The Reticence of God
Leon J. Podles on Signs & Revelation
I will die eventually, perhaps painfully. Yet in many incidents of my life I recognize the preserving hand of God. Once I was driving along a rural road on a mountainside at 60 MPH. I suddenly noticed the beauty of the wildflowers and slowed down to a crawl to admire them. At that moment a tire blew out.
Many Christians have had such experiences, yet they still tend to think of God as an undifferentiated, impersonal blob. One English Methodist, in justifying a new hymnal that addressed God as “Mother” as well as “Father,” explained that it didn’t matter what we called him (or her), because God wasn’t really a person.
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Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in Old English and Old Icelandic from the University of Virginia and is a senior editor of Touchstone. His latest book is Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine's Press, 2020). He and his wife Mary (author of the Touchstone column "A Thousand Words") are the parents of six children. He resides in Baltimore, Maryland.
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