Imagining God

“Humberto Casanova has walked boldly into the thick complexity of biblical language. He is deeply informed by the claim and function of metaphor and invites his readers to a quite fresh discernment of their potential. He deals with the trickiness of catching the inscrutable holy God in human articulation and does so with an alert critical edge. This book will be of immense value for those who work at the communication of serious faith in an increasingly skeptical culture. Casanova’s careful scholarship is a great service to our common work of interpretation.”


—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of The Prophetic Imagination





“Accessible and profoundly complex, Humberto Casanova’s new study explores myth and meaning in the literatures of the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean world, relating recurring patterns of content and thought to contemporary media and messaging. With clarity, the work introduces and applies a wide range of theoretical approaches employed in studies of comparative religion and mythography. An important thread in this thought-provoking book deals with reception history and the ways in which people read and purposely misread biblical myth thereby shaping and reinforcing particular worldviews.”


—Susan Niditch, Amherst College, author of Ancient Israelite Religion





“In his book Humberto Casanova makes use of the conceptual metaphor theory, as first introduced by Lakoff and Johnson. His analysis offers two strong claims about fundamentalism in religion, especially in Christianity. First, the church presents the idea of God through anthropomorphization. Second, the worldview of the church cannot be reconciled with that found in today’s democratic societies. The basic problem with these conceptual metaphors, Casanova contends, is that they cannot be taken literally because they are incongruous with what people know about the world today.”


—Zoltán Kövecses, Eötvös University, Hungary, author of Where Metaphors Come From





“Humberto Casanova reflects wide learning in ancient, medieval, and modern sources on religion and argues compellingly that the concepts of ‘myth’ and ‘metaphor’ are essential for the study of religion.”


—Marc Zvi Brettler, Duke Trinity College, author of The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously





“Humberto Casanova joins the increasing number of scholars who affirm that the Bible has not just been influenced by myth, it is myth. Where Casanova moves the conversation forward is in his argument that this categorical misinterpretation of the Bible is at the root of the current state of religious affairs—more and more people are finding religion irrelevant to the modern world and are therefore leaving religious organizations altogether. . . . In Imagining God, Casanova makes the compelling argument that the ancients constructed their ideas of God using metaphors drawn from their own cultural surroundings, and so should we, thus calling for a new theology that embraces the Bible’s mythical nature, is in dialogue with the natural sciences, and that takes seriously the criticisms of today’s youth.”


—Amy L. Balogh, Regis University





“Humberto Casanova offers a cogent assessment of the reception and use of biblical imagery in the Western theological imagination through a lucid and in-depth examination of the categories of myth and metaphor. . . . His diagnosis of the current crisis of Christian theology traces the problem to a reliance upon metaphors that are disconnected from contemporary life. The remedy calls for no less than a ‘radical new vision of God,’ one that replaces outdated source domain images with fresh metaphors generated by the institutions and values of today.”


—Dexter E. Callender Jr., Miami University