I think the church has been too careful with God.
Too quick to sand down the strange edges of the biblical text. Too eager to trade the raw, emotionally present God of scripture for something tidier, more philosophical, more comfortable. My work is a sustained argument against that instinct.
I’m Charles Halton — theologian, biblical scholar, and Episcopal priest. My book A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God won the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. It is the first in a series asking what we lose when we stop taking seriously a God who grieves, relents, and is genuinely moved by the world.
My scholarly formation is in the ancient Near East. I hold a PhD in Bible and the ancient Near East from Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, with an emphasis in cuneiform languages — the world of clay tablets, Akkadian, and the literary cultures that shaped the biblical writers before anyone called them biblical. I taught Old Testament and Semitic languages at the seminary and college levels for nearly a decade. I am currently Associate Rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington, Kentucky, and an external affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham.
The distance between a cuneiform tablet and a Sunday sermon is shorter than it looks. Everything I do — scholarship, preaching, writing — is trying to close that gap.
If you’d like me to speak at your university, conference, congregation, or book club, or if you simply want to be in conversation, I’d welcome the message: charleshalton [at] mac [dot] com
