With God in Human Trust - Christian Faith and Contemporary Humanism (Hardcover)

The hope in exploring this strange paradox further is that it may mediate between Christian -- and perhaps other -- faith on the one hand, and contemporary humanism on the other. Such a "meeting of minds" is much to be desired. For, in their different ways, the two bring together a sense of human liability to be responsible, and responsive, to that which is both in our power and beyond our mercy. To say that "truth is in the care of faith" is to recognize that "faith has to be the care of truth," just as "history" lies very much in the hand of historians (for good or ill) and historians are tributary to "history" as obligation and trust.

This whole approach to the truth/faith/civilization equation may seem dubious to pious minds inured to divine "omnipotence." A more lively and penetrating sense of things divinely human and humanly divine is pursued in this book through ten themes central to religion -- language, law, love, truth, tribe, selfhood, nature, power, time and worship. A final chapter clinches the distinctive case for Christianity as "divine risk." The argument is illuminated by examples from different religions, and from literature, poetry and the humanities.