Customer Reviews

The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery

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I found Panikkar's 'Experience of God' a more accessible read than the Christophany treatise. I think maybe his writing is translated to a difficult reading vernacular...since he writes in Italian, or Spanish. However, he is a unique scholar of Abrahamic faith, having experienced God from many contexts. He maintains an academic objectivity which is possibly off-putting to 'soaked in Western Protestant oriented church people', but refreshing to seekers of wisdom, who can read such material without a slant.

This is a short and refreshing book, and Panikkar weaves an elegant summary of how we experience God. He draws together different spiritual traditions without flattening out their differences or claiming to have found insights 'behind' them. For him, 'God' is the experience of the depth of being and beyond being, transcendent yet immanent, personal and in communion. We experience God through the mediation of ourselves and our traditions and language. While writing from a Christian perspective, he is not dogmatic but rather shows quite subtly the mystical presuppositions of the Trinitarian formula and its possibilities for transforming our lives. His obvious scholarship and personal experience of God is on display. This is a model of interfaith theology.

I read this book as part of an assignment for a class on Christian Theology. I thought it would be dealing with physical icons, so I was a little surprised when there were not any. It a deeply moving book about how we experience "God." I have put that in quotations, because the author feels that even that word is limiting. Labels have a way of limiting our interaction with the Divinity and that is explored in this book. A great read and I will read it again for pleasure to absorb more of the insight.