In Our Image: The Human Basis of the Christian Faith

In Our Image: The Human Basis of the Christian Faith
ISBN-10
1514448955
ISBN-13
9781514448953
Series
In Our Image
Category
Religion
Pages
210
Language
English
Published
2016-03-29
Publisher
Xlibris Corporation
Author
Stephen H. Smith

Description

The thesis of In Our Image is that the traditional Christian assertion that God made man in his image (Gen. 1: 26) has been turned on its head by Christian orthodoxy, and that it is most often the believer who makes God in his image. It is true that the Bible as a whole seems to support the traditional Christian theist view of a God ‘out there’ who creates mankind according to his will and demands high standards of holiness, but a too-superficial reading of the text will tend to overlook the significance of myth and symbol, thereby missing the point that the Bible is essentially a human document expressing human concerns. Holiness, although of the essence, is not primarily a top-down affair imposed or demanded from above, but a bottom-up one which is created by, and lies at the heart of human experience. Christian fundamentalists read the Bible with black-and-white literalism, while liberals often reduce religious experience to the merely human. Smith here argues for a via media which appeals to the harmonious existence of faith and reason as the chief means of addressing man’s modern existential situation.

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