Deborah Creamer on Who God is and how do we know?
I have the pleasure and opportunity of working with Debbie Creamer. By far, she is one of the highlights of my time thus far at Iliff School of Theology. She is a professor and Associate Dean for the School of Theology. She is trained as a theologian who specializes in feminist theologies and is a leading scholar in Disability Studies. She is a disruptive feminist theologian!
Some more proper social signifiers for Debbie Creamer are: white, female, middle aged, single, economically comfortable, and yet invested in living in ways that disrupt privilege, cultivate relationships, imagine possibilities, and offer space for co-construction of a better world.
Who is god? I ordinarily wouldn’t even try to answer this question – in part, because I know how damaging definitions and labels can be, particularly when we try to name something that holds as much value for some people as “God” does. But I’ve been playing with the idea lately that I might think about god as being the empty spaces. I don’t mean that god is “in” the empty spaces – as if, sitting quietly in an empty space, we might find or become aware of an entity or substance that we would name God – but rather I wonder what it would mean if we were to say that god *is* empty spaces. By this I’m thinking of potential and possibility, of fissure and disruption, of questions and the next moment and all that is gone or is not-yet. In a way, this evokes images of peace, or hope, or even eschatology in ways that might be familiar to those coming from Christian perspectives. But I like that it also evokes change, uncertainty, and even the openness that comes out of fracture. This leaves issues of justice, community, and relationality in our hands, rather than naming those commitments as part of god – this makes me a bit anxious, but I think I’m okay with that for now. Anyhow, I’m not sure I’d answer the same way tomorrow, but for today, I’m enjoying trying on this image.
And, as far as your question of “how do we know” goes, I think that we don’t. That’s part of god for me, too – that god is something that we experience or make sense of at a significant level in ways that are fleeting and elusive. That’s overstating, because I know that god is sometimes felt or known in deep and concrete ways, but more often than not, for me at least, god is somewhat akin to memory we have of a dream as we wake up. Or, god is something that we build only to deconstruct and then build again, which is where my picture of “trying on” a definition comes from. And beyond that, I think, it all needs to be worked out in community – where we together share our own tentative constructions and imaginations, and together weigh the consequences of any particular definition or description; where we repeat traditional stories as a way of holding ourselves together, and create aspirational pictures as a way of moving ourselves forward. Which, I guess, is why I’m feeling bold enough at the moment to give you this description, not because it is anything solid in and of itself, but because it will then go out to community for further reflection, evaluation, discussion, exploration – keeping it active and lively, instead of static and oppressive.
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