\u201cPrescientific people invested every tree, brook, and celestial body with personhood. For all its grandeur and refinement, the modern idea of a transcendent personal deity who acts wilfully in the world is only the final manifestation of ancient animism. For the religious agnostic, this is the ultimate idolatry\u201d<\/span> (p.103).<\/div>\nWhat do you think? Obviously a book cannot be summed up in a few quotes. But I\u2019ve often felt that, on the one hand, the highly anthropomorphic depictions of God one finds in ancient monotheistic religious traditions really are just the various anthropomorphic deities combined into one almighty and all-powerful God. Presumably we are meant to build on and at the same time move beyond such ideas to something better. Yet on the other hand, it is hard for me to imagine setting aside entirely the language of personhood in reference to God, not because I think of God as a person micromanaging events in the universe, but because I think that God is greater than <\/em>that rather than something less. God is the ultimate transcendence, and speaking about God as \u201cimpersonal\u201d seems to represent a reduction, a depiction of God as less <\/em>than we are.<\/p>\nI\u2019ve long<\/a> found Hans Kung\u2019s language helpful when he speaks of God as \u201cmore than personal\u201d. Admittedly, we don\u2019t have any idea what that means, but it seems to be pointing in the right direction.<\/p>\n
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