Life, Love and Hope: God and Human Experience by Jan-Olav Henriksen (review)

Henriksen’s book offers a lucid and welcome proposal for a Trinitarian theology that incorporates evolutionary theory into a synthesis designed to challenge dialectical theology on the one hand (79) and scientific reductionism on the other. “Revelation is about more [than the Word of God],” writes Henriksen, “It is about experiences” (57). The Reformation emphasis on “the sinfulness of human nature” (96), Henriksen suggests, has led to an unfortunate distrust of nature (97). Yet each side needs to pay attention to the other; science “needs to relate to the wisdom of theology, just as much as theology needs to be informed by the knowledge of science” (107). While science has had obvious successes, it has failed, he insists, to address “the realms of the world that matter most to our everyday life” (39). Theology at its best, insists Henriksen, “offer[s] experientially based wisdom … [which] seeks to understand what the conditions and contents of a good life are” (100). Identifying his theological project with Bultmann, Pannenberg, and Tillich (among others), Henriksen’s book takes up the “positive challenge for theology, [which is] … to find God in the present” (87).

Henriksen’s double perichoresis (drawn initially from the work of Jürgen Moltmann) is the fulcrum upon which his proposal rests. While the work of God in three persons operates first, according to the traditional internal perichoresis, the Trinity reaches out to the world in love, creating a second (asymetrical) perichoresis, as God the Spirit calls human beings into relationship. And it is this second perichoresis that provides the critical construct for explaining how it is that God’s love and hope for the world come to be known and made manifest through human experience. God’s panentheistic presence, or “deep incarnation,” reveals a God who answers the human yearning for love and recognition. Evolution has gifted human beings “with capabilities to live in realms of life that are made accessible through symbolic means” (57). Thus, Henriksen argues, we come to experience ourselves as participants in natural, cultural/social, psychological, and spiritual realms (48)—all of which function interdependently to reveal surprising glimpses of future possibilities not visible in the present or the past (202). These glimpses Henriksen refers to as “hermeneutic experiences”; and insofar as they free us from a view of reality bound to the past, God’s hopes become human hopes, and we are drawn toward a life that seeks to make God’s kingdom manifest.

So far the project appears to reflect faithfully an effectively updated version of Luther’s famous insistence that incarnation implies a finite world which bears the infinite in ways that exclude nothing from God’s active and grace-filled presence. Indeed, the call to find God’s loving activity in, with, and under every kind of experience (even the experience of Anfechtungen, where this is faithfully interpreted) reveals a decidedly Lutheran approach.

As Henriksen arrives at the matter of agency, however, his correlation of human responsibility with God’s promised kingdom appears problematic, particularly from a Lutheran perspective. Whereas Luther’s faith rested on God’s reliability, Henriksen introduces a God whose hopes for the future are vulnerable to human failure. Offering the traditional argument that love of God requires a real choice, he couples this with a kingdom that is wholly temporal (and apparently dependent upon human action to make it manifest). Where the kingdom rests on the free choice and action of human beings (inclined by sin to say “no”), the certainty of faith and God’s power to motivate through the promise appear to be deeply undermined.

Nevertheless, this is an important and provocative book—a book that is both interesting and well-argued. Henriksen brings to his task a profound erudition, and his list of interlocutors is impressive. While this is not a book I would recommend to anyone unfamiliar with theological concepts, it is a book that deserves to be read—and one I recommend without reservation...