Getting God Wrong
Ebook
Reading a tone of voice into printed words, especially the personal experience of an email or text, can disconnect two people, even friends. Having one friend reinterpret the way another "heard" the words with their own tone of voice may lead them into discovering how Jesus seems to hear God differently, even though he read the same Bible.
In Getting God Wrong, the reader is invited into a conversation on how they taught themselves to misunderstand the One who loves them best. "Instructions" is the same word that gets translated "commandments," and "guidance" is the same word sometimes translated "law." This shift of translations can affect one's emotional engagement with the ideas.
People have told themselves for centuries that God marched the people of Israel out of four hundred years of slavery, out into the desert, to tell them, "Now you'll be my slaves and live under my commandments!" What if God used a different tone of voice, and not the one people usually "hear" as they read? Getting God Wrong suggests that God wants people to hear his heart as clearly as Jesus lived it out in front of them. Jesus is God's tone of voice.
“This provocative book reflects the spiritual odyssey of a man who is satisfied with nothing less than being filled with all the fullness of God (Eph 3:19). You are invited to share his journey by re-examining and pondering your notions of God, of Jesus, and of what a truly godly life entails.”
—Bob and Jeanette Lauer, authors of Love Never Ends
“Reading this book felt like a gentle, quiet, subtle, and constant invitation to something better and truer—as if I were being taken by the hand and led toward the heart of God, and the deepest possible revelation that he is a loving Father. And knowing that somehow changes everything.”
—Brian Sanders, founder, Underground Network
“This is an audacious book. Yet it has a lot to say about how humans have misheard God since the day we first crawled from the primordial muck. Geoff Kohler asserts that God speaks love, not fear, desiring relationship rather than fealty. He invites us to listen afresh, saying, ‘Suppose Jesus is God’s tone of voice. Suppose we are to listen to God the way Jesus listened to God.’ Ahh. That’s an invitation worth accepting.”
—Dana Hughes, retired Presbyterian minister
“G. S. Kohler opens our eyes to what many of us have missed in our spiritual lives: an authentic, deep, and wisdom-filled relationship with God. For those seeking liberation from tyrannical views of God, Kohler reframes the commandments, obedience, sin, and control with solid scholarship and an easy tone that invites us to come and listen. Contemporary and personal examples provide illumination to any reader. This is an excellent guidebook for living in the wisdom of God with wonder and gratitude!”
—Carrie Call, conference minister, United Church of Christ
- Title: Getting God Wrong
- Author: G. S. Kohler
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666764932, 9781666764925, 1666764922, 9781666764789, 1666764787, 1666764930
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666764932
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-10-24T02:54:47Z
G. S. Kohler is a storyteller who has had many professions, from professional clamdigger to lead pastor. He now works as a transitional pastor. He believes that if church is about being good, he’d rather go camping. He is married and has three grown children, who all work in helping people recover from trauma.