Reviews for The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday

The average rating for The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-13 00:00:00 Amanda Atkins Gunton notes that with more rationalistic approaches to faith, moral action got stripped down to raw principles and concepts. In doing so, the centre of biblical faith, the cross, was eclipsed. Gunton argues that action must be understood through narrative, and narrative is understood through employments of metaphor. All meaningful action is metaphorical, and these metaphors give the cross' narrative its meaning. Thus, while in one literalistic way, Jesus was not "fighting" or "ruling" or doing anything priestly, these three domains of Old Testament language (war, law, and sacrifice) are applied to the actions on the cross to understand it. These metaphors, in turn, can and do get employed to understand the believers action as fighting evil, living justly, or living sacrificially. Personally, I found Gunton hard to follow at times in this book. I like Gunton's thinking, but he can at times get a bit ivory tower.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-30 00:00:00 Mortimer Mortimer One of top 5 books i have read on atonement. Collin Gunton work is different from other atonement books in a sense that he engages with the enlightment scholars such as Hagel, Emmanuel Kant and Frederick Schleiermacher.