Imagining God: Myth and Metaphor
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
An ever-growing number of Christians are becoming more and more uncomfortable with the tenets of the church, the stories of the Bible, and the church’s worldview. Statistics show that these feelings easily escalate into a crisis of faith, and for now their predicament is being resolved by leaving the church. This book will certainly help dealing with the crisis by showing that the language of faith is built by a web of metaphors taken from the Ancient Near East. We do not need to take biblical language literally, but as parables for human values in need to be assessed critically.
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“Humberto Casanova has walked boldly into the thick complexity
of biblical language. He is deeply informed by the claim and
function of metaphor and invites his readers to a quite fresh
discernment of their potential. He deals with the trickiness of
catching the inscrutable holy God in human articulation and does so
with an alert critical edge. This book will be of immense value for
those who work at the communication of serious faith in an
increasingly skeptical culture. Casanova’s careful scholarship is a
great service to our common work of interpretation.”
—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of
The Prophetic Imagination
“Accessible and profoundly complex, Humberto Casanova’s new study
explores myth and meaning in the literatures of the Ancient Near
East and Mediterranean world, relating recurring patterns of
content and thought to contemporary media and messaging. With
clarity, the work introduces and applies a wide range of
theoretical approaches employed in studies of comparative religion
and mythography. An important thread in this thought-provoking book
deals with reception history and the ways in which people read and
purposely misread biblical myth thereby shaping and reinforcing
particular worldviews.”
—Susan Niditch, Amherst College, author of Ancient Israelite
Religion
“In his book Humberto Casanova makes use of the conceptual metaphor
theory, as first introduced by Lakoff and Johnson. His analysis
offers two strong claims about fundamentalism in religion,
especially in Christianity. First, the church presents the idea of
God through anthropomorphization. Second, the worldview of the
church cannot be reconciled with that found in today’s democratic
societies. The basic problem with these conceptual metaphors,
Casanova contends, is that they cannot be taken literally because
they are incongruous with what people know about the world
today.”
—Zoltán Kövecses, Eötvös University, Hungary, author of Where
Metaphors Come From
“Humberto Casanova reflects wide learning in ancient, medieval, and
modern sources on religion and argues compellingly that the
concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘metaphor’ are essential for the study of
religion.”
—Marc Zvi Brettler, Duke Trinity College, author of The Bible
and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and
Religiously
“Humberto Casanova joins the increasing number of scholars who
affirm that the Bible has not just been influenced by myth, it
is myth. Where Casanova moves the conversation forward is in
his argument that this categorical misinterpretation of the Bible
is at the root of the current state of religious affairs—more and
more people are finding religion irrelevant to the modern world and
are therefore leaving religious organizations altogether. . . . In
Imagining God, Casanova makes the compelling argument that
the ancients constructed their ideas of God using metaphors drawn
from their own cultural surroundings, and so should we, thus
calling for a new theology that embraces the Bible’s mythical
nature, is in dialogue with the natural sciences, and that takes
seriously the criticisms of today’s youth.”
—Amy L. Balogh, Regis University
“Humberto Casanova offers a cogent assessment of the reception and
use of biblical imagery in the Western theological imagination
through a lucid and in-depth examination of the categories of myth
and metaphor. . . . His diagnosis of the current crisis of
Christian theology traces the problem to a reliance upon metaphors
that are disconnected from contemporary life. The remedy calls for
no less than a ‘radical new vision of God,’ one that replaces
outdated source domain images with fresh metaphors generated by the
institutions and values of today.”
—Dexter E. Callender Jr., Miami University
Product Details
- Title : Imagining God: Myth and Metaphor
- Authors:
- Casanova, Humberto
- Bandstra, Barry L.
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Publication Date: 2020
- ISBN: 9781532688201
Humberto Casanova was Professor of Biblical Languages and
Exegesis in the Evangelical Institute of Chile and Professor of Old
Testament in the Evangelical Theological Community of Chile. He was
also a member of the Bible Translation Committee of the
International Bible Society.