ABOUT THE BOOK
This is not a “feel good” book. It is not a book though that seeks to undermine or destroy everyone else’s faith, or belief, or whatever. It is a book that is written from the position of having one’s faith and belief completely shattered, or rather, having one’s hopes shattered, wishing the gooey niceness that religion offers was actually true somehow, and if it didn’t work, it must be my fault, something I was or was not “doing”, rather than the fault of the “system” itself. As previously conceived, this book was to be a radical book. Now it is even more so. Yet the point of departure, and that which I cannot shake or dismiss for some more palpable “answer” or belief, is that God is, and God is God, and that is terrifying, that is horrifying and sickening; but that is just the way it is: God is, and God is God, and we are God’s creatures, and there is nothing more to say. Except there is.
This book is the first of a three-volume work that is in some ways a “systematic theology”, but not in the traditional sense. This first volume focuses on “Philosophical Considerations”, followed then by volume two, “Theological Considerations” and then volume three, “Ecclesiological Considerations”. Yet volume one, as all three, is theological, in that there is a theological “program”, or “system”, “behind” it all, even as it focuses, for the most part, on philosophical issues. It also addresses and includes theological issues, and the reader will at times, even frequently, find references to and citations of Scripture at times even to support philosophical arguments. It is, in short, existential, as is, as the argument runs, all theology and all philosophy implicitly, even if not always explicitly. In some ways, I am simply tired and board, and disgusted with, the academic pretense of separating the personal/existential from the scholarly/academic. I have no intention of erasing the personal/existential from the scholarly/ academic analysis and argument that here follows. As such, this book, and indeed the work as a whole, is a series of reflections, or at times, meditations, as well as a series of speculations and analyses. The individual chapters do not necessarily fit together in a single genre or style. Some of the chapters, or parts thereof, go back to writing I did quite a long time ago now, even as most are brand new. What ties them together is my own personal struggle, or to use a phrase I find rather sickening, my own personal “search for faith”, or my own “path”. They are stylistically diverse as well, at times being somewhat almost personal memoire, at times scholarly analysis, philosophical, theological, and historical, at times textual and/or exegetical (though I have not been trained, as stated above, as a theologian and have no formal training in biblical studies), and at times homiletical. But there is, I think, a theme, or a position, or an understanding, or an insight, that runs through them all, and through the volumes that will follow, whereby they do, at least in my mind, somehow fit together as a whole, as a “Confession”, not in the sense of the admission of guilt, though that there is too, on every page implicitly even if not explicitly, but in the sense of assertion.
