Terhi Paananen

Mystery Manifest

Theology

“One of the great observations in Gail Ramshaw’s new book, Mystery Manifest, is that Christianity has no original language. Instead, it always has been and always must be translated. This point of view is universal, and even a pastor like me in Finland, a small Northern European country, using Finnish as a working language, can benefit from this book written in English about the language of faith and about the names we use for God. Every language and every generation must give the Christian faith a new translation, and this book helps us to do that. We have a dilemma: it is impossible to speak of God in the precise way the Western society would prefer. Yet we have been called to speak and sing. To communicate our ideas or experiences of God, we must use images, parables, and figures of speech, and be satisfied with the obscure picture they paint, like a piece of art that changes when you take a step closer or further away. Gail Ramshaw has written many remarkable books about the language of faith. This may be the most important one of them. For all, it is a treasury for many meditations and sermon preparations. Tolle, lege!”