Who is This Course For?

Hi everyone. I'm Soo-Young Kwon,

Professor of Pastoral Theology at Yonsei University in South Korea.
Let me give you a short introduction to my massive open online course,
Re-imaging God in Korean Context.
Here's a cute little story: After attending church with his mother one Sunday morning,
before getting into bed that evening,
a little boy kneeled at his bedside and prayed,
"Dear God, we had a good time at church today but I wish you had been there."
Missing God.
That's not only this little boy's issue but also ours,
because, most of us can hardly feel the presence of God without clear signs.
So, we want our God to be revealed and project with thunder,
lightning, earthquake or fire.
To Moses, in the Hebrew Bible for example,
God spoke through the mountains with a roar and a mysterious fire.
In the history of world Christianity,
so many church leaders and theologians have wrestled with God's revelation.
And yet, God is both outside and inside.
In the mountains and the thunder and, in the dark,
quiet, sometimes confusing the interior of our human souls.
Interestingly enough, many contemporary theologians have put
more emphasis on human imagination rather than God's revelation.
In fact, along with theologians,
all people including you and me imagine their God in their own ways.
So, let's take a look at how the interior of the little boy in the story is working.
Suppose that the boy had lost his father recently.
What if he has some feeling of absence in the family due to the loss of his father?
Possibly, that feeling of absence of his own father may have
resulted in the boy's inability to feel the presence of "Father God."
Not the revelation of God but the boy's own imagination of God,
is what makes the boy feel or in this case,
unable to feel God.
As a Korean theologian,
I would love to invite you to my own project to understand
a developmental history of
the Korean Protestant church and the Korean indigenous Christian movement.
Such as, Minjung Theology and the Pentecostal Movement.
If you are curious to learn about
the rapid and dynamic development of
Protestant Christianity in Korea then you're in the right place.
Don't miss this course.
I believe you will understand the Korean Protestant church and
theological movements more easily by exploring several collective,
cultural and sometimes self-conscious images of God in Korea.
I will endeavor to explore with you the way we imagine God as Father, God as Heaven,
God as Rice and God as Spirit,
in my own cultural context of East Asia.
At the same time, you will be invited to explore
your own imagination of God in your own context.
I would very much like you to be with me in this journey. God bless.
Orientation

Hi everyone. I'm Soo-Young Kwon,

Professor of Pastoral Theology at Yonsei University.
Welcome to this massive open online course,
Re-imaging God in Korean context.
I'm both humbled and honored to offer this course
this year which is a very special time in the entire history of Christianity.
The year 2017 marks 500 years of the reformation.
It has been 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses,
to the door of the castle church in, Wittenberg.
To celebrate this special year,
the east-west theological forum and Yonsei University have
coordinated the international conference on the protestant reformation.
People from all over the world gather
together to review the lessons from the past,
challenges of the present,
and prospects for the future.
It's very meaningful that Yonsei held this conference to
celebrate the 500 anniversary of the protestant reformation.
Yonsei university is the first college in
Korea which studied the history of protestant Christianity in Korea.
Yonsei University and Korean protestant
churches have shown extraordinary development
and growth in a short period since only missionaries like Horace G. Underwood,
the founder of Yonsei University came to Korea in 1885.
In 2015, to celebrate hundred years of theological education at Yonsei,
Yonsei University will launch a graduate program in English,
Global Institute of Theology (GIT) offering masters and
doctoral degrees to give thanks for
the blessings we receive from the only missionaries in Korea.
We admit graduate students from the countries where
higher education of theology is limited mostly from Asia,
Africa, and Latin America.
Students receive full scholarships from
Christian communities in Korea and around the world.
We are very proud of the fact that we are
inviting various well-known faculty members from the entire world every year.
This year, we have visiting professors from United States,
United Kingdom, Cuba, India, and Hungary.
GIT campus is located in Songdo international campus Incheon,
which is the city that Horace G. Underwood,
one of the first missionaries in Korea and the founder of
Yonsei University as I mentioned, arrived in 1885.
We envisioned through GIT powerful Christian movements in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America will spread as it happened in Korea.
In 2007, the New York Times
estimated the number of Korean missionaries overseas at 17,000,
the second largest in the world following 46,000 from the U.S. Now,
more than 27,000 Korean missionaries serve all over the world.
South Korea has been considered as one of the top countries
sending Christian missionaries overseas. Here's my question.
How can we possibly explain the dynamic development of a Korean Christianity?
The goal of this course is to examine the formulation of
the Korean Christian movement and
the Korean indigenous theology such as
Minjung theology by exploring several images of God in Korea.
God as Father, God as Heaven,
God as Rice, and God as Spirit.
Why Images?

You might wonder why I emphasize images of God in this course.

What image comes to mind when you think of God?
The Creator, the ruler of the universe,
Jesus Christ or the judge on the last day of this world?
Even among Christians who read the same Bible,
they may have different images of God.
For example, while you read the first part of the book of Genesis,
the image of the Creator may come to mind.
When you pass through the Torah and arrive
at the book of Judge and the Books of Kings,
you may imagine that God is a create ruler who handled the destiny of nations.
How about the New Testament?
As you read the gospel of the New Testament,
God is often overlaid with images of Jesus Christ,
Son of God, Son of Man.
If so, does the image of God as a man,
Jesus maintained to be a single image to every Christian? I don't think so.
Sometimes it feels like a Rabbi to a Christian
and sometimes a revolutionary to another.
Even when people look at the same object,
they naturally tend to have different images of the object.
In other words, it is somewhat inevitable that Jesus disciples, Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John had to write the gospel a little differently,
since they all had different images of Jesus.
The Beatitudes in the Gospel is a good example.
You can find the Beatitudes in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
Another name for it is the Sermon on the Mount.
Also, you can see the Beatitude in the Gospel of Luke as well.
Strangely enough though, it was recorded in the Gospel of Luke,
that the Sermon on the Mount was delivered on the plains not on the hill.
Whose statement is true, Matthew or Luke?
Who do you believe?
Do you believe in Jesus preaching on the mount or Jesus preaching on the plains.
So, my guess is that Jesus preached twice.
Once on the mount and once again on the plains.
It could have happened twice. Here's my thought.
Apparently it is highly likely that Matthew
and Luke listened to Jesus sermon together.
The chances are that the image of Jesus that they formed was very different.
Matthew was a good scholar of the law.
To Matthew, Jesus was often seen as a great Rabbi.
It is not a coincidence that there is a lot of talk
about discipleship in the Gospel of Matthew.
He might have attached the image of a Rabbi teaching on a high platform with Jesus.
What kind of person was Luke compared to Matthew?
He was very interested in the underprivileged in his society.
The parables of the lost sheep,
of the lost coins,
and of the prodigal son are found only in the Gospel of Luke.
He cared for the marginalized and the so-called sinners of the society.
Can you picture the image of Jesus that Luke had? Let's imagine this.
This is a painting entitled,
The Sermon on the Mount,
painted by Cosimo Rosselli in Italy.
It has been displayed on the wall of
a Sistine Chapel in Vatican City since the late 15th century.
The Sistine Chapel is a place where famous Fresco paintings like,
The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo,
have been placed on the ceiling.
Imagine that Jesus preached a sermon on this height of a hill, just this much.
No more no less. See, don't you get it?
This is exactly why Matthew and Luke describe the scene little differently.
To Matthew, Jesus was a Rabbi teaching on a little high platform.
In contrast, Jesus might look to someone like Luke as
a very fair man who treated the weak and
sinners equally as he would treat any others.
From Luke's point of view,
Jesus was probably preaching on
almost the same height of the hill as his audience stood on.
It is clear that Luke does not imagine Jesus preaching like a noble,
upper class Rabbi who is hard to associate with.
Accordingly, neither Mathew nor Luke lied to us about the Beatitudes.
The difference in their relational experiences
drew a difference in their images
of Jesus and they eventually drew a
difference in the illustration in the Bible.
Thus, each image later constitutes a unique set of beliefs.
Surprisingly, images play an important role in theology.
This does not apply only to Mathew and Luke.
Those who believe in Jesus today should also never
ignore the role of images in the formation of Christian faith.
In the multifarious development of a contemporary theology in the United States,
an important matter of the logical shift has been seriously
discussed from conceptual intellect to the imagination.
That is, many American theologians began to
shift their attention from conceptual matters to the foundational,
current of formative experience.
Many theologians are beginning to believe that
human experience of the world were of God,
is mediated using imaginative constructions.
And yet, this emphasis on the role of
imagination in fact, is not a contemporary idea.
Thomas Aquinas in the mid 13th century already said,
"The image is the principle of our knowledge...
When the imagination is choked,
so also is our theological knowledge."
At this point, we will have to raise an important question.
How does image function for theological thinking,
for the religious imagination,
and for spiritual formation?
To answer this question,
I would first pay attention to
Gordon Kaufman's emphasis on
the imagination in relation to constructing a theological method.
Theology, as a Work of the Imagination

Harvard theologian, Gordon Kaufman define a discipline

of theology in a very unusual manner back in the 1980s.
According to Kaufman, "All theology is
understood to be a primarily work of the imagination."
Gordon Kaufman began to speak of the imaginative
nature of theology in his early book,
An Essay on Theological Method, published in 1975.
Kaufman had long endeavor to find a methodological foundation for
theology that does not take revelation as its basis.
Kaufman replaces the stance of a revelation which comes from God
directly, with human construction that is the imagination.
Later, he naturally published a book entitled,
The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God in 1981.
In 1985, Kaufman developed some of these ideas even further in his book,
Theology for a Nuclear Age.
His experience of visiting the city of Hiroshima in
Japan reminded him of the destructive power of humanity in our age.
Just to mention, Hiroshima,
as many of you would already know,
is the city that was destroyed by atomic bombings during the World War II.
As Kaufman contrast his view with the historicist world view
"the end of history", which we in the late 20th century must contemplate,
must be conceived primarily not as God's doing but as ours. "
His theological proposal for our new era was quite radical.
Our age of a nuclear holocaust can no longer be uplifted or be
rationalized by the dualistic and asymmetrical perspective of imaging God.
This dualistic asymmetrical point of view
originated from the traditional rarefied images of God such as Father,
King, Lord, and Creator.
What did Kaufman mean by dualistic and asymmetrical image of God?
The religious fact that God is your father
does not mean that God is all as good to you.
Think about your own father.
Every father raises his children and disciplines them from time-to-time.
Some time he is very angry at his children when they are disobedient.
God is no exception.
When I studied abroad in the United States,
I witnessed President George Bush launching the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
I still vividly remember his depiction about
him experiencing the revelation of God to make such a decision.
Bush publicly said, "I'm driven with a mission from God."
God would tell me, "Go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan."
And I did. And then God would tell me,
"George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq." And I did.
Bush went on, "I feel God's words coming to me,
go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security,
and get peace in the Middle East."
And by God I'm going to do it.
You probably know that Mr. Bush became a born again Christian at the age of 40,
and he's one of the most overtly religious leaders who serve in the White House.
You might be able to picture his dualistic image of God,
that is God the Judge favoring his friends and the same God attacking his foes.
This is what Kaufman's critique on the danger
of traditional God images is all about.
What is then Kaufman's alternative?
He claimed, only through the imaginative work of
theology centered on God as the symbol of ultimate mystery,
can revelation be properly understood with
regard to the contemporary problems of human existence.
Kaufman also suggested that God should be
imagined as whole grand cosmic evolutionary movement.
The whole grand cosmic evolutionary movement,
what the heck is this?
It must be very confusing idea to you all. Oh, I know.
I agree as well. But hold on to it.
I will endeavor to explain his idea
step-by-step in Korean context throughout this whole course.
So, to explain the whole grand cosmic
evolutionary movement briefly before we move on,
it is suggesting that we should understand God as a force constantly giving life to
us rather than as a anthropomorphic conception of
God that is dominant while we are obedient.
I have a question for you at this point.
Can you imagine that God is not a human-like figure?
You might have imagined God as the one in human shape.
We often imagine that God had created all the creatures including human beings in
the same way humans today make puppets out of
clay or assemble tiny pieces for a machine.
Kaufman challenged our long-standing God images.
For example, God is Father,
King, Lord, and Creator.
And yeah, Kaufman never gave a solution to the question of
which other personal images beside the
traditional images we can use to imagine God.
Unfortunately, Kaufman did not spend much time explaining
the meaning and function of imagination in
human life in general and in theology in particular.
We cannot find even a clear definition of his concept of imagination.
One clear thesis he proposed was that,
the human works of theological construction should be based on imagination because
human experience is not enough to interpret the meaning of revelation.
The experience itself is ambiguous.
It's not the matter of whether it's right or wrong.
We've already talked about different experiences of Jesus among His disciples.
Concept of God vs. Image of God

Human images are ambiguous because every human being imagines in his or her own way.
We sometimes think that concepts are less ambiguous than images.
As we all learn mathematics and science,
we are likely to use more concepts rather than images.
A little child might have a hard time explaining a circle with concepts.
The child may be good at using some images though.
The child would explain the circle,
"hey, it's like a doughnut".
Images are thus primitive.
In contrast, concepts are more intellectual.
A more educated high school kid will explain the concept of circle as,
circle is a closed plane curve
consisting of all points at a given distance from a point within.
The scholars in the field of pastoral counseling
have attempted to distinguish the image of God from the concept of God.
What is the big difference between the concept of God and the image of God?
Let me give you an example.
I'm a professor who teaches pastoral care and counseling.
A couple came for counseling when I served
as an intern counselor at the pastoral counseling center a long time ago.
The husband was a lawyer and an elder at his Presbyterian church.
The wife worked as a school teacher at
a Catholic high school where the principal was a Catholic nun.
They were both in their all late 50's.
At first glance, their situations seemed awful.
As soon as they sat down in the counseling room,
they complain about each other.
The husband seemed to have had felt strongly
that he had been ignored by his wife.
He told me that his wife never listened to him.
He said, "My wife thinks she is special,
and I'm nothing to her".
Guess what his wife complained about his husband.
Always the same complaint came out of her mouth.
She shouted, "My husband is so arrogant.
He thinks he's God.
I'm sick of him pretending to be a saint when he is in a church".
Without having to ask them what their religion was,
I could easily know that they were Christians.
I asked whether the wife also went to church as her husband did.
She said, "I am originally Catholic.
I went to the Presbyterian church briefly after getting married,
but lately came back to my own Catholic church again".
I was curious about each of their understandings of
God because they both identified themselves as Christians.
I first asked the husband,
"What does your God look like"?
He seemed bewildered by my abrupt question,
but he answered like this,
"God is a creator.
And he is the ruler of the whole universe.
Why are you asking"?
I could catch a glimpse about his theology,
namely, his concept of God.
I explained to him by saying, "Sometimes,
our notion of God works as an important lens
through which we see others". He nodded.
I also asked the same question to his wife,
"What does your God look like"?
Then she started telling quite a long story about her first journey.
She went to a special junior high school founded by a Catholic foundation.
Her main teacher was a nun.
She was a kind and loving person,
and she cared for all of her students.
My client said her teacher was like her guardian angel,
and she came to be interested in the Catholic church more and more,
and eventually became a Catholic.
In the end, she answered my initial question,
"My God looks like my teacher,
sweet and loving, so gracious to everyone".
And she went on to mention, "Counselor,
I just found the reason why I had to leave my husband Presbyterian church.
I disagreed with my husband's notion of God".
Now, can you see what happened to this couple?
Their perceptions of God collided with each others.
The husband who confessed the creator and
ruler God probably wanted to be treated like a king,
while his wife who imagined warm maternal God might have wanted warm care.
You cannot say that either of their concepts of God was wrong.
It is just another concept of God.
Yes, as we know,
the Bible shows both aspects of God.
The power of creating and heart of caring.
Then, is this simply that the man and
woman read different parts of the Bible? I don't think so.
Through their difference in their concept of God,
we can assume their difference in human experience,
not which part they read in the Bible.
A pastoral theologian named Merle Jordan made an interesting distinction.
All Christians believe in both confessional theology and operational theology.
We'll learn about doctrines and confess them to others when asked.
This is the confessional theology.
What is the operational theology?
While confessional theology relates to what we learn,
operational theology relates to what we individually experience.
Our different human experiences influence our theology
implicitly to operate differently from the doctrinal theology,
or in other words, confessional theology.
To sum up, confessional theology is of
concepts that we learn and experience in human life
while operational theology is of underlying images that we unconsciously experience.
To explain easier, confessional theology is a theology with the head,
and operational theology is a theology with the heart.
So, we've been talking about different concepts
of God through the example of the couple.
The concepts of God here,
which were God as a creator and God as a caring figure,
are related to confessional theology.
But we will attempt to go further.
Let's further investigate into what their operational theologies were,
or in other words,
what their images of God were.
Back to the story of the couple.
The confessional theology of the wife was
viewing God as a maternal God of grace and caring,
but actually, unconsciously, God wasn't much of a counting figure to her.
What is the reason the confessional theology of the wife did not
act primarily as the grace in her marital life?
The implicit theology within the wife's deepest heart,
that is the operational theology,
reveals that the internal fact is different from the concept of God confessed.
This is why we need to distinguish between the concept of God and the image of God.
The Image of God: A Psychoanalytic Understanding

Now, let me tell you how I could figure out the wife's operational theology in
my counseling session.
Start transcript at 11 seconds0:11
Through several individual counseling sessions, I found, surprisingly,
that her implicit image of God was a horrifying tyrant.
Start transcript at 23 seconds0:23
Since she was a little child, the wife had been a witness of domestic violence.
Her father often beat her mother and treated her with a repressive attitude.
Start transcript at 36 seconds0:36
Fortunately, she was never beaten by her father.
But she obtained an uneasy psychological state
after all those terrible years of domestic violence.
Start transcript at 49 seconds0:49
Being attached to the nuns of the Catholic school she had attended and
being jealous for her faithful Catholic life was also to avoid fear and
irritation of the violent family.
Start transcript at 1 minute 5 seconds1:05
The school she later taught at was the very Catholic school she went to.
Start transcript at 1 minute 12 seconds1:12
As she entered college, she decided, without hesitation,
to marry as an ultimate escape from her violent father.
Start transcript at 1 minute 22 seconds1:22
Eventually, she met her husband who was attending law school and
married after a few years of courtship.
Start transcript at 1 minute 30 seconds1:30
Unlike her father, who, by the way, had complexes after series of business
failures, her husband passed the bar exam right after graduation of law school.
Was a perfect escape for the woman from her unhappy family life in the past.
Start transcript at 1 minute 48 seconds1:48
For nearly 20 years, they enjoy a perfect marriage life.
The husband did really well as a lawyer.
Start transcript at 1 minute 57 seconds1:57
Finally, he became a partner of the leading law firm in the area.
She also regarded teaching at her alma mater as a great joy.
Start transcript at 2 minutes 7 seconds2:07
It was definitely unexpected that
there would be a bizarre crux in this perfect relationship.
Start transcript at 2 minutes 15 seconds2:15
Her successful husband,
as a lawyer, began to associate with various people in politics.
He attended several evening meetings to get into politics on a weekly basis.
Start transcript at 2 minutes 28 seconds2:28
Such meetings were accompanied by many couples.
The husbands sorely wanted his wife to leave her workplace and
play a role as a secretary and help him get ready for politics.
Start transcript at 2 minutes 43 seconds2:43
The wife had a strong commitment to teaching in her alma mater, so
she did not easily agree to quit her job and help her husband get into politics.
Start transcript at 2 minutes 56 seconds2:56
That was when her frequent quarrels with her husband had begun.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 2 seconds3:02
The husband persuaded her, but
the wife's final words were always the same, I would die before I quit.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 11 seconds3:11
Then one day the husband, who came from an evening meeting
where his wife did not attend, screamed and complained.
Saying, How can you ignore your husband's job like this?
The husband threw the cup out of anger.
The cup broke into tiny pieces.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 30 seconds3:30
At the moment, her body suddenly stiffened.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 35 seconds3:35
She felt numb and could not budge an inch.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 40 seconds3:40
In a few seconds, an enormous anger came.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 44 seconds3:44
Her husband appearance now began to look completely different.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 50 seconds3:50
Now, you might be able to imagine someone else image in the face of her husband.
Start transcript at 3 minutes 57 seconds3:57
Yes, the image of her father, the image of a horrifying tyrant.
Start transcript at 4 minutes 4 seconds4:04
Can you imagine what happen to her next?
Start transcript at 4 minutes 8 seconds4:08
She unconsciously had to reinvent herself
in a completely disparate way from her mother.
Start transcript at 4 minutes 17 seconds4:17
If I become obedient like my mother, then I will finally be drag as servant.
And eventually I will get buried, I will never live like that.
In counseling, I found that the husband had never exercised any physical
bruise on his wife, even in the face of disagreements with her.
Start transcript at 4 minutes 41 seconds4:41
The wife worked hard to live a faithful Christian life.
Start transcript at 4 minutes 45 seconds4:45
But there was always an image of God in her heart as a source of horrifying fear.
Start transcript at 4 minutes 55 seconds4:55
In other words, the image of God, like her own father,
now her husband, had begun to wake her up.
Start transcript at 5 minutes 5 seconds5:05
To my surprise, the wife was asking for a divorce.
Start transcript at 5 minutes 11 seconds5:11
Her husband never knew why his wife asked for a divorce.
He thought he had done nothing harmful to his wife.
Start transcript at 5 minutes 22 seconds5:22
Her decision to divorce was based on her image of God,
an operational theology that God is a tyrant.
Start transcript at 5 minutes 36 seconds5:36
Her operational theology worked in her life as follows,
before your husband beats you, and before God punishes you, leave now.
Start transcript at 5 minutes 48 seconds5:48
The image of God eventually led her to avoid
Start transcript at 5 minutes 54 seconds5:54
the consequential explosion of her horrifying anxiety.
Start transcript at 5 minutes 59 seconds5:59
It operated as a defense mechanism.
Start transcript at 6 minutes 3 seconds6:03
According to the awful image of God as a tyrant,
unconsciously, divorce was probably the one and
only clearest solution for the wife to avoid God's punishment.
Through the counseling sessions,
I could find that while what she confessed as the concept
of God was Lord of Grace, actually the implicit image of
God that was operated deep in her heart was God as tyrant.
Because of her horrifying experience of witnessing her violent father for
a long time.
Start transcript at 6 minutes 47 seconds6:47
That is why many psychoanalytic researches on the experience
of God report that the image of God is distinct from the concept of God.
Start transcript at 7 minutes 1 second7:01
The image of God is sometimes implicit for
us to discover easily on a conscious level, but
more active, misleading on an unconscious level, as you can imagine.
Start transcript at 7 minutes 15 seconds7:15
Even in the words of Merle Jordan, the operational theology based on
the psychic image of God is called implicit theology or lived theology.
Start transcript at 7 minutes 29 seconds7:29
You may confess that God is the Father of Love, but
the God who lives in your unconsciousness can have a terrible, horrifying image.
Start transcript at 7 minutes 42 seconds7:42
So if you go to church, you may know, we call God as God the Father a lot.
Start transcript at 7 minutes 50 seconds7:50
The intriguing question here is this, what would happen
when you are to create the image of God as your father, if you
experience violence, either physical or verbal, from your own biological brother.
Start transcript at 8 minutes 8 seconds8:08
At times, there are possibilities that we may create the image of God
in consciousness or unconsciousness based on our own human experience.
Start transcript at 8 minutes 21 seconds8:21
Our relational experience with our biological fathers can be essential
in finding out our image of God especially as a father.
Start transcript at 8 minutes 34 seconds8:34
We are subject to the dominion of a false image of God created in our own lives.
Start transcript at 8 minutes 42 seconds8:42
In many cases, God is not the God who created us, but
the horrifying God that we created in our unconsciousness.
So the pastoral theologians, such as Merle Jordan, call this God we create
as psychic idol, which we obsessively believe in.
Start transcript at 9 minutes 7 seconds9:07
What do we mean by psychic idol?
Start transcript at 9 minutes 10 seconds9:10
This idol is not another distinct God we worship.
Start transcript at 9 minutes 15 seconds9:15
The psychic idol is the God we made, a forced image of
God distorted by our own psychological experience.
Start transcript at 9 minutes 26 seconds9:26
So a serious interdisciplinary approach to the image of God is
desperately needed for the formation of our contemporary theology.
Start transcript at 9 minutes 38 seconds9:38
Ideal theological works should wrestle with various psychic idols.
Merle Jordan stated, clearly,
that this theological task is fundamental in the work of pastoral counseling.
Start transcript at 9 minutes 55 seconds9:55
It is worth quoting in full, quote,
Taking on the gods is a significant responsibility of pastoral counseling.
Start transcript at 10 minutes 6 seconds10:06
Confronting those psychic structures, forces, and
images which masquerade as God; bringing love, faith,
and hope into the lives of persons,
and being an extension ministry of Jesus Christ walking in
the hells of human existence are all ways of expressing
the true evangelistic purposes of pastoral counseling.
The thought of taking on the gods in one's clients and
in oneself may seem like arrogance or a humbling and awesome challenge.
Start transcript at 10 minutes 47 seconds10:47
Nevertheless, taking on the gods is at the heart and
soul of pastoral counseling, end of quote.
Start transcript at 10 minutes 57 seconds10:57
If you are interested in the area of pastoral care and counseling,
then you should first read Merle Jordan's little book, Taking on the gods.
Start transcript at 11 minutes 8 seconds11:08
I wouldn't doubt that you will definitely be able to learn
much from this little book.
Start transcript at 11 minutes 14 seconds11:14
In the next module, we will examine the image of God as father, which
is one of the most traditional popular images in the history of Christianity.
Start transcript at 11 minutes 26 seconds11:26
Careful consolation of the psychoanalytic dimensions of
the image is central to the next module.
Start transcript at 11 minutes 35 seconds11:35
Now, let me summarize the main findings of this module today.
Start transcript at 11 minutes 40 seconds11:40
I have explained why images are so important in the theological methods.
Start transcript at 11 minutes 47 seconds11:47
And contemporary theologians, such as Kaufman, have argued that
theological discourse needs to go beyond making such
anthropomorphized images of God as Father, Creator, or King.
Start transcript at 12 minutes 3 seconds12:03
In our theological statement claiming God's revelation,
saying like I feel God's words coming right to me, go get your enemy,
may be so dangerous in that it may
be a human package of our intrapsychic experiences.
So it may be important to understand that theology is a human enterprise.
Start transcript at 12 minutes 31 seconds12:31
Understanding images is important to not only
theologians academically, but also to you.
Start transcript at 12 minutes 39 seconds12:39
To be faithful in an undistorted way,
you need to understand your image of God.
Start transcript at 12 minutes 49 seconds12:49
The image of God, rather than the concept of God may further dominate our lives.
Start transcript at 12 minutes 58 seconds12:58
And with the help of psychoanalysis,
we can see that the psychological experience of life as a human
has subconsciously had a profound impact on our experience of God.
Start transcript at 13 minutes 15 seconds13:15
Now I'm going to ask some questions that you can deeply meditate on.
Start transcript at 13 minutes 23 seconds13:23
How would you respond to the following statement?
Start transcript at 13 minutes 28 seconds13:28
Before the message, there must be the vision,
before the sermon the hymn, before the prose the poem.
Start transcript at 13 minutes 38 seconds13:38
Do you agree that human nature and societies are more deeply
motivated by primitive images rather than conceptual ideas?
Start transcript at 13 minutes 50 seconds13:50
What could you learn from the theological paradigm
shift by Gordon Kaufman highlighted in this module?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 0 seconds14:00
How does it affect the way you imagine God as a human-like figure?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 7 seconds14:07
Examine your images of God.
Start transcript at 14 minutes 10 seconds14:10
How do you regard those whose images of God are so different from yours?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 17 seconds14:17
Is it necessarily bad for
Christians to have such images of God as a human-like figure, that is Father or King?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 27 seconds14:27
What is the meaning of the fact that
the image of God is distinct from the concept of God?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 35 seconds14:35
And how about the fact that the operational theology is
distinct from the confessional theology?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 44 seconds14:44
If you have a non-human image of God, then where do you think it comes from?
Start transcript at 14 minutes 53 seconds14:53
I have mentioned several books written by Gordon Kaufman in this module.
You can find much more books written by him in a library nearby.
Start transcript at 15 minutes 4 seconds15:04
If you want to read them all, that'll be great.
But if you don't have enough time to read them all, I would like to introduce to you
the thinnest book among them all, Theology for a Nuclear Age.
Start transcript at 15 minutes 18 seconds15:18
It's a little out-dated, but it's easy to read.
And it's an important book to catch up his idea of imagination.
Start transcript at 15 minutes 29 seconds15:29
The next book I strongly recommend to you is Merle Jordan's Taking on the Gods,
I bet you will like it.
So keep on with my lectures if you want to listen to more stories
in which the image of God as Father, which is very traditional and
well-known image, was actually harmful to some.
Start transcript at 15 minutes 51 seconds15:51
I hope you have enjoyed listening to this module.
And I do hope to see you all in the next module as well.
Thank you for your time and interest, see you next time.