Runaway World

Edward Michael Bankes Green (who writes as "Michael Green") is a British theologian, Anglican priest, and Christian apologist. Green has generated some controversy more recently by coming out against the traditional idea of Hell as "eternal torment" (see his 1989 book, Evangelism Through the Local Church). This 1968 book contains chapters on History, Science, and other topics. The chapter "Running Away from History" contains a good, short summary of historical and archaeological evidence for Jesus, for example. The chapter, "Running Away from Science" contains statements such as, "the type of view advanced by Russell and Isaacs gives no satisfactory explanation of aesthetics, ethics or freedom ... It comes back to the problem of how you get ethics out of an unfeeling concourse of atoms, how you get personal being from the impersonal, how you get freedom, or at any rate the illusion of freedom (if all is mechanisticallly determined) in a determinist world." Here are some other representative quotations from the book: "What is more, (Jesus) asserted that he had a relationship with God which no-one had ever claimed before. It comes out in the Aramaic word Abba which he was so fond of using, especially in prayer. Nobody before him in all the history of Israel had addressed God by this word. For it is the intimate, family word that a child might use of his Daddy." "If Christianity is wrong about our origin or destiny, the purpose and the meaning of life, the value of persons and the secret of living together in community, they get up and say so! Say it violently, aggressively if you like: but say it after you have personally examined the evidence. Yet this is precisely what so many are apparently too afraid or too lazy to do."