Searching in Face of Mystery
Authors:   , le Grand Johan Bernhard 
Published: October 2023

Gordon Kaufman challenges theologians, both from Christian and non-Christian traditions, to describe the assumptions and steps of faith that lead from an agnostic starting
point to their faith positions using his method of imaginative construction. In this thesis
I’m taking on this challenge for what I consider my faith, i.e. religious seekerism. Here,
I define a religious seeker as a person who looks for inspiration in more than one religious and/or wisdom tradition without committing exclusively to any one of them.

The topics discussed in my seeker theology are based on empirical studies in literature: ethics, spiritual growth, the truth, the human, the world, the
ultimate, the key to the ultimate, life in community, inspiration, afterlife, ultimate direction and religious diversity.
An important difference between Kaufman’s theology and the theology in this thesis is that the latter deliberately refrains from taking any decisions on some theological
topics. Thus, although the ultimate, the key to the ultimate, life in community, inspiration, afterlife and ultimate direction are important topics for many religious seekers, it
is suggested not to take firm positions on them. For the other topics: ethics, spiritual growth, truth and religious diversity, as well as general spiritual interest, I conclude that religious seekers have good reasons to adopt stable positions. This leads to the following steps of faith:
Step 1: The decision to accept the view of the human as a biohistorical individual as normative.
Step 2: The decision to accept the view of the world as the environment for life and human life in particular as normative.
Step 3: The decision to explore (at least in a rudimentary way) our position on some existential questions about life, death and reality.
Step 4: The decision to commit to a process in which the self as a religious person and one’s ideal self become increasingly the same.
Step 5: The decision to leave the last word in theology to individual experience with respect to any theological questions in which one wants to seek.
Step 6: The recognition of the aporetic character of the insights of various religious and wisdom traditions and the decision to take these aporias serious as aporias.

Together, step 1 to 6 constitutes the theology for religious seekers I constructed based
on Gordon Kaufman’s method and as such they replace the six steps Kaufman proposes to end up at a contemporary Christian view. Here accepting step 1 up to 2 defines
what according to the religious seeker is a moral person. Accepting step 1 up to 4 leads
to a moral person with religious interest. If a specific interpretation of step 4 and 5 are
also accepted, the result is a liberal religious position and hence these first five steps can
be considered a theology of religious liberalism. If religious liberals also accept step 6,
they are religious seekers.

In conclusion, the research question whether it is possible to construct a theology
for the religious seeker based on the methodology of Gordon Kaufman is answered
affirmatively. The result is an innovative way to do theology, because the exercise leads
to several new aspects of theological thinking: constructing a theology based on what
empirical studies show to be the believes of a large number of people, deliberately
considering and justifying theological topics to be unstable, justifying breaking down of
traditions as part of a systematic approach and developing an entirely new approach to
religious diversity. Because of all the new facets which came on my way, this thesis can
only be considered a very first sketch of what a theology of religious seekers could be.