The thesis of In Our Image is that the traditional Christian assertion that God made man in his image (Gen. 1: 26) has been turned on its head by Christian orthodoxy, and that it is most often the believer who makes God in his image. It is true that the Bible as a whole seems to support the traditional Christian theist view of a God out there who creates mankind according to his will and demands high standards of holiness, but a too-superficial reading of the text will tend to overlook the significance of myth and symbol, thereby missing the point that the Bible is essentially a human document expressing human concerns. Holiness, although of the essence, is not primarily a top-down affair imposed or demanded from above, but a bottom-up one which is created by, and lies at the heart of human experience. Christian fundamentalists read the Bible with black-and-white literalism, while liberals often reduce religious experience to the merely human. Smith here argues for a via media which appeals to the harmonious existence of faith and reason as the chief means of addressing mans modern existential situation.
The thesis of In Our Image is that the traditional Christian assertion that God made man in his image (Gen. 1: 26) has been turned on its head by Christian orthodoxy, and that it is most often the believer who makes God in his image. It is true that the Bible as a whole seems to support the traditional Christian theist view of a God out there who creates mankind according to his will and demands high standards of holiness, but a too-superficial reading of the text will tend to overlook the significance of myth and symbol, thereby missing the point that the Bible is essentially a human document expressing human concerns. Holiness, although of the essence, is not primarily a top-down affair imposed or demanded from above, but a bottom-up one which is created by, and lies at the heart of human experience. Christian fundamentalists read the Bible with black-and-white literalism, while liberals often reduce religious experience to the merely human. Smith here argues for a via media which appeals to the harmonious existence of faith and reason as the chief means of addressing mans modern existential situation.
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