who cannot compel offers the mother company in the dark. He does not offer her the boy back, and he does not promise the dark ends. For the parent who needs a rescuer and not a fellow mourner, the partner God is thin soup. Artson chose truth over that comfort, by his own lights, and a man is allowed to. But the choice has a price, and the price is paid by the one who needed the other thing.<\/p>\n There is a second cost, and it does not live in the books at all. It lives in the building. In 2024 the American Jewish University investigated Artson and his deputy dean after complaints gathered over two decades from former rabbinical students, alleging a pattern of favoritism toward men and disrespectful treatment. The investigation closed that June. The firm reported that students had experienced discrimination, though it judged the problem not systematic, and the university did not release the report. The Rabbinical Assembly opened a parallel inquiry. Rabbi Artson retired in June 2026. <\/p>\n Set that beside the theology. A man teaches a God who rules by invitation and never by force, who holds the world in a relationship of mutual regard, who calls and waits and refuses to coerce the beloved. The same man ran a seminary, held the chair, decided whose career advanced and whose stalled, and stood at the head of a hierarchy where a student’s vocation passed through his favor. The students who filed those complaints did not describe an invitation they were free to refuse. They described a power that felt like the old kind, the kind that ordains and is not questioned, the kind Artson spent his life teaching God does not use. The theology of relationship and the structure of the institution did not match. Becker would not call that hypocrisy. He would call it the standard human gap between the hero system a man preaches and the one he lives, the gap every man carries, widened here by the size of the claim. The bigger the theology of mutuality, the louder the silence where mutuality failed.<\/p>\n Three coordinates, then.<\/p>\n The hero is the partner. The Artson hero does not wait for God to mend the world and does not bow before a decree he cannot fathom. He puts his hands on the broken thing and works beside a God who is also working and also at risk, and he finds his significance in the labor shared with a vulnerable partner rather than in submission to an invulnerable King.<\/p>\n The rival he fights without naming most days is the God of his own prayer book. The liturgy he leads still calls God King of the Universe, still says He kills and makes alive, still hands the old sovereign the throne. Artson preaches against that God on the page and chants to Him on Shabbat morning, and the rival lives inside the tradition he serves, which is why he can never finish the fight.<\/p>\n The one cost his ledger cannot price is the distance between the sermon and the staircase. A God who cannot compel is a beautiful answer to the woman in the study and a hard thing to square with the students who walked the halls below his office and felt compelled. The theology absolves God of the power to coerce. It does not absolve the man who held the chair.<\/p>\n Bradley Shavit Artson and the God of Becoming<\/strong><\/p>\n Bradley Shavit Artson<\/a> (b. 1959) ranks among the more consequential theologians of contemporary American Judaism, a figure who combined a long institutional career in rabbinic education with a sustained effort to rethink the idea of God for a scientific age. For more than twenty-five years he held the deanship of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University<\/a> in Los Angeles, where he helped train hundreds of Conservative rabbis. Across the same span he built a body of theological writing that drew on process philosophy, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and neuroscience, and that argued, against a long tradition of assumed conflict, that Jewish faith and modern science can deepen rather than diminish each other.<\/p>\n He was born in San Francisco, California, and educated at Harvard, where he studied history and literature and graduated cum laude in 1981. As an undergraduate he interned for Congressman Phillip Burton<\/a> (1926\u20131983) and Senator Alan Cranston<\/a> (1914\u20132000), and after graduation he worked for a time in the California State Assembly. The pull toward public life gave way to the rabbinate. He enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America<\/a>, the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism, and received ordination with honors in 1988. Already in rabbinical school he showed the preoccupations that would mark his later career, publishing early work on Jewish ethics and on war, peace, and nuclear disarmament.<\/p>\n Many rabbis with academic ambitions move quickly from ordination to the university. Artson did not. He spent a decade in the pulpit, serving Congregation Eilat in Mission Viejo, California, from 1988 to 1999. The congregation grew under his leadership from roughly two hundred families to more than six hundred, and his Introduction to Judaism course gained a wide reputation. Hundreds studied with him, more than two hundred converted to Judaism, and ten of his congregants later entered the rabbinate. The decade fixed a conviction that would shape everything after it: that Jewish life flourishes when it presents itself as intellectually serious and open to people who arrived without an extensive Jewish education.<\/p>\n In 1999 he joined the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, soon renamed the American Jewish University, and within a year he became dean of its Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. He held the post for about a quarter century, and under his direction the school became a principal center of Conservative rabbinic training. Artson argued that the modern rabbi needs more than command of Talmud and Jewish law. He broadened the curriculum to include pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, psychological resilience, leadership formation, and the practical skills of communal life. The rabbi he wanted to produce served at once as scholar, legal authority, counselor, teacher, and institutional leader.<\/p>\n His reach extended past North America. He became founding dean of the Zacharias Frankel College at the University of Potsdam<\/a> in Germany, a center for Conservative and Masorti ordination in Europe under the religious supervision of the Ziegler School. He took part in the support of emerging Jewish communities elsewhere as well. In 2008 he ordained Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, spiritual leader of the Abayudaya community in Uganda, and joined a court that converted candidates from several African countries. A regional chief gave him an African name.<\/p>\n Artson pursued advanced theological study alongside his administrative work. He earned a Doctor of Hebrew Letters in contemporary Jewish theology from Hebrew Union College\u2013Jewish Institute of Religion<\/a> under the supervision of David Ellenson<\/a> (1947\u20132023). The doctorate supplied the academic ground for the project that became the center of his intellectual life: the adaptation of process theology to Judaism.<\/p>\n Process theology<\/a> descends from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead<\/a> (1861\u20131947) and the later work of Charles Hartshorne<\/a> (1897\u20132000). It rejects the classical picture of God as an all-powerful, unchanging ruler who stands outside time, and describes instead a God bound up in relationship with creation and in the unfolding of events. Artson holds that the traditional doctrine of omnipotence grew harder to sustain after modern science and the catastrophes of the twentieth century. His God does not control every event. He offers, at each moment, the possibility of greater goodness, justice, creativity, and connection, while respecting the freedom of the world He calls forward. The argument found its fullest statement in God of Becoming and Relationship<\/i> and in Renewing the Process of Creation<\/i>, books that set out to build a Jewish worldview able to absorb evolutionary theory, quantum physics, systems theory, and contemporary cosmology without treating science and religion as sealed compartments.<\/p>\n The treatment of suffering and evil stands at the heart of the project. In God of Becoming and Relationship<\/i>, in The Search for God and the Path to Persuasion<\/i>, and in the broader argument he sometimes summarized as “Almighty No More,” Artson maintained that faith need not rest on belief in a deity who directs history and could halt any tragedy at will. The Holocaust, natural disaster, illness, and human cruelty press hard on the older claims about divine power. Process theology answers that God neither causes suffering for hidden reasons nor holds the coercive power to prevent every loss. God accompanies creation through suffering, offering strength, guidance, love, and new possibility. The aim is to keep both divine goodness and human freedom intact, and to make a defensible faith available after Auschwitz<\/a>.<\/p>\n The roots of this theology run into Artson’s own home. He married Elana Shavit Artson, and they have twins, Shira and Jacob. Jacob’s severe autism shaped his father’s thought and public work. Artson wrote at length about raising a non-verbal son, and about how the experience tested his earlier assumptions about prayer, communication, and human dignity. He came to treat disability not as a problem demanding explanation but as a summons to deepen compassion and widen communal inclusion, and his writing on the subject made him a leading advocate for the place of people with disabilities in Jewish religious life. That commitment ran alongside his support for broader participation in Jewish communal life, including LGBTQ inclusion, interfaith engagement, and racial justice, positions he advanced while remaining rooted in Conservative Judaism<\/a> and its claim that the tradition holds resources for the moral questions of the present.<\/p>\n A large part of his influence came from a capacity to carry difficult ideas to readers without specialist training. Beyond his scholarly books he wrote for general audiences in The Bedside Torah<\/i> and The Everyday Torah<\/i> and in many guides to practice and spirituality. He published hundreds of articles, lectured across North America and abroad, oversaw adult education programs, and supervised the Louis and Judith Miller Introduction to Judaism Program at the American Jewish University. His weekly Torah commentary reached thousands of subscribers.<\/p>\n His theology met a personal test when he underwent treatment for cancer. Writing about the experience in public, he reflected on mortality, resilience, and gratitude, and found the themes of his scholarship pressing on his own life. The episode confirmed his sense that faith rests less on certainty or supernatural rescue than on relationship, courage, and companionship in the face of what no one escapes.<\/p>\n In 2026 Artson concluded his deanship after more than a quarter century, and the American Jewish University marked the occasion with a gala in his honor. He took up the title of Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar, a name that links him to Mordecai Kaplan<\/a> (1881\u20131983), the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and an earlier American thinker who tried to reconcile Jewish tradition with a naturalist account of the world. Artson continued to teach, write, and mentor.<\/p>\n Conservative Judaism has long been known for scholarship, legal reasoning, and institutional strength rather than for systematic theology. Artson worked against that pattern. By bringing process philosophy into long conversation with Jewish sources, he undertook an ambitious theological program and pressed a question central to modern religion: how an ancient faith might stay intellectually credible and spiritually compelling in a world shaped by evolution, neuroscience, cosmology, and historical catastrophe. Whether a reader accepts his answers or not, he stands among the significant Jewish theologians of his generation, a man who sought a Judaism that holds tradition and scientific inquiry together and that names God a partner in the ongoing work of creation rather than a distant ruler above it.<\/p>\n Theodicy and Charisma: Bradley Shavit Artson Through Max Weber<\/strong><\/p>\n The problem of innocent suffering does not press on all religions with equal weight. Weber saw that it grows sharper as a faith grows more rational and more demanding about its God. A world of many gods spreads the blame, since one god’s cruelty answers to another god’s mercy, and no single will stands behind the whole. A God who made everything, knows everything, governs everything, and loves what He made has no one to blame but Himself. Ethical monotheism builds the trap and then lives in it. The more majestic the God, the louder the question of the child dead on the freeway and the six million dead in the camps. Weber called the rational accounts that answer this question theodicies, and he held that a high religion stands or falls on the one it can sustain.<\/p>\n Weber counted the solutions that hold together under pressure, and there are not many. Predestination keeps God’s power and goodness whole by placing His decrees past human judgment, so that the elect and the damned both serve a glory no creature may question. Calvin took that road. Dualism splits the cosmos between a power of light and a power of darkness, so that suffering comes from an enemy God fights rather than from God’s own hand. Zoroaster took that one. The doctrine of transmigration in India solves the problem with an iron justice across many lives, so that every soul reaps what it sowed and no fate is undeserved. Each answer holds, and each pays a price. Predestination buys God’s majesty with His warmth. Dualism buys His innocence with His sovereignty. Karma buys perfect justice with the abolition of grace. Weber’s point stands behind all three. A man cannot keep God’s goodness, God’s power, and the reality of evil at full strength at once. He keeps two and surrenders the third, and the religion he builds takes its shape from the one he gives up.<\/p>\n Bradley Shavit Artson gives up the third. He keeps God’s goodness and the reality of evil, both at full strength, and he lets the power go. His God does not govern the freeway and chooses companionship over control. The car crashes because the world holds real freedom and real chance, and God could not stop it without unmaking the freedom that makes love possible. Weber’s older theodicies refused this move, and they refused it for a reason Weber understood. A God stripped of coercive power loses the majesty that made men kneel. The Calvinist God terrifies and so commands. The Artson God accompanies and so consoles. Weber would file the surrender of omnipotence as a fourth solution, late and distinctly modern, available only to a religion that has already absorbed the disenchantment of the world and no longer expects God to part the sea. The price is the throne. Artson pays it without protest and calls the throne an idol.<\/p>\n The man who builds such a theology belongs to a type Weber drew with care. He is the religious intellectual, and Weber held that the intellectual carries a hunger the ordinary believer does not feel. The peasant wants rain and a cure for the sick cow. The intellectual wants the cosmos to cohere, to form a single whole that yields an answer to the question why, and he suffers when the world refuses. Salvation religions of intellectuals, Weber wrote, grow from this refusal of the world to make sense on its own. Process theology is an intellectual’s theodicy through and through. Artson built it for the educated congregant who reads evolutionary biology in the morning and cannot kneel to the King of the Universe at night, the man who needs his science and his faith to speak without contradiction or he will keep neither. Weber named the demand. Artson tried to satisfy it.<\/p>\n The demand runs into Weber’s hardest verdict, the one he delivered in “Science as a Vocation.” The world has been disenchanted. Science has emptied the cosmos of intrinsic meaning and left a chain of causes that answers how and never why. The scholar at his desk can tell a man what is and cannot tell him what to do or how to live or what his suffering is for. Weber thought the honest man of his age had two roads. He could bear the disenchantment with a clear eye and ask no comfort of a silent universe, or he could make the sacrifice of the intellect, the sacrificium intellectus, and return to the arms of the old churches, which take such men back without shame. Weber respected both roads and warned against the third, the road of the man who wants the consolation of faith without the surrender of reason, who dresses the old longing in the language of the laboratory and calls it knowledge.<\/p>\n Artson takes the third road and means to walk it without paying the toll. He reads the disenchantment and refuses Weber’s choice between bearing it and fleeing it. He says the cosmos that science describes, the cosmos of emergence and novelty and relationship, points on its own toward a God of becoming, so that the believer need not check his reason at the sanctuary door. Weber watches this with respect and doubt. The respect is for the seriousness of the attempt, which asks no man to deny what the telescope shows. The doubt is older and colder. Weber suspected that the marriage of science and salvation always hides a sacrifice somewhere, that the intellectual who finds his God confirmed by cosmology has read his hope into the data, and that the disenchanted world stays disenchanted no matter how warmly a gifted teacher describes it. Whether Artson dodged the sacrifice or only buried it deeper is the question the frame leaves open, and the frame does not flatter either answer.<\/p>\n Then there is the school, and here Weber’s second great category takes over from the first. Artson did not build the Ziegler School on rules. He built it on himself. Students wanted what he carried. The weekly commentary reached thousands because the man on the page held them. The curriculum he wrote, the rabbis he formed, the campers and the European ordinands and the African community he flew to install, all of it gathered around a person with extraordinary gifts whom others recognized as extraordinary. Weber has a name for authority of that kind. He calls it charisma, the power that rests not on tradition and not on rule but on the recognized gifts of a particular man. Charisma does not inherit and does not elect. It appears in a person, and it commands because the person commands, and it knows no regulation outside the leader’s own sense of his calling. Weber gave it a motto borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount. It is written, but I say unto you.<\/p>\n Charisma is the least stable authority Weber knew, and it cannot survive in its pure form. The gifted man ages and dies, and the school he built on his person must find some way to outlast him, which means it must convert his charisma into something that runs by rule or by inheritance. Weber called the conversion routinization, and he treated it as the fate of every charismatic order, the slow exchange of the prophet’s fire for the clerk’s ledger. Routinization is itself a kind of disenchantment, the cooling of the personal flame into the impersonal office. The deanship gave Artson an office, a legal and bureaucratic seat with rules attached, but he held the office charismatically, by the force of the man rather than the terms of the chair. An institution run that way distributes its goods the way charisma always distributes them, by the leader’s favor and not by impartial rule, because charisma recognizes no rule above the leader’s own discernment.<\/p>\n The collision arrived in 2024. The American Jewish University opened an investigation into Artson and his deputy dean, Rabbi Cheryl Peretz, after complaints that had gathered across two decades from former students, who described a pattern of favoritism toward men and disrespectful treatment. Weber’s frame names the form of the conflict. A bureaucratic and legal apparatus, the firm, the formal process, the assembly’s probe, was brought to bear on an authority that had run on personal gift. The complaint that a charismatic leader favors some over others and binds himself to no even rule is not an accident of one man. It is the standing tension Weber predicted between charisma and bureaucracy, the one that says favor and the other that says rule, and the investigation is the rule arriving to ask the favor to account for itself. Routinization, in Weber’s sense, came to the Ziegler School in the shape of a law firm.<\/p>\n In 2026 Artson stepped down after a quarter century, and the university held a gala, and he took the title of Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar. Weber would read the gala and the named chair as routinization completing its work. The charisma of the man becomes the honor of a title, the fire becomes a name carved into a chair, and the school keeps the prestige while shedding the unruly person who generated it. The Kaplan chair is a fitting close, since it ties Artson to an earlier teacher who also tried to keep faith and the modern world in the same room. The honor is real. It is also the form that charisma takes when it has been made safe for the institution that outlives the man.<\/p>\n Artson’s theology spent its strength stripping God of coercion, building a God who governs by persuasion and never by force, a God whose power is the patience to invite and wait. Charismatic authority is the most personal power a man can hold and the one least bound by rule, the power that says I say unto you and answers to no written code. The theology unmade compulsion in heaven. The authority that carried the theology into the world ran on the one form of earthly command that recognizes no rule above the gifted self. Weber does not call that hypocrisy. He calls it the condition of charisma, which builds great things on a person and then must be tamed by rule before it can be trusted, and which feels, to those who stand below it without favor, like a power that answers to no one. The God lost His throne in the books. The throne stayed warm in the dean’s chair until the rule came for it.<\/p>\n A God for the Immanent Frame: Bradley Shavit Artson Through Charles Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\n A man sits in the pew on a Saturday morning and cannot do the thing his grandfather did without effort. He cannot believe the old way. He has read his biology and his cosmology, and the universe he carries in his head runs on causes that ask no God to push them along. The sea does not part. The dead stay dead. He knows this the way he knows the earth goes around the sun, in his bones and below argument, and no sermon will talk him out of it. He also cannot do the other thing, the thing the village atheist does with a shrug. He cannot live in a world that means nothing, a flat world of matter and decay where his love for his children is a chemical accident and his grief at the graveside signifies as little as rust. He is caught between two impossibilities, and Charles Taylor<\/a> (b. 1931) wrote a thousand pages about him in A Secular Age<\/em><\/a>. Bradley Shavit Artson built a God for him.<\/p>\n Taylor’s account starts with the shape of the modern self. The man in the pew has what Taylor calls a buffered self, a self with a firm wall between the inner mind and the outer world. Meaning lives inside him, in his thoughts and his choices, and the world outside stands inert, a field of objects that carry no charge of their own. His ancestor had a porous self, open to a world thick with spirits and powers and holy places, where a relic could heal and a curse could kill and the boundary between mind and cosmos ran thin. The long change Taylor traces, the draining of the spirits out of the world, sealed the porous self into the buffered one. The buffered man is safe from possession and safe from grace alike. Nothing outside gets in without his leave. The old God belonged to the porous world, a King who reached into nature and bent it, and that God cannot find a door in the buffered wall. Artson’s congregant is buffered to the core, and he cannot will himself back into porousness any more than he can unlearn the heliocentric solar system.<\/p>\n Around this self Taylor draws the immanent frame, the background all moderns share whether they believe or not. It is the sense of a natural order that runs on its own, complete in itself, requiring no reference to anything beyond it to be understood. We breathe it. The unbeliever takes the frame as closed, sealed against any transcendent, and reads his own closure as the verdict of reason. The believer takes the frame as open, spun toward a beyond that the same natural order might point to. Taylor’s sharpest claim is that neither reading is forced by the evidence. The frame can be lived open or closed, and the choice runs deeper than proof, down in the place where a man senses where life is fuller and where it goes thin. The believer and the unbeliever both feel the pull of the other side. Taylor calls this the cross-pressure, the modern condition in which no faith is naive and no doubt is final, and every position feels the draw of its opposite.<\/p>\n Taylor spent his polemical energy on a story he thinks modern people tell themselves and get wrong. He calls it the subtraction story. The story says that secularity is what remains when you subtract illusion, that the modern unbeliever is simply the human being who was always there under the religious paint, revealed once the paint came off. Taylor denies it. Unbelief was not uncovered. It was built, a new and demanding self-understanding that had to be constructed against the grain, an achievement and not a residue. Hold this against Artson, because Artson tells half a subtraction story and resists the other half. He accepts that the omnipotent King was an error the modern man does well to subtract, a primitive picture science and history have retired. He refuses the larger subtraction that would leave only matter and call faith a leftover. The doubleness is the Taylorian condition exactly. Artson stands in the cross-pressure and tries to keep his footing.<\/p>\n His footing is process theology, and read through Taylor it is a re-enchantment built to the buffered self’s own specifications. The trick of it is restraint. Artson does not ask the buffered man to become porous again, to expect the sea to part or the relic to heal. His God of becoming never breaches the causal order. He does not reach in from outside and bend nature, because He has no outside to reach in from. He is woven through the becoming of things, present in the emergence and the novelty and the relationship that the science describes, calling the world toward goodness from within rather than commanding it from above. This is a God the buffered self can hold without breaking his own wall, a transcendence that asks no return to the enchanted world, a way to spin the immanent frame open while leaving the buffered boundary intact. Artson found the one shape of God that fits through the modern door.<\/p>\n Taylor insists that belief and unbelief are lived from particular places, that no man reasons his way to God or away from Him on a blank slate, that the sense of fullness a man orients by rises from where he has stood and what he has carried. Artson stood in a home with a non-verbal son whose dignity no theory of the useful soul could account for, and he stood later in the country of his own cancer, where the questions stop being academic. A theology that grew from those places is not a marketing scheme for the educated. It is the testimony of a cross-pressured man working out, from inside his own life, how to keep the frame open when the flat reading is always there at his elbow offering its cold relief. Taylor honors that. He thinks the open frame is lived this way or not at all, out of the depths of a particular life, and Artson’s God carries the marks of the life that produced Him.<\/p>\n So the frame grants Artson his sincerity and his achievement, and then it asks the hard question, the one Taylor reserves for the liberal theologies that accommodate the modern self with such care. Has Artson spun the immanent frame open, or has he furnished its inside more warmly. A God so fully at home in immanence that He never disturbs it, never breaks the causal order, never confronts the self with anything the self did not already half-possess, starts to look less like a transcendent Other and more like the immanent frame’s own most comfortable tenant. Taylor worries that the malaise of immanence, the flatness the congregant fled, might not be cured by a God who is immanence described in a kinder voice. The buffered man wanted a way out of the flat world. Artson may have given him a way to stay in it and feel religious, which is a different gift, and perhaps a smaller one. The transcendent in Taylor’s account is supposed to unsettle, to break in, to call the self past itself toward a good it did not author. A God who fits the modern door so well may have been measured to the doorframe.<\/p>\n The danger sharpens in what Taylor names the age of authenticity, the late modern climate where each man finds his own path and his own spirituality and answers to no authority but his sense of what speaks to him. The God of becoming is a God a buffered seeker can accept without surrendering anything, without the scandal of miracle or the yoke of a law he did not choose, and a God accepted on those terms edges toward a God of the self’s own choosing, the deity of expressive individualism wearing the robes of an ancient tradition. Taylor does not say Artson has crossed that line. He says the line runs near, that a religion shaped this precisely to the contours of the modern self risks becoming a mirror, and that the warmth the congregant feels might be the warmth of his own reflection. The question is whether Artson’s God calls the buffered man out of himself or only keeps him company where he already sits.<\/p>\n Taylor leaves it open, because his whole argument forbids him to close it. The immanent frame can be lived open or closed, and no proof settles which reading is true, and a man who builds a door in the frame’s wall cannot demonstrate that it leads outside rather than into another room of the same house. Artson built a real door. Educated men who had given up on God walked through it and found something they could hold without lying to themselves about the age they live in, and that is no small work in the cross-pressured world Taylor describes. Whether the door opens onto the transcendent or onto the most spacious chamber of immanence is the question the frame poses and refuses to answer, and Artson, who knows the cross-pressure from the inside, might be the last man to claim he has settled it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A woman sits in the rabbi’s study. Her son is dead at nineteen, a car on the 405 at two in the morning, and she has come with the question that predates the Book of Job. She does not raise … Continue reading