GOD IS LIKE A JAZZ BAND LEADER LOCATION OF DIVINE AND HUMAN POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY—A CALL TO PASTORAL THEOLOGIANS

This could be an historical moment in the life of dominant cultural godrepresentations. At the turn of the millennium, with awesome technological "capabilities" and the precarious state of the earth, we are called to take more responsibility in relation to God, to acknowledge our interdependent power with God. This will not occur unless the gods with which we enter places of worship and the gods to whom we pray more clearly evoke in humans a sense of interdependent power and responsibility. Our inner experiences of God will only be transformed if dominant cultural metaphors for God elicit such a cooperative response. In the 1960s Bishop Robinson heralded popular cultural focus upon the location of God, through his confessional musing in Honest to God} God is not up there, out there, but down here. Ana-Maria Rizzuto made a mark on the field of psychology of religion with her recognition of the import of the internal living gods. God representations are gleaned early in life, modified as we grow, and function powerfully to evoke affect and behavior. Harold Kushner managed to get a vast number of people to entertain the idea of an all-powerful God which in effect is not all-powerful because of limits God puts on God's self in order to provide freedom for humans. God is still all good, but there is room for evil, due to God's "granting" humans genuine freedom. God does comfort. Kushner got attention because he touched a vulnerable nerve in good people—why do bad things happen to them? Decades have passed since these cultural jolts to individual living gods. Teens who were born after these publications recently made a hit of a song which dramatizes God where Bishop Robinson didn't want—"From a Distance." In the meantime, we have exerted massive cultural energy reflecting upon metaphors for God as those convey a particular gender or ethnic image of the human. In whose image is God said to be made? For the last two decades theologians—systematic and pastoral—as well as biblical scholars, historians, and anthropologists have pursued the justice of inclusion as well as the effect upon personal self-esteem due to dominant cultural metaphors for God. Public notice began in earnest with Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father. The discussion has been sustained by numerous writers, including Major Jones's The Color of God and such recent works as Carroll Saussy's God Images and