|
|
|
News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
|
_____________________________________________________________________________
October 2006
Confronting an age-old heresy...again
Reviewed by Craig O'Brien
Does God Suffer? Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 2000. .
“Our mother Jesus gives new birth to a new creation.” So asserted Katharine Jefferts Schori in a sermon following her election this summer as Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church. Setting aside the offence of Ms. Schori’s re-assigning the gender of the historical person of Jesus Christ, this particular bit of homiletical bombast reveals a greater though more subtle theological problem. In the 19th and 20th centuries there was an alarmingly widespread and even commonplace re-conception of God as acting and suffering from within the created order here deems. This is a major departure from the first of the Articles of Religion confessing “but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.” Yet this view has been taken on by many, if not most, contemporary theologians, liturgists and preachers, Karl Barth, T.F.Torrance, Jurgen Moltmann and Abraham Heschel among them, who argue explicitly or by implication that the God of the Bible suffers with his creation and is thus subject to change.
Such is the critique of 20th century theology made by Thomas G. Weinandy O.F.M. Cap., Provost of Greyfriars, Oxford, in his lucid and vigorously argued defense of the ancient, biblical and patristic doctrine of divine impassibility, Does God Suffer?. The divine attribute of impassibility upheld by orthodox theology contends that “God is impassible in the sense that he cannot experience emotional changes of state due to his relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order. ”For God to be “passible” on the other hand, “…means that he is capable of being acted upon from without and that such actions bring about emotional changes within him.”
Weinandy exhaustively documents and sympathetically rehearses the contemporary case for divine “passibility, ”that God is subject to suffering and change in relationship to creation. Of interest to Anglicans, he locates the first advocacy for divine passibility amongst nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglican divines. The root of this, Weinandy would suggest, is that the horrors of the last century demanded more than ever before a re-discernment of the mystery of God’s goodness and justice in the face of sin, suffering and evil.
But where Weinandy is most illuminating is in his demonstration of the unavowed presuppositions harboured by the advocates of divine passibility. Weinandy argues that advocates of divine passibility come to the study of Scripture determined to exclude concepts of divine immutability and impassibility and that this has more to do with contemporary caricatures of the relation between philosophic reason and divine revelation than anything native to the fabric of Scripture itself. Furthermore, these presuppositions prevent us from appreciating the subtlety and importance of the historic consensus in making sense of Scripture and human suffering in light of the economy of redemption.
This debate is germane for Anglicans whose foundational formularies and classical ways of reading and praying Scripture are dependent on a union of Scripture, doctrine, and philosophical reason derived from the Greeks in a way which is at once more challenging to and more interactive with the destructive claims of exclusive humanism, than much that passes for “orthodox” Anglicanism. Through a wide-ranging discussion of the traditional developments of Trinitarian theology and orthodox Christology, Weinandy concludes that “the foundational mystery of all biblical revelation is that God is present to the world and active within history, in all his wholly otherness, without losing his wholly otherness in so doing.” Advocates of divine passibility, with the implication that God is subject to change in solidarity with suffering humanity, “…not only have undermined a true understanding of God, but they have also, in the end, distorted the Christian gospel,” and “in so doing they have equally disfigured, the Christian experience, interpretation and meaning of human suffering.”
For the patient and intrepid reader Does God Suffer? offers a prescient and faithful challenge to Christians at the crux of doctrine, discipleship and mission. Furthermore it provides much food for thought on how we might refer the presenting issues that now preoccupy us – our preaching, teaching, praying and forms of headship and ministry – to the doctrine of God.
|
|||
|
|
|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2006 |