Five stars! I was WOWED. The right book at the right time!

This book's focus on the pervasive presence of God in all creation, and in us, leads to some very timely (in my life) and important questions about doctrinal models that may have outlived their usefulness.

Those who fret over every tittle of doctrinal orthodoxy will be pleased to know this book concentrates primarily on surprisingly familiar themes: the omnipresence of God; the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in man; Jesus is the prime example of God's Spirit acting and moving through someone, and he is not "apart" from us. Where I encourage all readers to stick with it is in its most crucial message: to replace God and our experience of God within us and within all of nature with interpretations -- even ancient ones -- is an unhelpful and outdated idolatry. The model of the Trinity, when seen through the honest, contemporary lens that Morwood suggests, is truly the way of formulating concepts cogently for the learnèd living all those many centuries ago.

Morwood's care in word choice is palpable, and clarifies the message he seeks to deliver here.
"He notes that many of the images and ideas and much of the language we bring to faith questions today belong to a worldview that is no longer relevant" (from rear cover). What resulted, at least for this reader, is nothing less than the revitalization of my Catholicism in an age demanding more than dated understandings can provide. Central among Morwood's propositions is that God is not localized, somewhere far off, necessitating that he send an envoy from some distant place to us in the Incarnation -- rather Incarnation can be seen as the Spirit working through each of us, and we also can incarnate Deity ('be ye therefore holy/perfect/merciful') when we allow God to work in and through us. "In him we live and move and have our being," a borrowed phrase from Athenian philosophers that simply cannot be truly said of a God who in a literal sense sits in a throne room somewhere far away awaiting supplication of his peasantry (a situation that by no accident is similar to the manner of kingdoms and approaching a ruler contemporary with the Bible books' human authors). It is this literal sense Morwood asks us to abandon for all its harms, which he also attests.

Those Christians who would decry Panentheism had better ask themselves 'Whence comes, then the idea among countless authors, Judaic and Christian alike, that God is everywhere?'
See Jeremiah 23:23–24.… (more)

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chuff | Feb 28, 2022 |