God's Presence

UNCORRECTED ADVANCE PROOFS

In 2011, the celebrated theologian Frances Young delivered a series of lectures—the Bampton Lectures—to great acclaim, in which she offered a new contemporary theology. By engaging with the fathers of the church who laid down the parameters of Christian theology and enshrined key concepts in the creeds, she explored how their teachings can be applied today, despite the differences in our intellectual and ecclesial environments.

God’s Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (on sale Jan. 1st) is Young’s thorough rewriting of those lectures which the former Archbishop of Canterbury heralds as “a treasury of real wisdom.”

Young explores the key topics of Christian doctrine with a refreshing modern perspective, including creation, human nature, salvation and the concept of God. By focusing on God’s gracious accommodation to human limitations, she reveals that historically, Christian doctrine eschews the creationism and biblical literalism that factionalizes the modern church, and thus explains how to make sense of the religious tradition in the post-modern world.

In God’s Presence, Young poses a dialogue between early Christian history and modern theology from her own unique perspective: as a mother, faced with the challenge of a profoundly disabled son, and as an ordained woman with a deep commitment to mind and spirit, head and heart, and academic and spiritual engagement with God. Her meditation on contemporary Christianity and its long, fraught history is essential reading for anyone interested in modern theology and the history of the human relationship with God.