WHAT KIND OF GOD?
Responses to 10 Popular Questions
By Michael Ots
IVP. 153 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 783 594 108
Michael Ots has complied a highly accessible compendium of ten of the most popular accusations that are levelled – ‘finger pointed’ – at God, drawn from his talks on university campuses nationally and internationally.
Sexual ethics, Old Testament judgment, suffering, exclusivity and divine child abuse all make an appearance. Ots presents the book essentially as a response to Dawkin’s God Delusion signature quote and the New Atheist’s champion rears his head in most chapters.
Ots proposes that most of the questions that arise are now more about his character than his existence. Essentially God has been the victim of a smear campaign. Atheism has been on the decline according to recent census figures and for this reason I wonder if Dawkins deserves so much air time. His war on the evils of religion is recognised by many to be inconsistent and untenable; people reject it because they actually want good for their loved ones. At least Old Atheism was honest: no God, no morals, no complaints. New Atheism surely cannot demean the principles of a missing God.
The same conclusion is evidently reached: ‘deep down there is a sneaking suspicion that he is there anyway’, we doubt his goodness and, undecided, go happily on our way. Yet I do wonder if the point could have been made from a slightly different tack overall. Agnosticism is the new kid on the block in unreligious Britain and maybe deserves more explicit assessment.
No fence sitting
My favourite chapter concerns the relevance of God and majors on the claims of Christ. By quoting C.S. Lewis Ots shows that the one thing Christianity cannot be is ‘moderately important’. The claims of Christ cannot be anything close to a ‘maybe/maybe not’, a clear nod to agnostics. Indeed the call for more ‘extremism’ in following Christ’s (love your enemy) example is both a reiteration and a wonderful response to the big political question of our day. What Kind of God? is something of an apologetics illustration feast, replete with anecdotes and explanations that are infinitely reusable. As an introduction to personal apologetics this is a very helpful reference to answer questions that people are really asking.
