Who or What is God?

The essays in this book cover a wide range of issues centred on two themes, the search for truth, and the search for justice and peace. The search for truth concerns the ultimate reality to which the world's great religions point, involving discussion of religious experience, religious language, the relations between religions, life and death, and Christian belief. The search for justice and peace is pursued in the quest for a global ethic and in the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi and again in South Africa during the apartheid era. Who or What is God? begins with the ordinary concept of God found today in most churches and in common discourse - the God whom such writers as Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchins in God is Not Great reject. Hick also rejects this concept, but not the experience of transcendent reality that it so inadequately expresses. This leads to a distinction, drawn in different ways within each of the world faiths, between God or the Ultimate in itself and that reality as humanly known in terms of human concepts and in historically and regionally different forms.