Abstract
John Butler,
Rock of Ages? The Changing Faces of the Christian God
, Lutterworth Press: Cambridge, 2013; 236 pp.: 9780718892968, £20.00 (pbk)
This is a very personal book. ‘My aim’, writes John Butler, ‘has been to lay out the fruits of my search for a less selective and sanitized image of God than the one I grew up with’ (p. 20). The territory of the search is extensive; the language in which it is recorded is fresh (as would be expected of the author whose portrait of The Red Dean of Canterbury was so vivid); the restraint with which it is exercised is exemplary (the book stretches to a modest 235 pages).
What inspires it is Butler’s middle-aged realization that the Rock of Ages on whom decades of churchgoing had taught him to rely as an immutable presence is in reality somewhat more complex. For example, this God, on the one hand, utters Ten magisterial Commandments, but, on the other, creates a whole host of rules, some petty, and some downright strange, governing every conceivable aspect of human life.
Challenged by these irreconcilables, Butler sets out to explore the different accounts of God that populate more than two millennia of faith-seeking understanding in twenty-four chronologically arranged chapters. He begins in polytheistic prehistory; he proceeds to the God of the Hebrew Scriptures; then to the God of the New Testament. Next he leaves the Bible behind and works his way through (largely Western, largely Reformed) Christian history: the God of Nicaea and Chalcedon, the God of the Reformation and of the Enlightenment and so on, right up to the God of Bultmann, Tillich and Robinson. He does not forget his theme and regularly returns to it: what does the theology of this age or that fashion have to say about God?
His conclusion is that many of the accounts that he uncovers are mutually exclusive. This causes difficulties for those who believe that God ‘really exists’ (p. 218). It does not for others, for whom God exists ‘in the shared beliefs and common rituals of a community of faith’ (p. 219). These face their own difficulties, as Butler further proposes that the process by which in every generation an image of God is created which is credible within the cultural milieu of the times ‘appears to have stuttered’ (p. 222) in our present age. Some will be uncomfortable with this dichotomy. Surely there are alternative ways of approaching it – might the different accounts be the consequence of human striving after the eternal in radically different ages, places and historical contexts, for example?
A proper index and footnotes would have made this a more satisfying read and there are some surprising errors (at the Transfiguration do Moses and Elijah really converse with Jesus ‘about the law’ (p. 53)?) and occasional confusions (a discussion of ‘begotten’ and ‘created’ (p. 78)). But Butler achieves the aim which he declares at the outset and offers his readers an appealing invitation to join the search. For those to whom this is new territory he is an accessible guide; for the more experienced he leaves a useful map.