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 English from the University of Virginia and has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator. He is the author of The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and the forthcoming License to Sin (both from Spence Publishing). His latest book is Losing the Good Portion: Why Men are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine’s Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Naples, Florida. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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