Norman Mailer: God as artist, not lawgiver

From John M. Buchanan, Writers and words, The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 3:

Not long before he died [, author Norman Mailer] granted a series of interviews, which are published in the book On God. Mailer said that he was an atheist for 30 years before coming to acknowledge that he did believe in God.

He tried reading theology and was repelled. Theologians, Mailer concluded, "were undernourished in their appetite for inquiry." I wish he could have had a conversation with the theologian Joseph Sittler, for one.

Mailer came to believe in God, he said, because of his intense lifelong "exploration of human reality."

He envisioned God as "an artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy," and human beings as God's "most developed artwork."

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

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