Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Encounters with God: That Changed the World
    Encounters with God: That Changed the World
    Encounters with God: That Changed the World
    Ebook65 pages1 hour

    Encounters with God: That Changed the World

    By Rodney Castleden

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication.

    There have been many instances across the centuries of people’s encounters with God. Often these are intensely personal private experiences that powerfully influence and often transform individual lives. Occasionally profound spiritual experiences remake communities and lead to the emergence of a new religion it certainly happened to Moses, Buddha and Mohammed. This book traces the history of world religion through some significant early personal encounters with god. Encounters that were so momentous that they changed the world forever.

    Contents: Moses and the Burning Bush, Buddha’s Enlightenment, Constantine and the Flaming Cross, St Augustine and the English Pagans, Mohammed’s Revelation, King Edwin, Paulinus and Coifi, St Boniface and Thor’s Oak at Giesmar, Joan of Arc and the Voice of God

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanary Press eBooks Limited
    Release dateJul 16, 2020
    ISBN9781908698377
    Encounters with God: That Changed the World

    Read more from Rodney Castleden

    Related to Encounters with God

    Related ebooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      10 Strangest Bible stories

      Sep 9, 2021

      10 Strangest Bible stories
      5 min read

    • Article

      10 Jewish Biblical Facts That Hardly Any Christians Know…

      Oct 28, 2022

      As a new believer in Yeshua (Jesus), I assumed I was no longer Jewish—that believing in this Jewish Man had nothing in common with Jewishness. However, after reading the New Testament, I was shocked to find out that it was a Jewish book, telling a Je

      3 min read

    • Article

      History Of The Nativity

      Dec 1, 2022

      History Of The Nativity
      7 min read

    • Article

      How New Gods Are Made

      Mar 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT [email protected] On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine Anna Della Subin Granta Books 2022 Hb, £20, 460pp, ISBN 9781783785018 Many of the subjects of this delightfully curious book had no

      11 min read

    • Article

      Digging The Holy Land’s Past

      Jul 25, 2024

      WHEN GENERAL GORDON WENT to Jerusalem in 1883, the city offended his evangelical sensibilities. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, filled with incense and superstition, simply would not do: Christ must have died elsewhere. Jerusalem, he thought, posse

      4 min read

    • Article

      Anthropomorphising God

      Feb 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT [email protected] Francesca Stavrakopoulou Picador 2021 Hb, 608pp, £25, ISBN 9781509867332 There’s no doubting Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s ambition. In this huge, hugely entertaining,

      11 min read

    • Article

      Anthropomorphising God

      Feb 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT [email protected] Francesca Stavrakopoulou Picador 2021 Hb, 608pp, £25, ISBN 9781509867332 There’s no doubting Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s ambition. In this huge, hugely entertaining,

      11 min read

    • Article

      Ancient Demons

      Feb 23, 2023

      Ancient Demons
      8 min read

    • Article

      Veil of Shadows: On Jewish Trauma, Place, and American Anti-Semitism

      Nov 27, 2018

      A little less than 50 miles from Krakow, at the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers, there is a town of slightly under 50,000 inhabitants named Oświęcim. The official tourist site for Oświęcim describes the city as being “attractive and friendl

      12 min read

    • Article

      Word Search

      Jun 16, 2023

      Word Search
      2 min read

    • Article

      The unredeemed REDEEMER

      Apr 5, 2024

      The unredeemed REDEEMER
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Big Bang Is Hard Science. It Is Also a Creation Story.

      Aug 8, 2019

      In some ways, the history of science is the history of a philosophical resistance to mythical explanations of reality. In the ancient world, when we asked “Where did the world come from?” we were told creation myths. In the modern world, we are inste

      5 min read

    • Article

      Classical Corner

      Nov 30, 2023

      Classical Corner
      4 min read

    • Article

      Plague And Pestilence

      Dec 23, 2020

      SO READ THE HEADLINE in the Telegraph, evoking images of a bygone age when plagues were sent to punish us and repentance was the surest route out of any natural catastrophe. Not that this intervention reflected any desire for a return to the Lord our

      3 min read

    • Article

      The History Of The Devil

      Apr 22, 2021

      The History Of The Devil
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Big Bang Is Hard Science. It Is Also a Creation Story.: Even with its explanatory power, Big Bang theory takes its place in a long line of myths.

      Sep 4, 2014

      In some ways, the history of science is the history of a philosophical resistance to mythical explanations of reality. In the ancient world, when we asked “Where did the world come from?” we were told creation myths. In the modern world, we are inste

      5 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      Sep 1, 2022

      In my job, travelling the world making films on history and culture, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring religion in its many manifestations. Religion, after all, is a gift for the camera: full of colour, action and often moving rituals. It’s also a c

      3 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: How Can You Be Christian Without Caring for the Poor?

      Dec 22, 2017

      The minuscule Galilean town in which Joseph and Mary spent their lives and raised their son Jesus was, quite literally, a joke. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" asked one disciple, when he heard where the Messiah was from. Some scholars posit

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Fallen Ones

      Jun 11, 2019

      The Fallen Ones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Fox On The Rocks

      Apr 21, 2022

      Fox On The Rocks
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Image of Christ this Christmas

      Nov 27, 2020

      It’s not unusual to see nativity scenes this time of year. They’re often lovely scenes, complete with robed figures nestled among sheep, donkeys, and cows on beds of straw. But one thing frequently amiss in these scenes involves the portrayal of Mary

      3 min read

    • Article

      What Happened Next?

      Feb 24, 2022

      What Happened Next?
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Ancient Egyptian Underworld

      May 23, 2019

      The Ancient Egyptian Underworld
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Saga Of Sievekings

      Dec 2, 2021

      A Sieveking Family History Paul Sieveking Privately published 2021 Hb, 200pp, £25 inc p&p from [email protected] The magnificent if notoriously snobbish novelist Anthony Powell was so obsessed by family trees and breeding that he even took a

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Encounters with God

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Encounters with God - Rodney Castleden

      Introduction

      We all have encounters that change the way we think, the way we see the world, and ultimately the way we behave. It is one of the characteristics that make us human beings. A lot of these encounters are commonplace, like the encounters we have with our teachers at school. Most of us can remember moments when a teacher somehow, by telling us or showing us something, made us see things differently.

      There are encounters with friends, colleagues, husbands, wives and lovers, building over the course of months, years and decades to change us piecemeal in all sorts of ways. Then there are fleeting encounters with strangers, maybe a brief conversation, maybe no more than a fragment of someone’s conversation overheard as they pass.

      All these different encounters, significant and insignificant alike, are woven into the fabric of our lives, changing us sometimes subtly and gradually, sometimes with dramatic suddenness, into different people.

      There are many reports, across the centuries, of people’s encounters with God. This is not the place to debate whether these are encounters between people and a supernatural force outside themselves or encounters between different layers within their own minds – the conscious and the unconscious.

      Often these encounters are intensely personal, private experiences that powerfully influence, and often transform individual lives. Sometimes these encounters affect whole communities. Occasionally profound spiritual experiences remake communities and lead to the emergence of a new religion; it certainly happened to Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad.

      Some encounters are with people who are completely unknown before they come to prominence. Joan of Arc was an illiterate 13-year-old peasant girl when she had her first encounter with the voice of God in 1425. Her visions of angels urged her to help King Charles VII rescue France from English domination, and she went into battle with the French army at the siege of Orléans. Guided by her divine inspiration she helped steer the French army to victory against the English, altering the course of French history.

      Many such episodes are really a succession of encounters. We can see that the encounter between King Edwin and the Christian missionary Paulinus followed on from St Augustine’s encounter with pagans in southern England, and that in turn followed Pope Gregory’s encounter with a group of English slave boys in Rome.

      This book is inevitably about encounters experienced by people who have made their mark, famous people whose lives are a matter of record. Some encounters look full of promise, as if they should lead on to something momentous, yet they don’t. Others involve people like Joan of Arc, relative unknowns who happen to be in the right place at the right time. But, as I hope the book shows, it is always the unpredictability of human encounters that give them their peculiar interest.

      1

      Moses and the Burning Bush

      (CIRCA 1270 bc)

      The magisterial, resolutely serious figure of Moses strides solemnly through the early books of the Old Testament. He is such a familiar figure to most of us that it is hard to see him as he really was. It is hard too to visualize the astonishing magnitude or appreciate the sheer audacity of what he did. It was, or looks very much like, what the Greeks would later call hubris; the Greeks would concoct the myth of Prometheus to illustrate what could happen to mortals who seize from the gods what is theirs. Who was this Moses? Certainly he was a Hebrew prophet and lawgiver who lived in the bronze age, but we sometimes overlook the fact that he actually created a world religion as a result of his claim to personal direct communion with God.

      We are told that he was born in Egypt of Levite parents, during the time when the people of Israel were slave workers, captives in Egypt. In the bronze age, taking people as booty in time of war was a very widespread practice; both men and women were carried off to do various kinds of work. During the Trojan War, which took place perhaps a generation after Moses, around 1250 bc, men were evidently taken as slaves; this is mentioned in the poems of the Greek Epic Cycle. Women were routinely taken away to do work in textile manufacture, as we know from the archive tablets found at some of the Greek centres, and they were referred to as ‘women of Lesbos’ or ‘women of Chios’ according to the places round the Aegean where they had been captured. So the captivity of the Israelites and their transfer to Egypt to work was a perfectly normal practice in those times. It would be wrong to see the Israelites as a people singled out for special discriminatory treatment; they were persecuted no more than any other conquered people of the late bronze age.

      We are told that as a baby Moses (‘Mosheh’ in Hebrew) was nearly killed in a general slaughter of male Jewish children ordered by the Egyptian Pharaoh. He was rescued by being concealed by his mother in a chest in bulrushes by

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1