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Title: Is Jesus God?: Finding Our Faith by Michael Morwood ISBN: 0-8245-1891-8 Publisher: Crossroad Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 June, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Hoping Again
Comment: I had resigned myself to being forever frustrated with the teaching & preaching in my Catholic church. I wanted more 'meat' that I could take as a challenge to my prayer life and social justice mission. Michael has given me challenge, rooted in today's cosmology and scripture. I am grateful!
Rating: 1
Summary: New Cosmology? Same Song, Different Verse
Comment: We do need more people to challenge outdated religious concepts, but Michael's arguments of "updating" God to match our present cosmology simply won't work.
Our present scientific cosmology, whatever its limitations, was not developed with God in mind. All ideas came from observation, speculation, theory, and testing of physical results. In none of that can we find evidence of God's hand directing it.
If we superimpose "God" on our present paradigm, what kind of God would He/She/It be? Michael proposes awe and wonder at the mystery surrounding us. We don't need God to feel that. Michael states that "God remains utterly transcendent and utterly immanent".
Perhaps, if we could prove the existence of a God. Michael further states "God remains, even more so, the greatest mystery of all, beyond our concepts and beyond our mistaken efforts to shape God into our notion of 'person' and beyond the popular image of a male deity".
In other words, when we choose "God", we are choosing merely our own thoughts and ideas as to what God is.
Michael writes that the apostle Paul has an outdated cosmology, and we need to reject Paul. Yet looking at the same observable facts, Paul rightly concluded in Rom 9:16 that "...it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy."
Paul's conclusion was based on obvious physical evidence plus the fact that we cannot choose a God who is not dependent on our own beliefs and and opinions shaped by culture, genetics, and psychological dependency.
Granted, the old cultural ideas of God are outdated, but simply superimposing "God" over a new cosmology that doesn't need him is much like corporate welfare or political porkbarrels. If there is a God, then he/she/it is not dependent on our concepts. If we place God within this new cosmology, we merely make God the result of our measurements.
This is exactly what Paul, Jesus, and the disciples taught against. If man is a creation of God, then man must accept freedom for his own decisions apart from culture or ideological needs. Knowing this to be fully impossible, Jesus stands as an offering of grace for those who seek truth beyond that of men.
By seeking to remove the sacrifice of Christ, Michael makes us sacrificial objects to the ideas of humans and majority rule.
Rating: 3
Summary: If Spong was Catholic, and less polemical
Comment: This was kind of a disappointing read. I suppose it might serve as a useful introduction for those thinking of stepping out of the darkness of conventional Christianity, but for those who have done so already, it doesn't really have anything new to offer.
I think Morwood should have developed his arguments a little more. This is not a thick book (141 pages), and it suffers somewhat by suggesting radical departures from traditional Catholicism without backing them up with well-reasoned, detailed arguments. I don't know how persuasive they will be to anyone who is not already leaning in that direction -- although I suppose if they weren't already leaning in that direction, they probably wouldn't consider reading a book called "Is Jesus God?"
While his writing style is less confrontational than Jack Spong's (which is a good thing), his work is much like Spong's in that it fails to provide a very appealing alternative vision. For this reason I can give it only a marginal recommendation.
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Title: God Is Near: Trusting Our Faith by Michael Morwood ISBN: 0824519841 Publisher: Crossroad Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Tomorrow's Catholic: Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millennium (Inspirational Reading for Every Catholic) by Michael Morwood ISBN: 0896227243 Publisher: Twenty-Third Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Praying a New Story by Michael Morwood ISBN: 1570755310 Publisher: Orbis Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Jesus in the New Universe Story by Cletus Wessels ISBN: 1570754659 Publisher: Orbis Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Vows of Silence : The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II by Jason Berry, Gerald Renner ISBN: 0743244419 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 04 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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