Steven Ogden

Faith in the 21st Century, (Winchester, UK; Washington, USA: O Books, 2009,  www.o-books.net).

It is time to challenge traditional understandings of God in order to create a twenty-first century faith. We have to say goodbye to the Sunday school God and find new ways of thinking about God.

This is not an exercise in theory, but an effort to take the practice of life seriously. In fact, a twenty-first century faith is an open, dynamic and courageous attitude toward life. It presumes that God is found not in the sky, but in the midst of life. It begins with experience, our shared experience. While experience is not everything, it is a good starting point. It is what we know.

A new description of God can enrich and inspire human experience by incorporating the idea of the absence of God. There are, nevertheless, exquisite moments of presence. While an encounter with presence is short-lived, we learn to live without it, half expecting another encounter with the presence of God in the world.

Date of publication 31.07.09

Endorsements

Steven Ogden’s ‘I Met God in Bermuda’ is an engaging popular work that addresses profound modern faith issues. Articulating well the issues that drive people out of organized religion he invites us to walk with him along a new and compelling path. John Shelby Spong, author Eternal Life: A New Vision.

Can anything new be said about religion, the oldest human obsession? Probably not, but in this compelling book Steven Ogden has at least found a new way of talking about it. Richard Holloway, Former Anglican Primus of Scotland; Professor of Divinity Gresham College London

Steven Ogden’s wonderfully accessible book is a timely reminder that there’s more to religion than dogmatic fundamentalism, and that symbolism and imagery have an important place in our spiritual lives, even if they’re not literally “true”. ‘I Met God in Bermuda’ is a quirky, thoughtful and compassionate demonstration that the essence of faith is doubt and that, to mean anything at all, faith must be integrated with our knowledge and experience of the world we live in. Hugh Mackay, Psychologist, social researcher, columnist and author

Steven Ogden has written a 21st Century Honest to God and he has done it with wit and wisdom. He gives his readers an engaging and lively postmodern riposte to the new atheists and cultural despisers of Christianity today. Prof Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics University of Edinburgh

‘Our image of God must go,’ said journalists referring to John Robinson’s Honest to God. Steven Ogden makes a similar cry. He calls for a new understanding of the pattern of divine presence which embraces those times of God’s absence too. A sanitized account of human experience is replaced with a positive engagement with the ambiguities of human life in God. Ogden outlines a true ‘faith seeking understanding’, a critical realist account of Christian belief which acknowledges the metaphorical nature of theological discourse. This is a challenging but essential introduction to Christian faith in our contemporary world. Stephen Platten, Bishop of Wakefield and Chair of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission

How can we reconcile suffering with a God of love? This is the question behind the despairing contemporary agnosticism that is emptying the churches. Steven Ogden tackles this crucial question with a rare combination of exemplary, honest theological engagement and a lively energising prose style. I Met God in Bermuda is immediately accessible for a wide audience, making this a book that should be on every parish’s study schedule. Dr Muriel Porter OAM, Historian, author, journalist with The Age, Melbourne

With Hitchens, Dawkins and company, giving religion a hard time it was refreshing to read “I met God in Bermuda”. This welcome book not only clearly analyses the contemporary challenges to Christian faith but more importantly provides a lively apologetic for it based both on personal spiritual experience and on a broad theological knowledge and expertise. Steven Ogden is a good and honest communicator of complex issues to a generation often confused by the spiritual market-place as well as by various extreme expressions of religion. The Rt Revd Andrew R St John, DD, Rector, The Church of the Transfiguration, New York

The Presence Of God In The World:

A Contribution To Postmodern Christology Based On The Theologies Of Paul Tillich And Karl Rahner, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007, www.peterlang.com).

This is an academic work.  The study’s thesis is that the presence of God can be affirmed, if presence is understood in relation to absence.  Accordingly, it argues that the experience of God is ambiguous and consists of presence and absence.  While the idea of interpreting experience from the perspective of presence and absence is not new, the application of this interpretation to the systems of Tillich and Rahner provides new insights.  Moreover, while Tillich and Rahner are in favor of the presence of God, their theologies are oriented toward modernity.  The aim of the study then is to make a contribution to Christology by reinterpreting the theologies of Tillich and Rahner in relation to postmodernity.