Converging Destinies! Information? Inspiration? Intuition? Yes To All Three!

Well, my new book, Converging Destinies: Jews, Christians, and the Mission of God,"  is OUT.  It is so new that you can only get it on the publisher's website at http://wipfandstock.com/converging-destinies.html.  It is not yet available on Amazon. That will have to wait a week or so.  But the good news is that if you order it from the publisher, it is $30.00 instead of $38.00!

When I looked at my advance copy of the book, I found it was better than I knew I had in me. Let me talk with you a bit about that process. I think you will agree with what I will say about it.

The process of writing this book, Converging Destinies: Jews, Christians and the Mission of God bears similarities to my experience of writing songs for nearly fifty years. I have found that whenever I write a song, I can then use it in the worship of God without worshipping myself in the process because whenever I write such songs, there is Something, or rather, Someone present that goes beyond the sum total of my gifts, training, and talents, that helps to account for its usefulness in worship. There is what we might term the Other factor.

This Other factor also appears in creative works through the medium of intuition. People who imagine that the only path to knowledge is discursive analytical reasoning are surely in error, because not only artists, writers, composers, artists of every kind, but also scientists readily attenst to the role of intuition in guiding us to truths and perspectives we might never reach through analytical or deductive processes.

Finally of course there is the downright prophetic, where the Spirit of God more directly and with greater authority inspires thoughts and words that the unaided author never would have deduced him or herself, So it is that Peter can say, “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit,” and even in cases where the prophetic word lacks Scripture’s authority, there is a Presence working that supplements there merely human.

C. S. Lewis helps us think more deeply of these matters when he says, concerning his own book,Till We Have Faces, “An author doesn't  necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else.”   Quite shocking, is it not?

But in part, this has been my experience with my current book, Converging Destinies. It is part research, part deductive reasoning, lots of creative thinking and what my graduate school program called “dynamic reflection.”  But besides all of that, there is quite a bit of intuition here—intuition about what God is up to in the world, what has worked and failed to work in the manner in which Christians and Jews understand and position each other, and some intuitions and ideas about what should work better, with a big payoff for all concerned.

So I invite you to read this book as together, we all, myself included, learn from the process, and perhaps discovering liberating perspectives which until now have lain unexplored beneath a conscious level.

In his assessment of this book, Dr. Jeffrey Seif, University Distinguished Professor of Bible and Jewish Studies, Kings University, has this to say:

 Dr. Stuart Dauermann knows what every turtle knows: if you want to get anywhere in life you have to stick your neck out. This he does, in his extremely insightful and provocative new book. . . . Long live the Dauermanns of the world who stick their necks out. Long live the Dauermanns of the world who appreciate the Jewish shell and who are doggedly determined to stay at home in it—over and against the protestations of younger reptiles who don’t happen to have a protective, 3,500-year-old home to dwell in. Lastly, long live all who, with Dauermann, want to explore what does really mean to be a ‘Jewish’ believer in Yeshua/Jesus? Those who don’t agree with his answers 100 percent will still agree that he’s asking the right questions, and that his answers are serious forces to be reckoned with both now and in the days ahead, 

So I hope you will join me in reading this book. I hope you will make comments about it on my Facebook pages (Stuart Dauermann, or Interfaithfulness), on my blog at Interfaithfulness.org, and wherever you can. Let’s explore together

I think you will agree that reading it together will make the experience richer for all of us!