IN HIS NEW BOOK, God the Child: Small, Weak and Curious Subversions (SCM Press, 2024), Graham Adams follows up his ground-breaking Holy Anarchy: Dismantling Domination, Embodying Community, Loving Strangeness with a book which turns our thinking about the divine upside-down again, starting from the perspective of childness.

This is one of the ways that Jesus is recorded as speaking about the concerns and priorities of the weak God who overturns all regimes of power and domination in the realisation of love. In some cultures children are idealised. In other ones they are marginalised. In all they are ignored and abused to some degree. This is where God is to be located, but never pinned down.

As the publicity for God the Child points out, We often express the mystery of God with diverse metaphors, but mostly in adult terms. In this experimental theological adventure, Adams imagines what might flow from a more thorough ‘be-child-ing’ of God. Aware that the child can indeed be idealised, he selects particular characteristics of childness in order to disrupt discourses around God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience.

The smallness of the child re-envisages divine location in sites of smallness, like an open palm receiving the experiences of the overlooked. The weakness of the child reimagines divine agency as chaos-event, subverting prevailing patterns of power and evoking relationships of mutuality. And the curiosity of the child reconceives divine encounter as horizon-seeker, imaginatively and empathetically pursuing the unknown.

These possibilities are brought into dialogue both with other theologies (Black, disabled and queer) and with pastoral loss, economic/ecological injustice, and theological education. Through these conversations, God the Child emerges not only as a new model for God, but intrinsic to God’s new social reality which is close at hand.

Like Holy Anarchy, this book is essential reading for those seeking to rediscover the meanings of God in the twenty-first century, for those whose reception of Christianity was as a religion of overwhelming power, and for anyone who wishes to discover how revolutionary and subversive metaphorically-shaped theology has been and is.

* Graham Adams, God the Child: Small, Weak and Curious Subversions (SCM Press, 2024).

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© Simon Barrow was director of Ekklesia from 2016 to 2024, co-director from 2005 to 2016, and an associate from 2003 to 2005. He is a writer, educator and activist. His columns can be found here.