The author takes his new and comprehensive vision of God as Spirit from the only place in which spirit is experienced and known, that is, from our experience of our own selves. The need for this intimate and, therefore, bold view of God rests on the increasing inability of a self-contradictory orthodoxy to speak to the spiritual sensibilities of people in the twenty-first century.

A new understanding of God enables the author to deal in a fresh way with the troublesome questions people have raised about the behavior with which God is often charged. It also allows him to reinterpret...