Overview

We express the mystery of God with diverse metaphors, but mostly in Adult terms. In this experimental theological adventure, Graham Adams imagines what might flow from a more thorough ‘be-child-ing’ of God. Aware that the Child can be idealized, he selects particular characteristics of childness in order to disrupt God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. The smallness of the Child re-envisages divine location in sites of smallness, like an open palm receiving the experiences of the overlooked. The weakness of the Child reimagines divine agency as chaos-event, subverting prevailing patterns of power and evoking relationships of mutuality. And the curiosity of the Child reconceives divine encounter as horizon-seeker, imaginatively and empathetically pursuing the unknown. These possibilities are brought into dialogue both with other theologies (Black, disabled and queer) and with pastoral loss, economic/ecological injustice, and theological education. Through these conversations, God the Child emerges not only as a new model for God, but intrinsic to God’s new social reality which is close at hand.

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9780334065005

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Reviews

"""Our world contains 1.9 billion children but how might God be represented through them? As Adams puts it, 'in a world of giants, we don’t notice what is small.' In this brilliantly challenging book Adams encourages us toward new ways of imagining God, without all the constructs and sophistication of the adult world, with words like smallness, weakness and curiosity. This new territory opens up huge potential for transformation within our understanding of God."" -- Carrie Grant “God the Child is a joyfully unsettling read: richly resource-full, wide-ranging and paradigm-shifting, with Graham Adams’ characteristic combination of careful clarity and poetic playfulness. Exposing and challenging ‘the colonial matrix of adult power’ (including its racist, ableist and heteropatriarchal dimensions), God the Child invites us to reimagine power and agency – divine and human – in ways that are bursting with subversive possibility.” -- Al Barrett"

"""Our world contains 1.9 billion children but how might God be represented through them? As Adams puts it, 'in a world of giants, we don’t notice what is small.' In this brilliantly challenging book Adams encourages us toward new ways of imagining God, without all the constructs and sophistication of the adult world, with words like smallness, weakness and curiosity. This new territory opens up huge potential for transformation within our understanding of God."" -- Carrie Grant"

Author Information

Revd Dr Graham Adams is a Tutor in Mission Studies, World Christianity and Religious Diversity at Luther King Centre for Theology and Ministry

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