And that though Levenson says humans are called to be co-creators with God in creating health and order out of chaos, only God will ultimately set everything right. There's also a theme that God limits his power in order to allow his divine drama (combating evil and chaos) to unfold. "Humanity must learn to adjust to a world not designed for their benefit and to cease making claims (even just claims) upon its incomprehensible designer and master" (156). And much more-I don't care to give summaries so much :P.Īt the very end he brings up Job, and then says, And constructs a very non-Hellenistic God. So in this book he sets out to describe what he sees as a more accurate theology of Creation. In the introduction he says it is not his task to solve it, or explain it away. He touches on it, he jabs it, but it's not his goal. He is dancing in the playground of the problem of evil. I think that he touched on too many very different things for a book of this sort/size. So even after admitting that, I feel like the book was lacking unity and continuity. Which is all fine and good, but contras that with the Preface in which he said his goal was to make the book not scholarly but readable. Also a lot of referencing pagan texts and myths. There is a lot of Hebrew and Jewish terms that I had to look up, and much of what went with them I did not know. But I bump it up a point because it is pretty scholarly and I will concede that much of it I didn't follow because of this. So even after admitting that, I feel like th I'd give it 2/5 ("It was Okay."). He argues that Genesis 1 does not describe the banishment of evil but the attempt to contain the menace of evil in the world, a struggle that continues today.more Levenson traces this more flexible conception of God to the earliest Hebrew sources. Classic doctrines of God's creation of the universe from the void do not do justice to the complexity of that hard-fought battle, which is uncertain in its outcome. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's authorship of the world as a consequence of his victory in his struggle with evil. This paperback edition of Creation and the Persistence of Evil brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's authorship of the world as a consequence o