What kind of God do we believe in - Supernatural or Metaphysical?

I am deeply conscious that my beliefs are thought to be dangerously out of tune with the Biblical, orthodox, traditional Christian matrix that many still observe. I am also out of tune with some members of my own ‘tribe’, the progressive reformers and transformers. And I am most deeply conscious of the world of 2025 in which the American President is wreaking havoc on global political, financial, trading and relational networks and institutions that have formed the bedrock of my life as a white, Western European 1945-born boy. I am also living in a Christian era riven by disagreements about gender and sexuality, traumatised by the unearthing of abuse, sexual and emotional, and that has yet to confront what Berger was struggling with in 1968 – what kind of God do we believe in?

A Rumour of Angels - the supernatural, secularisation and the mystical

I was 24 when Peter Berger published A Rumour of Angels. I think my High Church Anglican religious world was a supernatural world in which God ‘lived’ somewhere other than earth and could be communicated with through prayer and affected emotionally through worship. God could be apologised to in confession and seduced into liking us through sensuous liturgy. I live in a different domain now, the domain of sacred, holy, real presence in the here and now, a domain which has the powerful effect of taking me beyond my mundane, prosaic self and away from a conditionally-loving, judgemental God of heaven and hell, into another realm which is as real both here and now in the present moment and in the infinite elsewhere, in glory and beauty and the infusion of love.