Rock of ages? : the changing faces of the Christian God / John Butler.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Butler, John R., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• God (Christianity)--History of doctrines.
• God (Christianity)--Attributes.

Physical Description:

235 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Lutterworth Press, 2013.

Summary:

Is God the eternal and immutable presence that Christianity has commonly proclaimed him to be-the Rock of Ages? John Butler offers a different perspective through a personal exploration of the changing images of God within the main streams of the Christian faith over a period of some four thousand years. Butler takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic odyssey that begins with the pantheon of deities in Bronze Age Canaan from which the God of the early Old Testament emerged and ends with the radical story is told largely through the record of the Bible and the ideas of key writers and thinkers whose authority or persuasiveness have allowed their visions of God to become embedded in the major Christian traditions. The book concludes with a discussion of the central question raised by the analysis: why is it that people across the ages have claimed to have experienced so many different and sometimes contradictory faces of the Christian God? Written in an elegant and engaging style, this informative book will appeal to Christians, atheists, students, and those who are simply interested in the cultural and intellectual history of God. Book jacket.

Contents:

• The origins of the Gods
• The God of Israel
• The God of laws and Psalms
• The God of messianic expectation
• The God of the Damascus Road
• The God who came to earth
• The God of dogma and heresy
• The God of creeds
• The God of selective grace
• The God of medieval scholasticism
• The God of reason and revelation
• The God of the reformers
• The God of predestination
• The God of prevenient grace
• The God of the gaps
• The God for enlightened times
• The God who warms the heart
• The God who was fading away
• The God of the liberals
• The God of the fundamentalists
• The God of neo-orthodoxy
• The God of silence and suffering
• The God for the twentieth century
• The God of the past and the God of the future.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [225]-227) and index.

ISBN:

• 9780718892968
• 0718892968

OCLC:

826658951

Publisher Number:

99954588773