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In the introduction to her new book "Memories of God," church historian Roberta Bondi explains how she "finally accepted that the theological work of telling one another our stories, of talking about the ways in which our concrete and particular experiences intersected with the great Christian doctrines, was not private work, or work done only on behalf of us as individuals. It was a common work, real theology done in order to find a way to claim for our own time and our own generation what it means to be a Christian." That recognition was a long time coming, because in the academic world into which she was initiated, "serious theology concerned itself only with what was universally true. It did not waste its time addressing the personal and the 'subjective.' Certainly, there was no room in theology to raise any of the kinds of questions I had, especially those connected with my experience as a female human being."

The world of the university was populated by a whole society of people prepared to induct me into the ethos of "the life of the mind." I was taught in my classes that reason and emotion were enemies. Where reason was objective, and universally verifiable, emotion was dangerously subjective, leading its sufferers to see the world through their own personal, particular experience.

It was only as I could strip away my own emotional responses to particular people or problems that I could arrive at what was rational. That my own emotions and experience so often stood in opposition to the conclusions of reason did not mean that those conclusions should be re-examined. It meant that my emotions and experience were to be discounted.

At the same time, I was taught to think about the moral life in these same terms. According to Philosophy 101, to be a moral person meant to lay aside the distorting private pulls of pity, preference, and the particular for the sake of the rational and austere sternness of universal law. Ethics was about justice, and justice, like the rationality of which it was an expression, was blind to individual need. Kant, I learned, had said that a person of principle never lied, even in order to save the life of an innocent person, for to fail to tell the truth in every situation meant to open the floodgates of social distrust and chaos.

Soon, in the ethos of the seminary, I would learn how God fit into all this, that is, cleanly, unambiguously, and at a civilized distance. There, it would be suggested to me that God, as the source of the structures of reality, was Universal Reason. God was "the ground of our being" who "accepted us in spite of our unacceptability." But God was not interested in the sins or sufferings of individuals. God's concern was with the human race, and that concern was for social justice. God would no more break the laws of nature for the sake of the inner or outer pain of individuals than would Kant. Intercessory prayer might do good for the person praying, but it did not move God at all. In fact, intercessory prayer was superstitious, anthropomorphic, and even selfish. God would not miraculously heal people of cancer or help children find lost dogs.

As for Jesus, he was a far cry from the "personal Lord and Savior" I had met as a girl in the Pond Fork Baptist Church when we visited my grandmother in Kentucky: a Jesus who died to make me believe as I was told. The Jesus of the seminary was Lord, yes, insofar as he showed forth the kingdom and gave us a perfect example of how to live into it by sharing with us in all significant human experience. But he was only a man. The Virgin Birth, the miracle stories, the Resurrection—all this was merely the mythological language of the early church, from which we needed to extract the universal truth.

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July 17 1995, Vol. 39, No. 8