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Reviewed by:
  • How God Acts: Creation, Redemption, and Special Divine Action
  • Kenneth A. Reynhout (bio)
How God Acts: Creation, Redemption, and Special Divine Action. By Denis Edwards. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. 224 pp. $27.00.

The concern of the latest book by Denis Edwards, a Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and the author of such books as The God of Evolution (Paulist, 1999), Jesus and the Cosmos (Wipf & Stock, 2004), and Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Orbis, 2004) speaks clearly in its title. The God depicted in the Bible, professed in the creeds, and given witness to by the Church creates the universe, the earth, and all its creatures. God enters humanity in the incarnate Son, suffers and dies as a human being, raises Jesus from the dead, sends the Spirit, and establishes the church. God receives prayer for guidance, healing, and deliverance, whom believers hope will one day make all things new. This is not the detached, clockmaker god of deism. The God of Jesus Christ is the God who acts, and How God Acts addresses such a problematic.

At least three challenges confront Edwards in his task. The first, which contributed to the popularity of deism, is the remarkable success of the natural sciences. A universe ruled by regular laws presumably possesses its own integrity that should in principle be fully describable by appeals to causal forces and rational principles. For some this implies a forced choice: either we admit that a divine agent is explanatorily superfluous and as such belief in God is irrational, or science should be able to detect and measure a God who intervenes as another causal force in the world, as say an “intelligent designer.” Dissatisfied with either option, interdisciplinary theologians have expended considerable energy over the past two decades trying to articulate a “noninterventionist” theory of divine action in dialogue with the natural sciences.

The second challenge: divine agency can only be analogous to human agency, with a weak analogy at that. We act because of and through our limitations as finite creatures to deliberately change our circumstances as we perceive some need or lack. To claim God acts in the same way would imply that God is finite, so divine agency must be something other than human agency. Pressing this dissimilarity too hard could mean undermining the very picture of an active God upheld. Finally, the third and perhaps most difficult challenge for articulating a theory of divine action is that it screams for an answer to the problem of evil. If God acts in the world, then why not more often, or at least differently, so that creaturely suffering decreases, is even eliminated? Contemporary science puts an even finer point on this old problem, since an evolving universe evidently involves and may even [End Page 145] require cataclysm, suffering, and death. How can this possibly be the way that a good God creates?

Edwards strides confidently into this thorny thicket, doing so with awareness and sensitivity. While he acknowledges we can never truly know how an infinite God acts and that the word “action” is clearly analogical, he still seeks to articulate characteristics of a noninterventionist theology of divine action that honors the integrity and freedom of the created world. Edwards affirms the relational and evolutionary character of the universe and the processes that encourage emerging complexity. He wants to understand this pattern of evolutionary emergence as the way God creates. However, he also acknowledges that the inherent costs of evolution—competition, predation, pain, and extinction—complicate his picture.

Treatments of divine action often start by developing a general theory and then proceed to plot specific kinds of actions, with the resurrection typically considered as a hard case. Edwards takes a different approach: he begins with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, or what he collectively calls the “Christ-event,” and builds a theology of divine action from there. The picture that emerges is of an intimate, loving, and compassionate God who graciously and patiently invites our participation in the kingdom through the way of Jesus. The Christ-event is God’s paradigmatic creative action in the world, in the...

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