This should become a classic! Gearing is, in this book, laying the groundwork for the salvation of the churches. That they need salvation is obvious. First, they are fading, people not attending, or attending from habit and second, the churches are needed as the bearers of the mythology, that is the truth hidden in mystery which evades the direct path of knowledge.
He lays out the problem: Every theology is built with reference to the science of its day. For example when the theology now preached in the churches was developed the possibility of a God surrounded by happy souls in a place called heaven fit our complete ignorance on what lay beyond the blue of the skies. My grandson, recently graduated from kindergarten, corrected the adults at the Thanksgiving dinner on their misunderstandings of the number, size and order of the planets. If I tell him about heaven he is going to ask "Where is it?" and expect me to point it out. I am not going to risk my good standing as an intelligent human being with him and yet my local preacher still thinks its up there somewhere, or, no he is not that out of the stream, he talks as if he thinks its up there somewhere, and shakes the confidence of all kindergarten and up pew sitters, not only in the theology but in his credibility.
So we need a new theology, starting with a new Image for God. This, he points out, is not as radical a task as it might seem since all images of God in the past have been the product of human imagination why not put our century's imagination influenced by our century's science to work on what God might be like. Way back our ancestors imagined God as living in a box they carried around, then in a temple. Once God was local to the Hebrews, fighting their fights against other and lesser gods. Now God looks a lot like Aristotle dreamed him, the unmoved mover. Knowing what we know, can we not come closer to the mark than those who knew less?
Lloyd Geering then gives us a perfectly reasonable hypothesis for God using evolutionary principles, (Teilhard Chardin), and depth psychology, (Carl Jung) and several of the great philosophers of all the times. Is it the final depiction of God? Did he get it right? Of course not. But it fits our times and if our science is more accurate than the science of Aristotle, he is probably closer to the mark. (The Hebrews avoided saying God's name because they did not want to give the impression that they thought they knew him.)
While I like Geering's theology, that is not the point. What he, I hope, will succeed in doing is to hallow the work of reimagining. It's what we should have been doing since the time of Galileo at least. This book shakes us out of a deadly rut and could put the churches back in the business of guiding the faithful instead of embarrassing them.
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A modern prophet for a post-Christian age
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 29, 2015