Formation for Knowing God

""God is Self-Revealed"" we are assured by many Christians today. Yet this conviction stems only from eighteenth-century Enlightenment debates. Early and ongoing Christians, with their Jewish roots, trusted God as a committed and saving but heavily clouded presence (whether by God's choice, or our inadequacy, or both). Continuing Christian tradition has thus insisted that there is much more to this God than we can hope to get our heads round. Yet such Christians have trusted that this loving, saving, triune God's purpose is to transform us Godward. ""The divine Word became as we are so we might become as he is."" Meanwhile, some of us at least can find ourselves drawn to share with our predecessors and one another in imagining how this may be. And then we may be drawn to realize in practice what we imagine--in active service to God among fellow humans and all God's fragile creation. Then, we may hope, we may have been brought to know God more nearly as God is.
Gerald Downing first argued this fifty years ago, and here he restates the issues with fresh insights and renewed hope.


""In a world of brittle religious certainties and defensive theologies, Downing provides a statement of Christian faith--not as a form of pseudo-knowledge--but as faith; as unknowing yet reasoned and imaginatively engaging. Accessible, lively, and enriched by an easy familiarity with a breadth of scholarship, Formation for Knowing God is a welcome and compelling read.""
--Duncan Dormor, St. John's College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

""Gerald Downing's Has Christianity a Revelation? was a necessary and challenging intervention when it was first published in 1964. Those were indeed exciting times for theology. But its message has not always been heeded and I am constantly astonished about how much other theologians seem to know about the inner workings of God. They would do well to read this lively revisit to an important topic.""
--Robin Gill, University of Kent, Kent, UK

""Many Christians will find their central beliefs about atonement, reconciliation, and the knowledge of God turned upside down by this book. The product of a lifetime's scholarship, it shows how careful study of the meanings of words and biblical texts produces liberating, positive, and hopeful conclusions at odds with what many churches teach today.""
--Jonathan Clatworthy, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK


F. Gerald Downing is an Anglican priest, retired from ministry in parishes and among students in their ministerial training. He has written many articles in a range of journals, and books with various publishers, from Has Christianity a Revelation? (1964) and A Man for Us and a God for Us (1968) to God with Everything (2008) and Order and (Dis)order in the First Christian Century (2013).