Abstract

To liberate man, that is the theologian's task. But ever since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment theologians have been accused of failing dismally in this task. 'Who is this God you speak of? Why should I believe in him? Anyway, what difference will it make to me or anybody else if I do?' These are the most urgent of man's religious questions. And still it is widely believed that theologians have shrunk from giving answers to these questions in terms meaningful today, or even that they have concealed their incapacity to give answers by discussing these fundamental questions in a technical language only comprehensible to themselves. Here, however, is a daring attempt to grapple with these basic questions compactly and in a language shorn of all jargon. The author is writing specifically of the Christian God, the trinitarian God, but this is no abstract exposition of formal points of doctrine. He discusses the present crisis of faith, traces its origins in the history of Christianity, describes how our idea of God has developed from Old Testament times to the present day, underlines the importance of insights of some of the greatest (and frequently most misunderstood) modern theologians and points to the challenge to so much of our thinking about God implicit in our new understanding of the individual's relationship to the community and in our discovery that the God of Christians is essentially a 'God of the future' -- "He who is to come."