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Modern Jewish Predicate Theology

Predicate theology rejects traditional concepts of God as a supernatural being, instead viewing "God" as representing qualities like goodness, love, and creativity that are worthy of emulation. This school of theology developed from the works of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and his student Rabbi Harold Schulweis. They asserted that God is not a person but rather the natural processes that allow people to fulfill their human potential, or the humanly comprehensible divine qualities themselves. Modern exponents like Rabbis Harold Kushner and David Cooper take this further, describing God as a verb or process rather than a noun or thing, representing the highest values and what humans can become.

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66 views2 pages

Modern Jewish Predicate Theology

Predicate theology rejects traditional concepts of God as a supernatural being, instead viewing "God" as representing qualities like goodness, love, and creativity that are worthy of emulation. This school of theology developed from the works of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan and his student Rabbi Harold Schulweis. They asserted that God is not a person but rather the natural processes that allow people to fulfill their human potential, or the humanly comprehensible divine qualities themselves. Modern exponents like Rabbis Harold Kushner and David Cooper take this further, describing God as a verb or process rather than a noun or thing, representing the highest values and what humans can become.

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PREDICATE THEOLOGY IN MODERN JUDAISM

by Ian Ellis-Jones

Predicate theology, as it is known, has contributed to a new understanding


of the nature of God and religion. This “school of theology” was initially
developed by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983), the founder of
Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan, a religious naturalist, rejected all
traditional forms of theism, along with all notions of supernaturalism, and
asserted that God was the sum of all natural processes that allowed a
person to become self-fulfilled as a human being. Kaplan’s ideas were
popularized and further developed by one of his former students Rabbi
Harold M Schulweis.

In predicate theology God, as opposed to the “qualities” of God, is


essentially unknowable; thus, the emphasis is on “godliness” and those
qualities or virtues that are “godlike” or “divine”. In his book Evil and the
Morality of God (1984) Rabbi Schulweis has written that “the humanly
comprehensible qualities of goodness, love, intelligence and creativity are
godly … they themselves are worthy or adoration, cultivation, and
emulation in the lives of the believers.”

Mordecai Kaplan spoke in terms of God, not as a person, but as “the


Power” or “the Process”. In Questions Jews Ask (1956) Rabbi Kaplan
wrote, “God is the Process by which the universe produces persons, and
persons are the process by which God is manifest in the individual.” Rabbi
David A Cooper, author of the best-seller God is a Verb (1997), writes:
“What is God? In a way, there is no God. Our perception of God usually
leads to a misunderstanding that seriously undermines our spiritual
development.” Cooper goes on to say, “God is not what we think It is.
God is not a thing, a being, a noun. It does not exist, as existence is
defined, for It takes up no space and is not bound by time. Jewish mystics
often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness.” Further, writes
Cooper, “The closest thing we can come to thinking about God is as a
process rather than a being. We can think of it as “be-ing,” as verb rather
than noun. Perhaps we would understand this concept better if we
renamed God. We might call It God-ing, a process, rather than God,
which suggests a noun.”

One of predicate theology’s modern exponents is Rabbi Harold S Kushner,


author of the best-seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People
(1981), who has written:

“Predicate theology” means that when we find statements about God that
say, for example, “God is love, God is truth, God is the friend of the poor,”
we are to concentrate on the predicate rather than on the subject. Those
are not statements about God; they are statements about love, truth and
befriending the poor, telling us that those are divine activities, moments in
which God is present.…. They are not things that God does; they are things
that we do, and when we do them, God is present in our lives.
Similar views are expressed in Humanistic Judaism. Erich Fromm, one of
the most respected humanists and social philosophers of the 20th century,
and author of the best-seller The Art of Loving (1956), saw God as
standing for “the highest value, the most desirable good”, a “symbol of
man’s own powers which he tries to realize in his life”, the “image of man’s
higher self, a symbol of what man potentially is or ought to become”. In
other words, God is an image, an idea, a symbol of what we human beings
can ultimately become - a view shared by many modern day Unitarians.

-oo0oo-

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