W.H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense: The Response of Being to the Love of God, 2nd ed. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007), xix + 120 Pps., $14.00.
W.H. Vanstone was an Anglican theologian in the twentieth century. While having the requisite credentials to be placed in the Academy, he chose instead to commit himself to parish ministerial work in north England. This is a new edition of the historic book first published in 1977, and it contains a foreword by H.A. Williams. This title explores the nature of authentic love, its cost to the lover, and reflects on the activity of God in creation. This activity of God in creation, Vanstone avers, is a sublime self-giving, which forms the ground, source, and origin of the universe. Moreover, this activity of God within creation expressed as such, requires the Creator to wait patiently upon the response of his creation. Vanstone pictures all of reality in light of God’s unfailing love for his creatures, which is displayed continually by his self-emptying.
The book is composed of six chapters, with the first being strictly autobiographical. Chapter two identifies the problem that book covers, and chapter three describes the phenomenology of love. Chapter four elucidates the kenosis of God, and chapter five explicates the response of being (to God). The book concludes with a chapter devoted to the offering of the church, which displays why the life of the church is a matter of great importance. In what follows, important highlights of the book shall be mentioned.
Vanstone introduces divine activity in chapter one as being explainable by both working and waiting, which includes both activity and passivity (33). In this working and waiting, necessarily included is the idea that the creator gave to, or even built into, his workmanship a degree of power over himself. He refers to this activity as ‘self-giving’, which he equates with creative love (34). In chapter three, Vanstone contends that the authenticity of love implies a totality of giving (45). Correspondingly, the falsity of love is shown wherever a limit is placed upon it, when control is applied as a result of its display, and when lover is detached from its application. He notes therein that the activity of love is precarious in that the object which receives love may fail to ‘arrive’, as love proceeds by no assured programme (46). However, the potential gain justifies the risk of failure. In that love is precarious, it is neither static nor smooth, but an angular progress, endlessly improvised instead (47). From the three marks of the falsity of love, Vanstone approximates a description of love as limitless, precarious, and vulnerable (53).
In fourth chapter, Vanstone reflects upon the love of God in light of the description of authentic love being limitless, precarious, and vulnerable. Of course, kenosis, or divine self-emptying, is most often associated with the atoning death of Christ upon the cross (cf. Phil 2:5–11). However, Vanstone does not limit the term with the labor of redemption, but with the ground, source, and origin of all that is: creation (59). The activity of God within creation is a limitless creativity, as it seeks no interior limit to its own self-giving, and ever seeks to enlarge the capacity to receive of that ‘other’ to which it gives (ibid.). As a result of the increasing complexity of the creation, the shape and direction Vanstone notes that nothing is withheld from the self-giving, and there are no unexpended reserves of divine power or potentiality. Moreover, in this divine self-giving, this divine creativity ever extends and enlarges itself (63). The creation is assured of triumph, not because it proceeds towards a predetermined goal, but because the same loving creativity is excercised upon it continually (63). Also within chapter four, Vanstone touches upon the important topic regarding the problem of evil. The existence of evil implies that that which is created is a possibility that must be worked out in a creative process, a working out that includes the correction of false steps, the redemption of a potential tragic move (63–64). God does not will this problem of evil and creativity, but overcomes it instead. Indeed, for out of disturbances comes the possibility of new developments.
What is it in the universe that determines the triumph or tragedy of God’s love? In chapter five, Vanstone seeks to flesh out an answer to this difficult problem. He contends that the response of the creature determines either the success or failure of the love of God. In so asserting this, he clarifies three levels of response by that which is created: the response of nature, the response of freedom, and the response of recognition (81). The response of nature is that a thing should be that which it was to be by the intention of the creator. In contrast, the response of freedom refers to the acceptance (or denial) by a thing that it should be what it was to be (86). The response of recognition highlights the fact that in order for the creative love of God to be considered a triumph, it must wait upon the understanding of those who receive it.
This book is vibrant with passion, yet is also intellectually disciplined. It contains personal experience, intellectual discipline, Christian concern, and insight into practical living. As such, I deem it to be a masterpiece of twentieth century theology, and it should be required reading for graduate theology students.
Bradford McCall
Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA