Cosmos Reborn : Happy Theology on the New Creation -some reactions.

Well, it had me intrigued, the title and the blurb:

 Need a religious detox? Have a dose of happy theology! Good news to liberate your life. Though we opposed Him as "enemies in our minds," God never set Himself against us as our enemy. Adam was breathed from the very life of God, and it has always been the Creator's intent to restore humanity to the bliss and immortality of its divine origin. In the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God included you and absorbed the entire created order into Himself, bringing an end to decay and corruption. Mortality has been swallowed up by immortality 

 In part because it  seemed to promise some exploration of things I'd been considering lately and also because it seemed to be promising that it would be based in some 'respectable' theology. I like the way that the book quotes and uses the ideas of theologians like Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Clement of Alexandria and modern ones like Torrance and Barth. This list might rightly give the impression that there is a strong Trinitarian focus to the theology. The author, John Crowder, confesses himself to be a fan of such theology though with the disclaimer that he may not always pass it on so well. And to be fair there were one or two points when I felt that he fell of the theological wagon but overall the thrust was fairly consistent and sustained.

One of the things I enjoyed also was someone quite obviously formed in the pente-charismatic end of US Evangelicalism 'selling' Orthodox theology like theopoiesis and doing so in a style that would probably connect with that constituency. Even to the point of using the language of prosperity teaching -which was frankly a bit disturbing though a hint here and there that it is nuanced in such a way as to avoid the excesses of that kind of teaching (though not enough that I felt entirely sure of that)

The main theses being promoted are an exposition of the theological implications of God being love and that we are loved from eternity. In the process he does a take-down of popular excesses in the relating of penal substititionary atonement, the misconceived understandings of God's wrath and the general grumpiness of the way that popular American Evangelicalism portrays God. And he's right to do all of those things.

Just sometimes I felt he got carried away with his own rhetoric and so seemed to fall into the 'rebound' effect of argumentation (you know, trying to state something against an error so strongly that you end up appearing to endorse something equally erroneous the other way) -though there are little bits that indicate these are flights of rhetoric. A notable place where this happens is in the treatment of anger where he manages to calm the rhetoric to note that love implies anger in some circumstances and he probably does so in a way that overall gets the balance right on that.

I found myself speed-reading some sections, and asked myself why. What i realised was that there was a lot of familiarity on my part with the broad line of argument being made and that I was getting impatient with the preacherly voice of delivery in the text which battered at me: 'I know, I get it; now can we get on with the next point?' captures my inner reaction.

The thing I'd probably want to explore with him, if I got a chance, would be how -given the hammering home of the finished work of Christ- we are actually to understand continuing bad behaviour and bad attitudes in Christians. Sometimes it almost seemed that he'd slipped into transcendentalism and was singing Mary Baker Eddy's tunes.

Amazon.com: Cosmos Reborn : Happy Theology on the New Creation eBook: John Crowder: Kindle Store:


Cosmos Reborn -- Amazon
Cosmos Reborn -- Book Trailer
John Crowder -- Main site (Sons of Thunder)
John Crowder -- Fan page on Facebok

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