What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul — Reading Companion

Question-Driven Structure

Rather than following a systematic outline, Swain organizes chapters around particular questions that arose in his pastoral work. He acknowledges that this method 'does not permit of a strictly logical treatment of the themes,' yet insists that a 'definite and concrete picture of God' emerges in the background. The preface lists chapters on losing God, the Bible, and immortality, noting that the Bible chapters are 'not closely related to the rest of the book' but included because Scripture contains God's 'specifications' and 'blue-prints.' This frank admission of structural looseness suggests Swain values accessibility over doctrinal neatness.

God Encountered in Human Touch

Two extended anecdotes illustrate Swain's central claim that God is known through human relationships. In one, his children—Philip, eight, and Esther, six—debate whether one can kiss God. Philip insists God is a spirit, but Esther concludes that if God is in each of them, kissing each other means kissing God. Swain, watching from a dark hall, calls this 'the very essence of the Christian religion,' linking it to Matthew 25:40. A second story recounts a woman who prays for Christ to reveal himself, only to realize she has turned away a maid and her daughter; a voice tells her, 'Inasmuch as ye did it not unto the least of these ye did it not unto me.' Both vignettes dramatize the idea that divine presence is mediated through ordinary acts of care.

The Instrument of God's Presence

Swain extends his relational theology to Paul's departure from mission churches: 'God had no instrument remaining through which He could make Himself so humanly real to them.' He suggests that God writes letters or makes visits 'in Paul'—that is, through human representatives. This concept of God needing an 'instrument' reappears in the children's story, where Swain remarks, 'Doubtless God never will be seen outside the bodies which He provides for Himself and His children to use in common.' The physical body, then, is not a hindrance but the very medium of divine self-disclosure.

Readers should approach Swain's text as a pastoral work that tests theological claims against concrete human situations. The anecdotes are not mere illustrations but the book's primary evidence. Pay attention to how Swain moves between personal narrative and doctrinal statement; the logic is associative rather than deductive. The preface's warning that the Bible chapters are loosely connected suggests that the book's unity lies in its method of answering real questions, not in systematic argument.

Finding this book, with its talk of meeting God in the quiet shape of another person, brought back an old evening—sitting on a porch while a friend described grief as a door, not a wall. That same hush settled over me long ago with The Mormon Doctrine of Deity: The Roberts-Van Der Donckt Discussion To which is added a discourse, Jesus Christ, the revelation of God; also a collection of authoritative — Reading Companion, where doctrine softened into something almost held in the hands, less argued than lived.