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Walter Cardinal Kasper has written, “It is time, it is the right time, to speak of God.” This book invites readers to use their God-given ability to work through important questions that many people have about God today: Why is God so angry in the Bible? Is the biblical God male or female (or what)? Who is Satan? Why do people suffer? By exploring the Bible’s answers to these and other biblical questions, people can come to understand better their living and loving God.
A Human-Shaped God approaches the humanlike accounts of God in the Old Testament as the starting places for theology and uses them to build a picture of the divine. This understanding of God is then brought into conversation with traditional conceptions that depict God as a being who knows everything that happens, is at every place at the same time, is constant and unchanging, and does not ultimately have material form. But instead of pitting the Old Testament's humanlike view of God against traditional theology and assuming that only one of these understandings is correct, A Human-Shaped God posits that theologians should embrace both of these constructions simultaneously. This is a new way of theological inquiry that embraces both the humanlike characteristics of God and the transcendence of God in traditional theology. By seeing and understanding the humanlike depictions of God in the Old Testament and by using the rich language of traditional theology together in tandem, the reader acquires a much deeper and meaningful understanding of God.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle
The incarnation--the act of God assuming mortal flesh through Jesus Christ--reveals God's radical love for a world marked by the rebellion of the created against their creator. God becomes human to create life and restore the disrupted divine-human relationship. This doctrine is thus the theme of the Christian faith par excellence. However, the incarnation does not begin with its ultimate realization in Jesus Christ; that single event is preceded by a long history of a God who continually reunites with his people to lead them from death to life, from bondage to freedom. God Becoming Human pursues the astonishing arc of the incarnation, chronicling the varying ways Scripture recounts the divide between God and the creatures of his likeness as well as the diverse expressions the text gives regarding the desire for reconciliation. As the expectations of an existing intermediary that can somehow bridge this gap between God and humans dwindle throughout the Old Testament, hope is increasingly placed on new forms of closeness to God. The closeness made possible by Jesus Christ receives a wide range of interpretations by New Testament witnesses and is continued by a rich chorus that culminates in the early church with the theology of the incarnation. Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann invite readers to see that the doctrine of the incarnation, the pinnacle of the scriptural saga of redemption, reveals that God's ultimate purpose in dealing with creation was to become human. As narrated in the story of the fall, if paradise was lost because humanity wanted to emulate God, the one reconciled with God through Christ is now given the opportunity--and challenge--to become a child of God. In accordance with the One who descended from the heavenly throne, one must precisely lower oneself and thus fully embrace one's created humanness. It is through the flesh that the created and their creator are joined; there is no other path to unity.
This book addresses one of the oldest questions posed to religious believers: if God made everything, who made God? Most recently levelled by the New Atheists, the question was asked in ancient Greece and has preoccupied religious believers in the centuries since. Here, renowned scholar Robert Banks explores the history of the objection - from its earliest vocalization in the ancient world to its most famous opponents, Freud, Marx, and others. Ideal for anyone with a general interest in new atheism, for those studying religion, or wanting to sort out what (if any) elements of their idea of God are man-made.
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
Departing from human experience the book deals with the theological underpinnings of religious experience, then draws practical conclusions or implications for the spiritual life.
Sean McDowell and Jonathan Morrow have penned an accessible yet rigorous look at the arguments of the New Atheists. Writing from a distinctively Christian perspective, McDowell and Morrow lay out the facts so that the emerging generation can make up their own mind after considering all the evidence.
Dr Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, is one of the world's leading scientists, working at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God. How does he reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable? In THE LANGUAGE OF GOD he explains his own journey from atheism to faith, and then takes the reader on a stunning tour of modern science to show that physics, chemistry and biology -- indeed, reason itself -- are not incompatible with belief. His book is essential reading for anyone who wonders about the deepest questions of all: why are we here? How did we get here? And what does life mean?