UNDERSTANDING OUR EMBODIMENT

From The Living Church-

Review by Rowan Williams

Anything written by Ephraim Radner can be guaranteed to be serious, constructively difficult, spiritually challenging and original, and this book is no exception. It will be hard to classify, though; it is essentially an essay in theological anthropology, but is at the same time an exceptionally wide-ranging essay on our North Atlantic cultural crisis. In a nutshell, what he argues is that our Western society has lived through a “Great Transition” involving altered expectations of life and health, and reduced birth rates. We are less and less capable of seeing our lives as following a God-given trajectory in which birth, generation, and death constitute the way God gives us of being human and growing in our humanity to the point at which we resign our lives into God’s hands for a “Great Transfiguration.” Learning to inhabit this trajectory is the “Great Traversal,” the journey in which we enact and echo God’s traversing of human experience in Jesus Christ, the divine act that has established that the prosaic transitions of our routine experience are the stuff of which the new creation will be made — not by our effort or success, but by God’s mercy.

More here-

http://livingchurch.org/covenant/2017/04/27/understanding-our-embodiment/