There is a lot to like about this book, and much in it I find myself
agreeing with. For instance, the image of God as suffering love and the
working out of the implications of this for creation and our own lives
is concomitant with many of my own views. Love is essentially
persuasive, not coercive, and when you accept that God is that, you
should look for evidence of persuasive and not coercive influence.
Further, I liked the big U Universalist overtones. There is little doubt
that the God represented in the book is TRULY a God love, and one that
reconciles mercy and justice through that love. I enjoyed the vision of
the Trinity, the view of God as living relatedness, and one in which God
truly shares in the suffering of creation. The embracing of a
patripassionist tone is concomitant with my own views. God was not
'away' when Jesus was on the cross, it is on the cross that we get our
purest vision of the divine. That kind of Christocentrism, in which we
truly take Jesus as the primary revelation of who and what God is, is so
often lacking in the Christian community. 2000 years later we still
haven't fully come to grips with what that might mean, and the book goes
a long way to addressing that issue.
But does the book FULLY
embrace its own project? I'm not so sure. It certainly supports a vision
of God that, in love, allows the universe to become fully itself. God
'lets things be' out of a commitment to non-interruption, a commitment
born out of love and respect for autonomy of the other. But retained is
the possibility that God COULD coercively intervene, but chooses not to
out of love. Is this logically consistent? I'm not so sure. If God is
ESSENTIALLY suffering love, if that is His very nature, then it seems to
me that coercive power is simply not an option for God. Because any God
that acted coercively would not BE God, but an idol. Doesn't it make
much more sense, and is more internally consistent to just say that God
IS suffering love, and as such there are just certain things God cannot
DO? Isn't the really radical conclusion that the book should lead us to
that God just cannot do everything, that God is not the guarantor of
proximate security so many people sycophantically crave? A corollary of
this is the view that God knows what we do before we do it. The book
sees God as taking a risk on creation, on the main character, on Jesus.
God is essentially risky venture, in the book. But that simply isn't
possible if God knows what happens in advance. For US, there is risk,
for God, no risk. This brings up another point, in the end the book
suggests that the only purposes that matter are God's purposes. Now we
may speed up or slow down those purposes, but we do not in the final
analysis add anything to them? Is this right? Can God's purposes (though
never His character and the nature of those purposes) not CHANGE with
human decisions? The view of God as finally self-sufficient, in no need
of humans, whose plans are set and cannot be ultimately frustrated,
seems more in line with the vision of God as essentially coercive, than
as essentially persuasive. In that view, humans cannot finally add value
to the universe, they can only slow or speed up the addition of God's
value. But why can't God MAKE what humans do VALUABLE, be the element of
lasting significance to human purposes, and that which makes human
purposes part of a cosmic venture? It seems to me a vision of mature
interdependence between all creatures and God is more in line with the
vision of God's CHARACTER with which I so heartily agree.
Finally,
the book lacks a vision of cosmic evil. It sees all evil as the result
of human behavior. Not only do I think its interpretation of Genesis is
wrong biblically, it is wrong scientifically and so leads to a
misunderstanding of human evil. Evil, in some form, was running wild
long before we got here. Evolution is a story of waste and suffering
which is second to none. The Bible always envisions human evil as a part
of a cosmic struggle, that predates them. The absence of such a vision
in the book is problematic. Humans did not cause cancer, or mosquitoes,
or malaria, nor the suffering and loss of value that emanates from them.
In the end, I highly recommend the book. It is well written and
makes good points. However, I would say that in general I think the
book contains internal contradictions the writer is unaware of.
No comments:
Post a Comment