...The Gospel According to Terry
Eagleton accuses most unbelievers of rejecting a theologically illiterate caricature of God unknown to classical theology. Even to say “God exists” is to commit a kind of ontological faux pas; God is “no kind of entity” but rather “the ground of all being, the condition of possibility of anything at all.” (God and the universe, he notes astutely, do not add up to two.) God is neither the metaphysical industrialist imagined by creationists, nor a claimant to ownership of the universe. God is not the Cop on the Cosmic Beat, our immensely stronger rival in a contest of wills; God’s sovereignty is “not like that of a despot, however benevolent” but rather “a power which allows the world to be itself.” Rooted in “its sharing in the life of its Creator,” our freedom and autonomy is rooted in God’s, not hemmed in or suppressed.
Sounds about right to me.
ReplyDeleteI will have to read more . . . as it stands, the excerpt makes God sound like an aspect of theoretical physics (but that might simply be my flawed reading of the excerpt . . . so I need to read more) . . .
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