This idea of God has a long history, which the remarkable scholar and ex-nun, Karen Armstrong has written up as “The History of God”. God is an idea that has played an extremely important centering role in our evolving culture. God became the ultimate point of reference. It was the idea of God as creator of the universe that led to the rise of modern science, as mediaeval theologians tried to discover what they called ‘the ways of God’ by conducting experiments. It was they who laid the foundations of today’s empirical science.
But also associated with this idea of God were the values of love, compassion, honesty and truth. These make such moral demands of us that they transcend us. And though the idea of God had its beginning in our mythological past it remains, therefore, a useful symbol for our highest values. Even the New Testament asserts. “God is love”.
Drawing from theology, science and his own faith journey-from his call to ministry, through his much-publicized heresy trial, to decades of public speaking, teaching and writing, Geering retraces key developments in the Western understanding of God. He imagines a new spirituality, one that blends a relationship to the natural world with a celebration of the rich inheritance of human culture.
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Until two hundred years ago, most people in the Western world believed that earth and sky were no more than six thousand years old. Then science brought that date into question. In the pages of From …
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Do we need Jesus? I still do not know how to answer that. But I am pretty confident the modern secular world would not be as good as it is if it were not for the original input from Jesus of Nazareth. In any case, should we not rather be asking – Do we need to love our enemies?
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In the last two centuries, theologians have been abandoning the view of divine revelation. This move has radically changed, if not actually rendered obsolete, the role once played by confessions and creeds.
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You have become the most widely known person in the world. And this in spite of the fact that, as my six-year old granddaughter said a few years ago, ‘You don’t hear much about Jesus these days!’
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For us Christianity provides a framework of values, ideas and practices that nurture our ability to create a meaningful path of life and define ourselves as persons.
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Though some twenty three centuries have passed since an anonymous Jewish sage calling himself the Proclaimer (Ecclesiastes) set down his thoughts about life, they are strangely in tune with todays secular age. Its surprising, therefore, that they ever found a place in Holy Scripture. Lloyd Geering has brought Ecclesiastes to life by ingeniously composing imaginative dialogues with the sage, which show that he was a free thinker, a humanist, and an existentialist. In fact, this biblical heretic essentially undermined the rest of the Hebrew Bible by finding no discernible thread of purpose in the universe or in human existence, and by proposing that though Nature operates in ever-repeating cycles, much of human life is determined by sheer chance. The role of the sage, as Ecclesiastes saw it, was not to pass on gems of eternal wisdom, but to goad us into thinking things out for ourselves in our search for meaning in life.
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Now he has followed the lead of the Renaissance sage Erasmus, whose droll and counter-intuitive title "In Praise of Folly" similarly introduced a critical assessment of a conflicted and self-satisfied society. Our present paradox, Lloyd notes, is that willy-nilly we live in a secular society lately evolved from Christendom – one in which liberal spiritualities are under assault by both religious fundamentalists and militant atheists. But then, liberty has always fought an uphill battle against political and ecclesiastical tyrannies, and has always demanded a high level of individual responsibility. The personal freedom offered by secularism – which includes a free choice of spiritual pathways – is what Lloyd Geering sees as a beacon of hope as we strive to create the global society of tomorrow. Indeed, one may well see in this little volume an echo of one of Jesus' most radical and authentic teachings – the parable of the Leaven – the essence of which is the inspired insight that only when the sacred and the secular are made one will the Kingdom of God have come.
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