Just over a week ago, I preached for the Beyond the Walls online ministry up in Toronto. I wanted to post the text of my sermon (I’ll also link to the video recording just before that text begins). I was excited about this particular topic, since it fit nicely with some thinking I’ve been doing in recent years, includingwhile reading Cédric Lagandré’s book Dieu n’existe pas encore and writing up some subsequent thoughts. I imagine I’ll continue to think on these kinds of themes, but I was pleased with how much the burning bush story—and Jesus’s riffing off of it in the Gospel of John—contributed to my thinking at this particular time.

As I write this, I’m almost done with a reread of Gérard Siegwalt’s La réinvention du nom de Dieu (Reinventing God’s Name), which is not an easy read (my French is pretty good but not accustomed to theological treatises) but has a lot to offer for thinking about what Christianity might look like today. Of the many things that I’m getting from this reread, one of the things I appreciated most is that Siegwalt has helped me understand a concept that I’ve been trying to get my head around for a year or more: the idea of a non-theist God.

I owe Pete Enns a lot. Reading his books in the years before I hit a faith crisis helped that experience go a lot more smoothly, as did continuing to read his stuff and listen to his podcasts during the process of faith transition.

Around the time this book was coming out, though, I needed a break. I felt like I knew most of his stuff, his media efforts felt like they were getting bigger and more corporate, and as much as I owed him, I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I even wondered what I could possibly get from another book and avoided this one for a while.

I was recently complaining about religious books that I felt were below where I am in my thinking, so this was a slice of humble pie. I don’t do great with dense philosophical or theological works, and my rating is more a reflection of that than anything else. I made it through with an audiobook, but I don’t know how much I’ll retain.

Tillich came highly recommended by other authors, but I think that most of what I wanted to get out of it was concentrated in the final chapter of the book. I may have to revisit that section in text. There’s much of interest in here—I just need to find a way to sit with it more effectively.