The Divine Embrace

What is true Christian spirituality? Rediscover spirituality's biblical roots and how you can live out your response to God's story today.

What does it mean to say that God is Love? For many, the concept of unconditional love is troublesome, especially in the face of suffering, doubt, alienation, and loneliness, the kinds of hardships that occur for everyone at some time in their lives. We may want to believe it, but struggle to do so. We may start off on all kinds of spiritual searches but still find it ultimately impossible to accept that we are beloved before God. In this beautifully written and compassionate book, Christina Rees argues that the only way we can know God is through our own experience, by embarking on a personal journey of discovery and gradually learning to recognise how God is at work in our lives. Through that recognition we may begin to see the world, each other and ourselves the way God sees us.

Using examples from his own life, the author urges Christians to pay close attention to God's gifts and callings, and not to take them for granted. Each "sighting" of God's work, Gire says, can make Christians fall more in love with Him.

Religion thrives on two lies: distance and delay. "Divine Embrace" celebrates the initiative that God undertook to cancel every possible definition of distance. The mission of Jesus was not to begin the Christian religion but to reveal and redeem the image and likeness of God in human form.

Life at the end of the twentieth century presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. Miroslav Volf contends that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Reaching back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Increasingly we see that exclusion has become the primary sin, skewing our perceptions of reality and causing us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not within our (ever-narrowing) circle. In light of this, Christians must learn that salvation comes, not only as we are reconciled to God, and not only as we "learn to live with one another", but as we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been enfolded by God.

In this winsome, conversational book, pastor and speaker Ken Fong focuses on the biblical theme of adoption to explore the boundless, extravagant love of God.