Forgiving God: Embracing a Risky Adventure with the Divine

This moving faith odyssey chronicles one man’s journey from Christian fundamentalism to the form of progressive Christianity known as process theology. Macallan, a church leader and professor of theology, shares his shock at being diagnosed with cancer, and how that shock challenged him to confront his beliefs about God and the world.
Prior to his diagnosis, Macallan had ignored the implications of evolution for the traditional doctrines of sin and theodicy (the problem of evil in relation to God), and historical Jesus scholarship. “I had always felt,” he writes, “that if I could just hold on to the core Christian doctrines and how they are traditionally understood, I would be alright.” But to do so required a range of mental gymnastics that collapsed under the weight of his diagnosis. And, as aspects of his traditional beliefs collapsed, so did his faith.
Forgiving God describes Macallan’s journey toward a different understanding of reality, one informed by process philosophy, which then led him to a different understanding of God. In these pages, Macallan guides readers along the path he took from understanding God as an all-powerful and all-knowing being to a divine reality that participates with us in the unfolding of creation. This God does not stand outside the flow of reality, but within it, experiencing all that every moment of reality experiences. The book further shows how this perspective on the divine not only impacts one’s self-awareness, but one’s awareness of all creation. It becomes a call to ethical choice and charts a way of living that, as the subtitle suggests, is a risky adventure with the divine.

Originally from South Africa, Brian C. Macallan is currently Senior Lecturer in Theology at the University of Divinity and Ministry Leader at HeartWell Church, Melbourne Australia. His research emphasizes the practical connection between faith and life and its impact for the church in its cultural context.