Josh Mueller at Open Minded Coversations offered up a review of Discovering The God Imagination on Amazon. He gave it 5 stars. I really appreciate Josh’s review because he is such a great thinker. Thanks Josh.
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Jonathan Brink is sharing some key insights regarding questions that matter to all of us: What defines us as human beings? Are we good or evil from God’s perspective and in the way God places worth and value on human beings? How does the biblical narrative identify the reason for God allowing us to probe the possibility of evil and how did “the Fall” impact our own judgment of God’s attitude and of our dignity and identity? What if the impact of false judgment and derailed thinking caused us to read the story itself in a skewed way, reflecting that same broken understanding of God and humanity ever since? What if the root problem and God’s response is much simpler than we thought possible?
Brink goes into great detail exploring particularly the opening chapters of the Bible. He demonstrates over and over again how the changed human perspective misreads and contradicts God’s actual intent and judgment. He also illustrates beautifully how the calling of Abram and the history of Israel become the blueprint of God meeting people where they are at and preparing them to understand both the futility of our own attempts to find validation and identity apart from God’s judgment of “good”, and the true view of reality from God’s point of view. He proposes a radically different understanding of the atonement that takes into account the actual reason why God had to become (!) sin in order to demonstrate His unchanging love and invite us to overcome the root problem.
I really loved this book for several reasons:
1. It brought many “puzzle pieces” of my own questions and past discoveries over the years together into a coherent picture that makes sense to me personally and offers a compelling view of both the Old Testament and the rationale of the Christian Gospel.
2. It is wonderfully liberating in its focus on the eternal nature of God’s love and grace.
3. It is insightful not only regarding the theological aspects of the story but also more recent scientific discoveries how our brains work and how the brain creates a sense of reality and personal judgment.
4. It breaks through many unhelpful and paralyzing paradigms, helping me to see how our participation through faith (which is identified as the ability to “see” the truth and agree with it) mobilizes us, instead of making us into passive recipients of a falsely understood rescue of God.
5. It helps us to see and embrace not only our own identity, dignity and purpose of love but also in every other human being, independent of their gender, race, sexuality, religious affiliation etc. It particularly compels us to see the “enemy” no longer as the problem and as a threat to ward off in order to secure our own existence but as another human being, with the same dignity, struggling with the same root problem.
I highly recommend the purchase of the book. It still inspires me daily to think about the wider implications in a multitude of areas: evangelism, a Christian approach to ethics and justice, ecclesiology, a new perspective on heaven and hell, biblical hermeneutics etc.
