Lloyd Geering

The Once and Future Jesus Conference took the quest of the historical Jesus to a new level. At this unprecedented gathering, leading thinkers turned their attention from the past to the future and asked: What do new understandings of Jesus mean for the church, the faith, and the world of tomorrow? Their answers can be found in the pages of this book.

Described by the BBC as ""the last living heretic,"" Lloyd Geering has spent much of his life wrestling with God. Of late, however, he finds himself struggling with the absence of God. The rise of nonreligious, secular culture around the world testifies that he is not alone, that the concept of God has become problematical. Should God be abandoned altogether? Can God be reformed, so to speak?Drawing from theology, science and his own faith journey-from his call to ministry, through his much-publicized heresy trial, to decades of public speaking, teaching and writing, Geering retraces key developments in the Western understanding of God. He imagines a new spirituality, one that blends a relationship to the natural world with a celebration of the rich inheritance of human culture.Reviews:“Reimagining God is surely the key challenge for any still drawn—for whatever reason—by the stories of or about the man Jesus from Nazareth, in the world `after theology’, which so many now recognise as the territory we together inhabit. … Lloyd Geering has shown himself to be not just a survivor but a gifted commentator for almost 50 years, not only on how to survive; but also, much more importantly, how to belong and indeed thrive as a progressive believer in today’s still too often less than progressive church.” —Sofia

The idea of evolution is the most life-changing concept to have emerged in modern times, but most people know of it only in fragments. The evolution of the universe, of planet Earth, of life and of human culture is a truly breathtaking story that can be told in many ways. In one continuous story this book combines cosmological and biological evolution with the subsequent development of human thought made possible by the emergence of language. Sir Lloyd shows that the commonly supposed conflict between religion and science arises from a failure to appreciate the role of what he calls the `human thought world’. The realm of the gods, created by human imagination, was the ancients’ way of understanding nature. For them it was both their science and their religion. By sketching the history of `God’, Lloyd shows that the centrality of this idea provided an essential premise for the emergence of empirical science. This has enabled the human species to dominate planet Earth and usurp roles once attributed to God. The story of evolution helps us understand the past — but the future of the human race now rests on our shoulders.

Though some twenty-three centuries have passed since an anonymous Jewish sage calling himself the Proclaimer (Ecclesiastes) set down his thoughts about life, they are strangely in tune with today’s secular age. It’s surprising, therefore—and some may think outrageous—that they ever found a place in Holy Scripture. Lloyd Geering has brought Ecclesiastes to life by ingeniously composing imaginative dialogues with the sage, which show that he was a free-thinker, a humanist, and an existentialist. In fact, this biblical heretic essentially undermined the rest of the Hebrew Bible by finding no discernible thread of purpose in the universe or in human existence, and by proposing that though Nature operates in ever-repeating cycles, much of human life is determined by sheer chance. The role of the sage, as Ecclesiastes saw it, was not to pass on gems of eternal wisdom, but to goad us into thinking things out for ourselves in our search for meaning in life.

According to Lloyd Geering the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity, which began as attempts to reflect the indwelling of God in human beings, were soon distorted to proclaim the reality of a sacred realm in the heavens. But the collapse of supernaturalism, he says, has produced a new and different pattern of reality: the self-creating universe, the self-evolving human species, and the emerging global consciousness. In light of these changes, he asks, 'Is Christianity going anywhere'? His answer, simply put, is that Christianity will not survive unless it can be harmonized with the secular global world. He further observes that all religious traditions must incorporate a concern for the present ecological crisis. And, he insists, any credible faith tradition must embrace a secular or humanist spirituality. Geering concludes that the most credible scenario for Christianity's future depends on accepting the Gaia concept as a powerful modern myth that will sustain individual humans spiritually, and our planetary home ecologically.

Lloyd Geering, a minister and professor in the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand, was tried for heresy in 1967 following his article 'What Does the Resurrection Mean?'. Found innocent, he became the foundation professor of religion at Victoria University. This is a reflective and honest account of his personal journey. In Wrestling With God Geering writes movingly of the interior and family life that form the backdrop to his controversial public life.

Many ideas once thought to be foundational to Christianity are now known to be false due to scientific discoveries regarding the nature of the universe and historical findings about how Christianity began. Is Christianity doomed to irrelevance or even extinction? How might Christianity reinvent itself so that it can address the real concerns of people in today's world? This collection of essays from such leading thinkers as Karen Armstrong and John Shelby Spong addresses questions such as life after death, the meaning of God, apocalypticism, and the significance of Jesus' death.Contributors: Karen Armstrong, Don Cupitt, Arthur J. Dewey, Robert W. Funk, Lloyd Geering, Roy W. Hoover, Robert J. Miller, Stephen J. Patterson, Bernard Brandon Scott, John Shelby Spong

According to Lloyd Geering, the world we inhabit is largely a product of our own making. We supply its meaning. Thus "God," a central symbol of meaning, is entirely a human creation. In Tomorrow's God, Geering traces the collective "drift toward meaning" that gave rise to the various religions and explores the reasons they are now in decline. He argues that, for our own survival, we must consciously create new meaning for our lives and shows how the Christian tradition may lead toward a new world of meaning.