Most Christians living in a secular society have unwittingly relegated God and all things spiritual to the "second storey" of the universe: a realm we cannot reach except through death. The effect of this is to banish God, along with the saints and angels, from our everyday lives. Fr. Stephen Freeman makes a compelling case for becoming aware of God's living and active presence in every moment of our lives here and now. Learning to practice your Christian faith in a one-storey universe will change your life--and make possible the living, intimate relationship with God you've always dreamed of.
God required the price to remove his anger against the humankind who offended him. He wanted to see in that price a death, with bloodshed as evidence, demonstrating a sacrifice for the forgiveness of the sinners. For God, all sinners had to die. So, when Jesus died, the corpse of Jesus represented the corpse of all sinners. God was satisfied when he saw the corpse of Jesus. God put in his mind that he had killed all mankind. The punishment was then given, and the problem between him and the humankind was resolved. Jesus Christs corpse has ability to be the price required by God. His blood as a killed sacrifice is the evidence of the death required by God. The blood of animals was not needed in the mankinds salvation process. The blood required by God was to be a mankinds blood. This blood had to come from the death of a perfect person, perfect as God himself. The problem was only to be solved by the blood of God himself, because only God is perfect. But God could only die by taking human form, that is why the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, descent to earth to die in the place of humankind, through an agonizing death at the cross of Golgotha, and therefore he paid the price required by God. Then, God died as self-substitution for men. He was God-man. In beliefs of different world religions, we cant find any other god who died for people. Only God, in whom Christians believe in, died for humankind, and he had risen. He is alive. Only the Faith in God propitiated for sinners is True Faith, and other beliefs are false faith.
Is There a God? offers a powerful response to modern doubts about the existence of God. It may seem today that the answers to all fundamental questions lie in the province of science, and that the scientific advances of the twentieth century leave little room for God. Cosmologists have rolled back their theories to the moment of the Big Bang, the discovery of DNA reveals the key to life, the theory of evolution explains the development of life... and with each new discovery or development, it seems that we are closer to a complete understanding of how things are. For many people, this gives strength to the belief that God is not needed to explain the universe; that religious belief is not based on reason; and that the existence of God is, intellectually, a lost cause. Richard Swinburne, one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion of our day, argues that on the contrary, science provides good grounds for belief in God. Why is there a universe at all ? Why is there any life on Earth? How is it that discoverable scientific laws operate in the universe? Professor Swinburne uses the methods of scientific reasoning to argue that the best answers to these questions are given by the existence of God. The picture of the universe that science gives us is completed by God. This new, updated edition of Richard Swinburne's popular introductory book Is There a God? features two substantial changes. He presents a new, stronger argument why theism does and materialism does not provide a very simple ultimate explanation of the world. And he examines the idea of the possible existence of many other universes, and its relevance to his arguments from the fine-tuning of our universe to the existence of God.
