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Review: Searching For A Better God
- By Wheldon Curzon-Hobson
- Published January 13, 2009
- Religion and Spirituality
Wheldon Curzon-Hobson
Reviewer Wheldon Curzon-Hobson is a New Zealand writer. His second novel Near A Canal was described as “… easy to read, evocative of its setting and the characters are beautifully drawn … " His reviews are written in a similar vein, selecting books with inspiring characters and history. He is married with two young children who continually encourage him to 'open his eyes a little wider' to the wonders of the world.
Title: Searching For A Better God
Author: Wade
Bradshaw
ISBN: 13: 978934068007
Publisher: Authentic Publishing
This book outlines
the charge against Christianity in modern Western society: that God,
if he exists, is not a good God, and his morality is inferior to that
of a human.
This challenge is further compounded by the
modern ambiguity of the term God. When surveys are conducted in the
United States, the majority believe in some Supreme Being, but this
may not resemble the traditional God of the Bible. An increasingly
common definition is that God is all good, a goodness that is defined
by modern society's relativist and inclusive morality.
Socrates
famously challenged Euthyphro by asking if an act was pious because
the gods love it, or do they love it because it was pious?
Traditional Biblical Christianity argues that God only loves an act
if it is good, and that the good act is to be loved because its
goodness is derived from Himself. God only loves what is good, and
only does what is good, as defined by himself because he is the
origin and definition of good. In modern society, however, many are
arguing that this logic is flawed because the Creator as defined by
the Bible is not good. It is further claimed that the God of the
Bible, the Father of humanity, has a remarkable number of
similarities to the classic symptoms of an abusive spouse. This
charge is backed up by the various crimes of abuse committed by
leaders of the church over the previous decades.
The argument
concludes that if the Bible represents a God who is not good, then
God needs to be redefined. The result is that the God of the Bible is
discarded in favour of a more humane, increasingly inclusive,
accepting and non-judgemental god.
Wade Bradshaw takes these
statements in his stride. He argues that the church should not
succumb to such arguments. Instead, it needs to make what he terms
the Old Story more comprehensible and relevant to the modern world.
In doing so, the God of the Bible is not weakened or changed, but
presented in such a way that the modern mind can connect and
understand Him.
Bradshaw repudiates many of the charges laid
against God and puts forward a number of solutions. He does tend to
talk around a subject rather than clearly outlining the issues and
potential solutions. Nonetheless, he puts forth many excellent
arguments to support God's goodness, despite the accusations of God's
immorality, anger, distance and bullying.
Searching For A
Better God will leave you with an understanding of the moral
challenges facing the contemporary church, and provide you with a
comforting sense that God is in fact good, and that there are
excellent arguments to support this claim.
Click Here To Purchase Searching for a Better God