There have been many theological texts and authors that have influenced me in regards to my faith. The text that has been the most influential to my understanding of my calling would have to be What Is God by John F. Haught. I usually refer back to this text whenever I need a reminder of why I am trying to become a pastor. This text was assigned to me in my Basic Issues of Faith and Life class at Bethel College. Within this book, Haught tackles the basic question of “What is God?” Now when writing this, it was easy to see that most of it was directed at atheists. Most of Haught’s books are a battle between theists and atheists. Even though I was a Christian at the time I read this, I still got much from the reading. Haught, in this book, did the …show more content…
In the future chapter,
Haught says that the future is endless and that it is in place to liberate us from the confinement of the past. He argues that God is inseparable from the future, especially if one is a Christian. He goes on the speak about freedom. To Haught, freedom cannot be controlled by man. That freedom, at it’s purest definition, is something that we can’t grasp, but instead something that grasps us. As a Christian, one could think of this as freedom through Christ. We did not reach for that freedom, but instead that freedom has encompassed us.
In the next chapter Haught explains the idea of beauty. Haught explains beauty as this feeling of allowing ourselves to be “carried away by the aesthetic phenomenon.” He says that we can think of God as the unlimited beauty where we long in our own desires. Finally Haught explains truth as God. Truth, in Haught’s opinion, evades us intellectually. Every ti me we find something true, there is yet another truth to be discovered. This fits in with Haught’s horizon idea that he uses for God. Within each of these ideas, Haught explains that these each require us to surrender ourselves to them, much like
Thesis: Just as the characters in this novel are taught by only 2 books, doesn’t show that what they are taught is correct, especially in David’s case.
...onally transposing indirect to direct quotation, putting words into people mouths and blending two separate eye witness's accounts. How can one read a novel for knowledge gaining purposes when the structure appears so flawed? The use of modern and old English are combined in the sentence structure. The highly academic vocabulary not only is confusing, but breaks the flow of the book when that is the evident purpose for the format of the book. The confusing order in which Starkey retells events and the ineffective and useless information that is put in for building character personalities.
There is a stark parallel between the Vietnam War and the circumstances under which life is maintained on Potrero Hill. The soldiers in Gods Go Begging are poor, uneducated, and trapped fighting in a war they do not support; the boys on Potrero Hill are also poor, uneducated, and unable to escape the war into which they were born. They are victims of their circumstances and their government. Some of the boys that Jesse meets in Vietnam are there because they were drafted. Unable to get a deferment, either due to a lack of funds or because no higher education establishment would accept them, boys are forced to go off to war. Others, like Mendez, fled to the United States in order to escape the violence at home that resulted from the United States’
it being for a few fleeting words. It may not be much, but in the final words of the book,
If anyone else I knew had read this book, I believe the discussion between the two of
	"It mattered that education was changing me. It never ceased to matter. My brother and sisters would giggle at our mother’s mispronounced words. They’d correct her gently. My mother laughed girlishly one night, trying not to pronounce sheep as ship. From a distance I listened sullenly. From that distance, pretending not to notice on another occasion, I saw my father looking at the title pages of my library books. That was the scene on my mind when I walked home with a fourth-grade companion and heard him say that his parents read to him every night. (A strange sounding book-Winnie the Pooh.) Immediately, I wanted to know, what is it like?" My companion, however, thought I wanted to know about the plot of the book. Another day, my mother surprised me by asking for a "nice" book to read. "Something not too hard you think I might like." Carefully I chose one, Willa Cather’s My ‘Antonia. But when, several weeks later, I happened to see it next to her bed unread except for the first few pages, I was furious and suddenly wanted to cry. I grabbed up the book and took it back to my room and placed it in its place, alphabetically on my shelf." (p.626-627)
It is easier to grasp a meaning of this line further along in the book.
Thus, because she perceives grace as the central need of human experience and redemption as the essential aim of life itself, she also insists on the reality of sin and the inevitability of judgment. Unlike many modernists who complain that God has turned His back on the world, she contends that it is man who now shuns God (35).
Discuss this statement and show how your critical understanding of the text has been strengthened by at least two different readings.
... is playing favorites in whom he wants to grant salvation to while they are alive on Earth, there is no incentive for anyone to care. If God is so merciful, then these Calvinistic Puritan doctrines should not exist and everyone should be granted spiritual salvation and grace while they are alive on earth at all times. Edward Taylor’s arguments and symbolic imagery of the beauty of God and how gracious he is are highly questionable and shoddy – similar to God and Puritan theology.
... use the old metaphor, we are all the blind men, feeling and describing different yet important parts of the elephant of beauty as God guides our hands. He is the ultimate truth and standard by which we determine truth. God is love (1 John 4:8) and therefore standard by which we determine what is and is not loving. God created beauty, a very good thing, and therefore God is beautiful. If even heathens find His works glorious and breath-taking, how much more beautiful He must be! Therefore, as children of the Creator of beauty, striving to be “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29), we are to exhibit His beauty – His love – in all areas of our life.
W. Andrew Hoffecker. Building a Christian World View, vol. 1: God, man, and Knowledge. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, New Jersey : 1986.
“…the primary response of God to the problem of evil. It states that the unification of the world with God’s plan for it will bring about the eventual conquest of suffering and evil, if not in this world, at least in the world to come.”
The factual nature of God (given that He exists as the First Cause) is at all times argued by most Christians. Moreover numerous questions arise on the nature of God. We all know that, at some point we will actually die; yet, we consistently refuse the causes operating within ourselves that looks into the real result of what comes after a person loses his or her life. It is far simpler for humankind to agree that, they will depart to a secure home in Heaven and will be pardoned all their sins by a supreme being, rather than to query on the existence of the extremely all-powerful being. Luckily, some of us usually query this existence and the development of humankind; in addition to, the spiritual lessons obtained from our mothers and fathers, community and religion. This essay investigates the two logical justifications for and against the nature of God; in accordance to opinions of some exceptional researchers and philosophers. Through two classical arguments for God; the ontological argument and the teleological argument, I will show that there is no adequate evidence or extensive justifications for the true nature of God.
implies that God is present in all of us and should not be chucked out