The Nature of God
Author of a number of books and numerous articles, Carter Heyward's most distinctive theological idea is that it is open to each of us to incarnate God (that is, to embody God's power), and that we do so most fully when we seek to relate genuinely to others in what she calls relationality. When we do this, we are said to be 'godding', a verb Heyward herself coined. God is defined in her work as 'our power in mutual relation'. Alluding to mainstream Christian views of God, Heyward has stated 'I am not much of a theist'. For her, 'the shape of God is justice', so human activity can, as theologian Lucy Tatman has observed, be divine activity whenever it is just and loving. In her book Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right, Heyward asserts that 'the love we make... is God's own love'. In Heyward’s work, God is therefore not a personal figure, but instead the ground of being, seen for example in compassionate action, which is 'the movement of God in and through the heights and depths of all that is'.
Read more about this topic: Carter Heyward, Theology
Famous quotes containing the words the nature, nature and/or god:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
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“Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)