Re‐defining god: The rhetoric of reconciliation

Abstract

Religious people who encounter crisis and tragedy often question the premises of their faith. Many of those believers, in order to continue in a life of faith, must re‐imagine their conceptions of God. This process of re‐imagining God, whether for an individual believer or a professional theologian, is a dialogical one. Utilizing Bakhtin's conception of speech utterances, we will model a process of reconciliation by which believers such as C.S Lewis and Shusaku Endo and theologians such as Schmuel Boteach and Enrique Dussell contribute to a rhetorical, dynamic understanding of God.