Abstract

Is Christian faith compatible with a thoroughgoing naturalist view of the cosmos? Hardwick thinks so, and in this book he articulates and defends a naturalist form of Christianity. Hardwick argues that Christianity is not committed to the truth of theism, nor to any view that there is a God who created and redeems the cosmos through an incarnation. Instead, Christian faith witnesses to “events of grace” in which believers develop an “openness to being”. “To live a life of faith is to live with a fundamental openness toward the future”. This openness to being and the future is compatible with the denial that God exists, Jesus is the incarnate God-man, and other components of the various creeds of Christian tradition. While Hardwick does not think there is a God from a scientific or metaphysical point of view, he endeavors to read the Christian claim “God exists” as the referral to, and the affirmation of, a valuable way of life.