Anthony Clarke and Andrew Moore, Within the Love of God: Essays on the Doctrine of God in Honour of Paul S. Fiddes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), xiv + 260 Pps., $85.00.
Anthony Clarke is Tutorial Fellow in Pastoral Studies and Community Learning at Regent’s Park College, Oxford and a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. Andrew Moore is a Fellow of the Centre for Christianity and Culture, Regent’s Park College, and a Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. This volume brings together a team of internationally distinguished scholars from a wide range of theological, philosophical, and religious perspectives, motivated by but not restricted to the work of Paul S. Fiddes, to whom it is offered as a Festschrift. Its contributors include friends, colleagues, tutors, and interlocutors of Fiddes. The individual essays herein reflect not only their author’s interests, but also some of the fields with which Fiddes has been active as one of the major systematic theologians of the twentieth century. The doctrine of God, in particular, is central to the theology of Fiddes, and it is also central to theology as a whole as it determines the way in which other areas of Christian doctrine are articulated, yet work on this topic has been occluded recently by treatments of the Trinity or divine passibility. In this title, the individual authors attempt to “dance” with Fiddes work in doing theology, and thereby participate in the very life of God.
This title includes thoroughly invigorating discussions of the biblical and non-biblical sources for the doctrine of God. The introduction, for example, relates the essays in the book to the work of Fiddes and to wider debates in Christian doctrine. Also, the introduction serves as a brief intellectual biography of Fiddes. After earning his doctorate in 1976, Fiddes left Oxford to study at Eberhard Karls University under Jürgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel, which led to his first monograph, The Creative Suffering of God. This title is still an important contribution to an understanding of God’s passibility. This book displays the perpetual influence of both Karl Barth and Process Theology upon Fiddes, themes that works themselves out also in the remainder of Fiddes oeuvre. But Fiddes is not a slavish follower of either Barth or Process Theism, choosing rather to develop his thinking in his own ways instead. One of the important contributions that Fiddes makes draws together Process Theology and Barth by insisting that if suffering is going to be meaningfully ascribed to God, then suffering must be something that happens to God. In so doing, he presents a mutuality of involvement between God and the world. In the essays to be highlighted below, these themes are discussed several times, as are the topics of divine passibility, necessity, and contingency in the divine nature.
The essays in the first section of the book explore a range of sources for the doctrine of God, especially its biblical background. John Barton, in chapter 1, illustrates the kind of problems that an exegete faces in translating and interpreting the Hebrew text – I his case, Isaiah 63:9, which implies that God suffers with and alongside his people. Working within a context illuminated by Augustine and Aquinas, John Colwell’s chapter 3 explores textual commentary, focusing principally upon the prologue of John’s gospel; he argues that from the identity there asserted of the Logos and God that speech and communication should be central to our understanding of the being and nature of God. In chapter 4, Andrew Moore gives an account of the relationship between some of the sources and norms of Christian doctrine, focusing particularly upon experience; Moore then discusses the role of experience in Fiddes doctrine of God.
The second section of the book, on “Metaphysics and the Doctrine of God,” examines some of the most important conceptual questions arising in contemporary theological debate about the being and nature of God, and God’s relations to the world. Frances Young, in chapter 5, looks at the context in which metaphysical questions about God were first discussed in the Christian tradition – that of the Pagan Roman empire. Young focuses on why there are no appeals to divine suffering in early Christian literature. John Webster takes up the relationship between God and God’s (human) creation in chapter 6, noting that God’s relation is a “real” relation. Moltmann, in chapter 7, argues that “who God is” also determines “what God does.” The final section of the book on “God and Humanity” is highly relevant to scholars working in the fields of theological anthropology, moral and political theology, on inter-faith relations, on theology and literature, and those who are interested in the impact of science upon the doctrine of God.
In sum, this collection of essays present major treatments of key themes in the doctrine of God, and it will assuredly stimulate fresh thinking and new debate about this central topic within Christian theology. Recommended to all comers.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary