Like Father, Like Son

Wilfrid Harrington OP

The Bible presents us with a wondrously attractive and deeply comforting portrait of God. The early Church, in bringing to the non-Jewish world the Good News that God himself was present in the man Jesus, put to death and risen from the grave, felt it necessary to call on the philosophical language of its day.  But for most people today, such language is cold and distant. Wiser and better by far, Wilfrid Harrington argues, is to choose to live with mystery, and to accept that only God can understand how God can live in a human person. It is in the Bible that we will find a vivid and entrancing engagement with this mystery.

Like Father, Like Son sets out to indicate how, when we try to express the truth of who God is and how God acts, we need to think the unthinkable – that God is fully revealed in a human life. In Jesus of Nazareth God has come to walk with us. In him God has suffered among us and at our hands. It is always the same God, the one God, from the first page of the Bible to the last.

Wilfrid Harrington OP has made studying and teaching the Bible his life’s work. He has taught in academic centres (the Dominican studium, Dublin, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the Milltown Institute, Trinity College Dublin, the Church of Ireland Theological College, and The Priory Institute), in summer schools, especially in the USA, and with parish and adult-learning groups in Dublin and Newry. He is the author of over 60 books on the Bible, and is one of the founders of the quarterly Scripture in Church.