A theology of celebration has the luxury of being able to objectify God, and because suffering is kept at a distance it is not necessary for the presence of God to be immanent. God can be a distant abstraction whose praise is expected. For example, Westermann notes that when Western theology speaks of God’s salvation or of a God who saves, God thereby becomes objectively tied to an event, and thus emerges a “soteriology.” The Old Testament cannot pin God down to a single soteriology. It can only speak of God’s saving acts within a whole series of events, and that necessarily involves some kind
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