Thursday, February 2, 2012

God through the Ages...




Most people’s notions of God, if they even have any, are stunted at the level of children: that of the big man in the sky.  Of course, with this idea, there is a limit to spiritual or religious growth.  This form of God, in my opinion, leads people away from religion and what they consider its puerile notions of God and the divine.

Finding God: Ten Jewish Responses by Rifat Sonsion and Daniel B. Syme lays out many different concepts of God throughout the length of Jewish history.  There is the God of the Bible, Rabbinical literature,  Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Isaac Luria, Spinoza, Martin Buber, Steinberg, Kaplan, and Fromm.  This is not a long book, 132 pages of text, so it is commendable that the authors  have distilled so complex an array of thinkers in so short a space.  This is difficult to do, yet they accomplished it smoothly.

For readers looking to expand their notions of God without getting too technical or diving into primary literature, this book is an excellent resource.  

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