By Greg Forster: part seven of a series. The image of God as king is very familiar in other contexts – especially as the importance of “the kingdom of God” in the teachings of Jesus is being rediscovered. But what we may not always realize is that a king is a worker! As with the image of God as a…
By Greg Forster: part six of a series. In my last post I noted that, without realizing it, the biblical images I had chosen for imagining God as a worker could be organized in a progressive scale based on what the various kinds of workers had stewardship over: God as a doctor: Human body (material bodies of intelligent creatures) God as…
By Greg Forster: part four of a series. Adam was not only a gardener; he was a farmer. He was called to bring the world under cultivation not only to make it beautiful but to make it fruitful. In this, Adam was like God. In many parables, Jesus represents God as the owner or manager of a farm or other agricultural…
By Greg Forster: part three of a series. If the profession of shepherd is “largely lost on us today” that of the doctor is not. To the contrary, the difficulty for us is to understand how remote and exotic – and shameful – it was in the biblical world. While the shepherd’s work is foreign to us, we are actually too…
By Greg Forster: part two of a series. In a talk on Sending Disciples to a Pluralistic World, Vincent Bacote said: “Many Christians live in an imagination desert, unable to connect faith to vocation.” That’s a deep insight – that it takes imagination to make the connection between faith and work. And Bacote draws the work/imagination connection tighter when he…
By Greg Forster: part one of a series. Do we really think of God as a worker? We may say he is one, citing John 5:17 or other passages. But does our concept of God match our theology? How we imagine God is one of the most profound formative influences on our faith and life. That’s why scripture gives us…
The Green Room 