Reimagining God: The Faith Journey of a Modern Heretic by Lloyd Geering. Polebridge Press (Salem OR, 2014). Pbk. 249 pages. £12.63.
At 96, Lloyd Geering is without any doubt the granddaddy of SOF understanding, and not just in its antipodean outposts. The 14 essays brought together in this volume span rather more than 20 years of his writings, and they cast interesting light on the shifts and influences on him over those years – as indeed on his earlier life and career.
This reviewer, shamefully, had not read his work before, so the editor's request to review this book gave opportunity to make amends. The title is itself inviting. Reimagining God is surely the key challenge for any still drawn – for whatever reason – by the stories of or about the man Jesus from Nazareth, in the world 'after theology', which so many now recognise as the territory we together inhabit.
And Geering is a very good and attractive storyteller. His prose is lucid, and pleasantly free from torturous theological jargon, and he has been fortunate where some others have not in his own personal story. There's more than a hint of self-mockery in his subtitle, The Faith Journey of a Modern Heretic, for he hasn't been hounded in the way some other radicals have. The two-man attempt in 1967 to charge him with doctrinal error in the Presbyterian General Assembly failed utterly.
He has shown himself to be not just a survivor but a gifted commentator for almost 50 years, not only on how to survive; but also, much more importantly, how to belong and indeed thrive as a progressive believer in today's still too often less than progressive church. A long life has encouraged him in the desire to live in the present, to look forward to the future, but also to look back and be able to find encouragement in the past which has been his own. 'I have been intrigued to discover that much of what I have learned about our Christian past suddenly sparkles with new meaning.' This capacity of things to sparkle afresh is a recurrent theme in the essays brought together here.
Geering is very much a God person, but his God is one freed from thingness and factuality. To 'believe in God' is not actually to make any kind of categorical statement about the 'existence' of God, but a way of speaking about a willingness to place trust in that which we name as God. He follows his Canadian contemporary Wilfred Cantwell Smith in seeing the great modern heresy of the church to be 'the heresy of believing'. To say that I believe in God does not mean that it is my opinion that God exists; rather it indicates that 'I give my allegiance to God… I entrust myself to God.' Credo is not about a narrow factual believing; the two Latin words that make it up, cor and do, speak actually about the giving of one's heart.
So he writes with fondness in an essay on The Faith to Doubt: 'When I say that God exists, I mean something like this: "God is the symbol that holds together in a unity all my bits of knowledge about the world and all the virtues I have come to value, such as love, justice, compassion." The more I respond positively to all this and learn to trust my fellow humans and the world at large, the more I find human existence to be of great worth and meaningful.'
'Much of the language of the Bible and the Christian tradition is still very helpful to me. For God, as I understand this word, is to be found in people, in human relationships, in my own thinking, in the mystery of all living creatures, and in the stars and distant nebulae.'
In one sense of course plainly none of this is new. These are Geering's own re-bundled essays, seven of which are put together in a section, Learning from my Mentors, specifically acknowledging his debt to others. But it's an impressive list of those to have learnt from: Schleiermacher; Feuerbach; Jung; Teilhard; and John Robinson. Anyone wanting an introduction, for their grandchildren perhaps, to progressive, radical Christian faith understanding today could do a lot worse than use this book. I certainly would commend it.
Hugh Dawes is a retired Anglican priest, somewhat bemused to be living now in Haslemere. He was chair for some years of PCN Britain and until recently edited its newsletter, Progressive Voices.