God, Freedom and Human Dignity: Embracing a God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered Culture
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Does God’s all-encompassing will restrict our freedom? Does God’s ownership and mastery over us diminish our dignity?
The fear that God is a threat to our freedom and dignity goes far back in Western thought. Such suspicion remains with us today in our so-called secular society. In such a context any talk of God tends to provoke responses that range from defiance to subservience to indifference. How did Western culture come to this place? What impact does this social and intellectual environment have on those who claim to believe in God or more specifically in the Christian God of the Bible?
Professor of religion Ron Highfield traces out the development of Western thought that has led us our current frame of mind from Plato, Augustine and Descartes through Locke, Kant, Blake Bentham, Hegel, Nietzsche—all the way down to Charles Taylor’s landmark work Sources of the Self. At the heart of the issue is the modern notion of the autonomous self and the inevitable crisis it provokes for a view of human identity, freedom and dignity found in God. Can the modern self really secure its own freedom, dignity and happiness? What alternative do we have? Highfield makes pertinent use of trinitarian theology to show how genuine Christian faith responds to this challenge by directing us to a God who is not in competition with his human creations, but rather who provides us with what we seek but could never give ourselves.
God, Freedom and Human Dignity is essential reading for Christian students who are interested in the debates around secularism, modernity and identity formation.
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For some people, God is far from being a solution to life. He is the problem. For how can I be a free, morally responsible agent if God ordains and orders the world? And what is the place of human dignity in a creation saturated with the presence of God? In this accessible and readable book, Ron Highfield engages with a host of thinkers in the history of ideas to show how we need to reorient ourselves from being 'me centered' to being 'God centered.' Only then, he argues, can we leave behind competitive views of our relationship to the Deity, in order to understand the dignity and freedom God bestows upon us as creatures.
—Oliver D. Crisp, Fuller Theological Seminary
Humans have great dignity. Yet from where does it come? How is it sustained and protected amidst the turbulence of life and ever-changing opinions? In Ron Highfield's philosophically informed meditation, he reminds us that a 'God-centered' identity is the only secure basis for our dignity. We are never as truly free, safe and whole as we are when we rest in the self-giving God of the gospel.
—Kelly M. Kapic, Covenant College
Ron Highfield's book explores the philosophical and theological inner world of the core human temptation--the Promethean quest to challenge and even be god. By unmasking the impulses, desires and arrogance of the modern self, God, Freedom and Human Dignity provides for anyone who cares about the gospel today a guide to the postmodern condition and where the gospel must strike first. If this book were pocket size you'd find a copy in my pocket.
—Scot McKnight, Northern Seminary
- Title: God, Freedom & Human Dignity: Embracing a God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered Culture
- Author: Ron Highfield
- Publisher: IVP Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2013
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Pages: 229
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Identity (Psychology) Religious aspects Christianit; Self (Philosophy); Self
- ISBNs: 9780830864508, 0830864504
- Resource ID: LLS:9780830864508
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-06T20:54:07Z