How (Not) to Speak of God

October 11th, 2006 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0) |

Fall break is coming up soon and it marks the one year anniversary of when I read A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren. It is an incredible, eye-opening book that I have since loaned to several people. Shortly before I read that book I became intrigued by the emergent church conversation and read that ANKOC was a good starting point, so I read it.

My goal this fall break is to read Peter Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God (back cover). Adele Sakler has written a great article, which is the first in a four-part series, about the book for Church and Postmodern Culture: Conversation (here’s a .pdf if you prefer). The article has several tantalizing quotes from Rollins’ book, and I am very excited to dig in when I finally have some free time during break. I’ll be sure to write a review shortly after I am finished with it.

In an interview with Leif Hansen, Brian McLaren says:

One of the things that I love about [How (Not) to Speak of God]… is that I think it correctly identifies so much of the problem as [to] the way we speak of God… The God who would really exist has to always be greater than the language that we use in speaking about God. It gives us permission to doubt the way we speak about God as an act of faith in saying that the real God would have to be better than the way we speak about God.

Relevant Magazine recently published a concise and balanced review of the book. Also, I did some poking around and it looks like the author has a blog (who doesn’t?).