The God Nobody Knows: Unexplored Dimensions of Belief

Janet McCreadie is a Dunnville-based freelance editor and writer.

Belief in God is something each of us has a free choice to accept or reject. According to Reginald Stackhouse, often the choice is based on a way of conceiving God that is mistaken for the reality itself.

Questions about God’s reality have been known to recur with different degrees of intensity, throughout peoples’ lives. Belief in God cannot be just an intellectual concept for anyone who takes itseriously, the author maintains. It also has to be an enriching experience which makes a more convinced believer.

Stackhouse can truly say he believes in God, and this book has been written to help believers who might think they have to abandon their faith because they find no meaning in the word God as they have understood it. Ithas also been written for the atheist who has not yet made the effort to find another way of conceiving God.

Stackhouse has written the book as one who has moved from faith to unbelief to faith, and found itpossible to do so by recognizing how human concepts of God are. It has permitted him to see that the reality of God is beyond human efforts to conceive Him. His conclusion is that God remains the one nobody knows, but God remains the one in whom a person can believe. They are not mutually exclusive terms.

Analyzing thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, and Sartre and movements such as religionism, cultism and sexism, the author examines the human experience of God and shows how belief in God can give purpose, order, wholeness, and confidence to a person’s life.