Theology in the Flesh

Some key ideas discussed in the book:

• Human embodiment plays a crucial role in our cognitive processes including our thinking about God and the Christian life.
• Reasoning about religious topics uses the same conceptual structures we use to think about non-religious topics.
• We use figurative language, particularly metaphors, in order to understand most of our really important religious ideas.
• There is usually more than one legitimate way to think about topics such as salvation and God. But there are constraints—it is not anything goes.
• Though there is tremendous cultural variation in concepts there are some panhuman concepts shared by all normal humans.
• Christians can legitimately expect widespread agreement on some general teachings and then cultural variation on most topics.
• Conceptual differences between cultures can lead Christian communities to give different meanings to biblical texts.
• Christians have principled ways to revise or even reject biblical teachings.
• Christians should exercise humility in knowledge claims concerning a wide variety of topics.
• Americans commonly think of God as either an authoritative or nurturing parent and these two models lead to vastly different doctrinal and moral stances.
• Cognitive linguistic notions of prototypes and exemplars are important for Christian moral and spiritual reasoning.
• God as an agent (person) is the default conceptualization for humans.