Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.46 (920 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0830837094 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 208 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
What was missing? Through prayer and searching the Scriptures, Godawa realized that while God cares deeply for rationality, propositional truths were not the only, or even the primary, tools he used to reach people with his Truth. For any Christian who wants to learn how to communicate and defend the Gospel in a postmodern context, this book will help you find a path between the two extremes of intellectualized faith and anti-intellectual faith by recovering a biblical balance between intellect and imagination.. Artist and screen writer Brian Godawa used to revel in his ability to argue the truth of the gospel, often crushing his opponents in the process. In his refreshing and challenging book, Godawa helps you break free from the spiritual suffocation of heady faith. In time, however, he began to realize that winning an argument about the logic of Christianity did not equal persuading people to follow Jesus. Without negating the importance of reason and doctrine, Godawa challenges you to move from understanding the Bible "literally" to "literarily" by exploring the poetry, parables and metaphors found in God's Word. In fact, Godawa discovered that story, metaphor and imagery were central to God's communication style because they could go places reason could never go: into the heart. Weaving historical insight, pop culture and personal narrative throughout,
Highly Recommended! Dave Vandeveer Brian Godawa shows how God works through the arts and not just, or even primarily, through propositional truth. The Bible reveals God's heart through the images and stories of people's lives, and He continues to engage people this way today. Brian exposes our tendency to approach God heartlessly by distilling the doctrine and then ditching the story. In doing this we lose the life of the message, and reduce revelation to cold, heartless proposition.Word Pictures opened my eyes to how Western Christianity has over emphasized reason and logic at the expense of life. We are to wors. Jeremy said Words? Pictures?. This book presents a perspective that is new to me when thinking about the Bible. This book demonstrates the value of rendering an image with words and the Bible is full of this. As an example, an image derived from words is the difference between monotone speech and speech with inflection. This book presents how this came to be and gives many citations for reference.. Jacob A. Davis said A much-needed primer on Christian creativity. There seems to be a recent movement within the Protestant community to finally start talking about the arts and their role in the Christian life. Numerous publishers in the evangelical and mainline streams have released direct or indirect approaches to the matter as of late, from groundbreaking to the pitiful. With so many books now in the mix (and my personal bookshelf space gradually being depleted as a result), it is refreshing to find a book that I can recommend to everyone as a starting point for study on the broad subject of a Christian approach to art, literature, film, a
He has also convinced me that I am a 'literarialist.' Read this book and you'll probably become one too." (Dean Batali, TV writer, That '70s Show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer)"Brian Godawa is that rare combination of industry professional and serious intellectual who is respected by the academic community and the media industry as well. Godawa shows convincingly that God interacts with us as whole persons, not only through didactic teaching but also through metaphor, symbol and sacrament." (Nancy R. The thoroughness of research makes the book a triumph of scholarship as well." (Leland Ryken, Clyde S. It is a spirited and balanced defense of the imagination as a potential conveyer of truth. As a Hollywood insider, Godawa is uniquely situated to assess both the assets and liabilities of today's major movie industry and to offer valuable suggestions to Christians for how they should interact with it. Pervading all this wealth