Andrew P. Porter Knihy

How did the Bible come to be written? How did Israelite religion grow out of the surrounding cultures? How did Israelite religion become Christianity and rabbinic Judaism? How did scholars discover this history in the last two centuries? This book is about such questions, and about the ways that Christianity in the modern world became confused, looking for acts of God in the interstices of natural causation rather than in the living-in-history in which the Bible was born. The modern challenges to Christianity are historicism, relativism, and pluralism; and Christianity can learn to receive them as blessings and as offers of grace--as old friends, not as new enemies.

Intelligent Design creationism faults evolutionary biology for being "naturalistic" but ID is in its own strange way just as naturalistic. Like the man who can't find his car-keys at night and looks for them under a street-light, though he last saw the keys someplace else, intelligent design creationism seeks acts of God within the gaps in our scientific knowledge. Creation takes the goodness of this world on faith, but Creationism works to get out of the challenge of the doctrine of creation, not to embrace it.

A philosopher's exploration of the central commitments of a life that recognizes God as bringing good in all of life, hard and painful parts included. In the first volume, Exposure, Limitation, and Needs, Porter, who is not identified, takes exposure, limitation, and need as exemplary of the pains of life, and looks at the response of faith that transforms them into blessings. In the second volume, Action and Language in Historical Religion, he adds the dimension of historical living to the original affirmation of human life in the world. The volumes are paged and indexed separately. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

We are taught by our culture to think that for God to act, he has to interfere with the natural course of events in one way or another, perhaps through the openings left by quantum indeterminacy. The argument of this book is that the pertinent concepts in religion don't work that way. When the naive concept of divine interference is examined closely, it quickly shows itself to be incoherent and incapable of doing the work assigned to it. If we look at the language of human action in real life, what we find is not nature but history. The supernatural is just naturalism by other means; the real alternative to nature is history. The God of history has a power and majesty that goes quite beyond anything that the naturalists have offered us.