Customer Reviews

Reforming the Doctrine of God

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It's been awhile since I've read a book of this kind. F. LeRon Shults guides the reader through historical and contemporary philosophical and theological views or "trajectories" of the doctrine of God in his book Reforming the Doctrine of God (Eerdmans 2005).

I appreciated his (and others') critique of the immaterial substance, single subject (versus trinitarian being), first cause view of God. Shults points out that this characterization of God (single subject theism) created the reaction of a-theism.

Shults introduces us to Greek philosophers, early church fathers and Reformation and modern theologians who all grappled with God's Infinity, Trinity and Futurity. The "hardening" of God as single subject, immaterial substance and first cause led to antinomies because the biblical revelation of God could not fit those hardened categories.

LeRon Shults, while appreciating past thinkers, desires to create present "conceptional space" that allows for a vigorous evangelical rethinking of the doctrine of God. Shults thinking pulls in the Eastern Orthodox theologians, especially in discussion the perichoretic relationship of Father, Son and Spirit. Shults' discussion of intensive Infinity (and the Trinity) versus extensive Infinity is fascinating.

Part III "Reforming the Doctrine of God" is where Shults contributes his own creative reformative views of the theology of God. [Note: Shults discusses the "doctrine" of God or the "theological" expressions/statements about God. He is not presuming to say that he is reforming God. I say this because I think some on the evangelical right will critique Shults' creative discussion as an assault on the "assured results" of their evangelical views.]

Parts I and II are a presentation of the flow of theological thought through the historical development of God's Infinity, Trinitarian being and Futurity. It's heavy reading and I was stunned and thankful for the breadth and depth of Shults' scholarship and research. And, yes, at times I found myself saying, "What the heck is he talking about?!"

I'll end this review with this clear statement from Shults:

"The great theologians of each generation have realized that merely repeating particular formulations inherited from previous generations would serve only to preserve the gospel by petrifying it. Fear can easily drive us to treat our theological propositions as fossils, unearthed from a privileged period in church history and placed in an ecclesiastical museum, quarantined from the polluted air of cultural anxiety that might contribute to its deterioration."
Reforming the Doctrine of God, 201

This has probably been one of the most significant books that I've ever read in regards to so many questions about God. Before ever reviewing the book though I'd like to highlight John Frye's review where he points out well that "[Note: Shults discusses the "doctrine" of God or the "theological" expressions/statements about God. He is not presuming to say that he is reforming God. I say this because I think some on the evangelical right will critique Shults' creative discussion as an assault on the "assured results" of their evangelical views.]" When I've first showed this book to several different people, they're reaction to the title has been negative, as though the book is trying to say that we need to reform God: this is not the book's intent.

Reforming the Doctrine of God is broken into three parts, with an introduction at the beginning of the book.

Part 1: Challenges in the Doctrine of God
This section of the book is the `deconstruction' part, and looks at three main challenges in the Doctrine of God: God as Immaterial Substance, God as Single Subject, and God as First Cause. LeRon carefully and contemplatively looks at theological voices from the past to see what they've said, set up, and articulated about into the dialogue about three main topics relating to who God is: Infinity, Trinity, and Futurity. Each Section looks at specific anxieties linked to each of the three topics (Cartesian, Ockhamist, and Newtonian), discusses the topics from the perspective of Early Modern Theological Projects, Late Modern Philosophy, Contemporary Science, and finally gives Biblical Experiences of Infinity, Trinity, and Futurity.

Part 2: Trajectories in the Doctrine of God
This section, organized very much like the previous section, looks at retrieving the aforementioned "Big Three" of Infinity, Trinity, and Futurity. For each of the three in this section, LeRon looks at Traditional Resources, Reformed Reconstructions, Lutheran Reconstructions, Ecumenical and Reformative Appeal of the doctrines, and then ends with presentations on Intensive Infinity, Robust Trinity, and Absolute Futurity.

Part 3: Reforming the Doctrine of God
The final section of the book is the `reconstructive' part of the book, and I think the most powerful. Again grouped into the same groups of threes, LeRon looks at Omniscient Faithfulness, Omnipotent Love, Omnipresent Hope. In each of these areas, LeRon looks at moving beyond certain antimonies: Divine Foreknowledge, Divine Predestination, and Divine Timelessness. He also shows how we can `tremble with delight' at the Name, Reign, and Face of God; how Jesus relates to the Spirit of Wisdom, Justice, and Freedom; he reconstructs the Teleological, Cosmological, and Ontological arguments, and finally gives the Gospel of Divine Knowing, Acting, and Being.

The book is breathtaking in its depth, and covers an almost unbelievable amount of subject matter for a book that's not quite 300 pages. Note: this is definitely a book that's meant to be read cover to cover. I had it for quite some time before actually reading straight through, and was sort of using it as a reference book for certain topics. For this, it was somewhat helpful. But when I finally read through it straight through, everything became so crystal clear that it was awe-inspiring: it was like hooking up an amplifier to scripture. I found myself reading scriptures that I'd read hundreds of time before in a much more powerful way: God was all the more amazing, more incredible than I ever could have thought possible.

Like I said at the beginning, this book is not about changing God or challenging scripture. LeRon holds scripture in very high esteem and looks at it powerfully. Do be warned, however: LeRon is very upfront in saying that all language (including the words of scripture) will ultimately be apophotic in some sense. Why? Because words will never fully grasp God (otherwise words themselves would necessarily have to be God). LeRon's main focus in this book is to challenge our understandings about God and about what scripture is truly teaching.

This book is NOT an easy read by any stretch of the imagination. You'll probably need to have a dictionary nearby, and even a theological dictionary. However, it's well worth the read and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone who seeks to have better understandings of these topics. I close my review with the last paragraph of the book:

"For those feeling crushed by the ontological weight of the world, the all-embracing presence of God is good news, evoking hope that grants new being even now, as we attend to the infinite divine countenance that brings grace and peace. The absolute beauty of omnipresent hope calls human freedom into being as a hopeful becoming. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as the "hypostasis" of "hoped-for things." Christian life is subsisting in the infinite hope-fullness of the Trinitarian God. The divine presence holds believers in an ever-new experience of ecstatic becoming. The being of the biblical God is gospel, because being confronted by this welcoming presence is an invitation to be transformed by and in a living hope. God's gracious creative presence orients us in hope toward the future of our own well-being, which is already being made new. We long to belong eternally within the infinitely joyful harmony that is the life of God. This is the chief end of human becoming - to glorify and enjoy God forever" (p. 293).

Bearing a profound learning in the intimidatingly vast history of both philosophical and theological thought, F. LeRon Shults has produced a magnificent work that continually provides insight into the history of the Christian understanding of God, its failings and antinomies, and potential trajectories for "reforming," and as such overcoming, traditional methods.

I say "overcoming traditional method" as opposed to really "overcoming traditional doctrine" for two reasons: 1.) Throughout the book it becomes increasingly clear that the major contribution of Shults is not necessarily his conclusions quae conclusions, but in the methodologies he employs to reach them (though I by no means wish to decry his actual theological conclusions which are exceedingly profound, if not wholly adequately developed) and 2.) "overcoming doctrine" would imply too readily that Shults is some type of post-modern (or later-modern) seperatist who has little to no wish to maintain ties to "traditional" understandings of the doctrines of God, which he has sometimes been (wrongly) accused of in other areas(especially a particular Amazon reviewer commenting on one of Shults' other books "Reforming Theological Anthropology").

Shults' main thesis of the book, which is implicit throughout his other works as well, is that Theologians never (contra Barth) produce doctrine based on strict biblicism (i.e. by ignoring extra-biblical sciences), but more universaly drawn from contemporary aspects of philosophy and science to help them articulate their Biblical worldview. Even the more "biblically" oriented interpreters refer to concepts such as "man," or "world" or "time" (in this case "God") which are not systematically developed in the bible, and as such there is a demand of the theological consciousness for an explicit concentration to explain and interpret all reality in light of the biblical witness for the sake of its own self-coherence: Christianity claims to know the One God, and so the one basic "fact" of all reality, hence Christianity is either a universal discipline (involving dialogues with science and philosophy and sociology and psychology) or a "ghetto-ized" delusion.

Jumping off from there, Shults launches into traditional methods and understandings of past theological enterprises, their philosophical and theological underpinnings, and the antinomies that arise because of these decisions. In particular Shults calls attention to traditional problems by focusing on three intertwined categories that continually come up throughout the tradition: God as Immaterial Substance, God as a Single Subject, and God as the First Cause. These three categories, and the examination of the history of their thought and difficulties, comprise the first four chapters of Shults' book.

Shults proposes that these categories are not faithful to the biblical witness, and create insuperable difficulties. For example, thinking of God as immaterial substance often leads to a transcendance/immanence dialectical pull that often results in the truncation of one for the other. Or, again, God as a single Subject creates the polarity of what Shults calls the "Voluntarist/Intellectualist" ideals, which have a tendency to base all discussions of God's "knowledge" or "will" based on faculty psychology of a single subject. Hence we see the Calvinist/Arminianist solutions on this spectru,: Does God know everything because He wills it, or does He will a certain world because He knew it in advance?" Or "God as First Cause", for example, has had incredible problems, especially with the rise of Newtonian mechanistic science, of explaining creaturely free will over against what appears to be the logical conclusion of an absolute mechanistic determinism.

Rather than the detailed and intricate arguments that so often debate Prdestination vs Free will, or God's foreknowledge of future events, etc... within this spectrum of assumptions (that is, assuming God as Immaterial Substance, Single Subject, and First Cause) SHults sees that there is evidence, both in the bible and in traditional philosophy/theology, to reject the spectrum itself and create a new one. Hence, Shults creates three "new" categories: God as truly Infinite, God as Trinity, and an "eschatological ontology" which claims that, in a very real sense, God's power is the power from the future, rather than the mechanical push of past-oriented causation (obviously I can do no justice to the philosophy and theology here, so read the book if you are intrigued). The next three chapters trace these three new categories throughout Patristic, Medievil, Reformation, and Contemporary (read: 20th century) theologies. In particular, Shults continually (though briefly)dialogues with three Reformed Theologians (Karl Barth, Colin Gunton, and Jurgen Moltmann) three Lutheran theologians (Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jungel, and Wolfhart Pannenberg), the profound Catholic thinker Karl Rahner, the Orhodox theologian John Zizioulas, and a small variety of Liberation and Feminist theologians (though this comprises the smallest portion of the dialogues).

Finally, after elaborating how these three categories come to play in other's theologies, the last three chapters are devoted to a large reworking of the Predestination vs- Free will arrangement and all that includes, by an intensely nuanced biblical discussion of the evidences, guided by the new three categories. The result is simply astounding (though I wont spoil it by revealing his conclusions here).

But, like all things produced by mankind, this is not a perfect book. My complaints are few and small, but I shall mention them anyway: I earlier remarked that this book's most valuable contribution is its discussion and methodology, rather than its specific conclusions. Again, I don't want to reduce the profundity of Shults' conclusions, nonetheless there were certain things left unexplained, even by his broad analyses. Namely, how do we explain certain passages, like God's pre-decision of Esau and Jacob that Jacob God would Love and Esau he would "hate"? Shults analyses is profound, but it would have been strengthed by more concrete examples of the traditional problems. It may in fact be obviouse, and so Shults opted out of this "theological hand-holding" but I was left with many questions of actual application of his new categories to certain biblical problems.

On a more profound note, certain of SHults' categories themselves are left uncritiqued. For example, Shults', with many of his contemporaries, calls for a truly Infinite God (in the Hegelian sense): The Infinite that is merely the negation of the limits of the finite, or stands over against the finite, is itself only a false infinite and is itself finite by the opposition. The true infinite overcomes its own antithesis to the finite, and so is both transcendent and immanent to it. Now, I wholly accept this conclusion, but, for example, Ludwig Fuerbach critiqued Hegel's understanding of the True Infinite by saying that if, in this way, the subject/object distinction does not apply to God over against us, then God is not truly "other" than us. The conclusion then follows from this critique: if God is not Other than us, He is us, that is, we are God. Another example of a potential critique (though by no means a particularily detrimental one) is Shults' use of Cantorian set-theory as an example of the revolution in mathematics pointing towards the "true infinite." Now again, I think this is a brilliant example (how often do we theology-readers actually get to interact with mathematicians?) Yet, as far as an example, Cantor still seems to assume Platonic-realism of numbers for his theory to work (that is to say, that numbers actually refer to real, existing entities.) Now, obviously, Shults was only using Cantor as something of a heuristic device, but at the same time I was left feeling, with this particular example, that perhaps Cantor was presented as more philosophically "radical" than he may actually be. Now, these complaints can (and have) been addressed to certain extents, but not by Shults, who simply views these categories as "correct". I agree with him that they are good categories, but I would have appreciated more of a defense of Shults views, rather than merely naming them as savior over-against traditional categories. It may be, however, that this critique of mine (small though it is) is itself based on an overly "traditional" understanding of defense. Shults, in one sense, does defend these (and other) decisions in the sense of allowing their implications to unfold and explain Christian theology in an absolutely brilliant manner. If one were to liken it to an explanatory"hypothesis" in science, it may indeed be in this sense that one could say that Shults has "proven" his case, (even if only provisionally, which Shults himself would admit to be a key criterion against stagnation).



All in all however, this is a must read for anyone even vaguely interested in theology. While not necessarily an easy read, it is well worth any commitment given to it.

As all of the other reviewers can testify to, this book has much to offer in way of clear writing style and interesting historical discussions of the various scientific, philosophical, and theological issues. For those reasons, this book is certainly worth a careful and thoughtful read. However, I wish to bring up several weaknesses in the book which other reviewers have not mentioned. These criticisms are to be seen as representative and not exhaustive. These criticisms lead me to say that, while this book has many positive attributes, its' achievements are overrated.

1) While Shults shows much disdain for substance metaphysics, nowhere does he offer a solid refutation of substance metaphysics and often he misconstrues it as some sort of "dualism". (Dualism is the new f-word in various theological and philosophical circles.) Nor does he replace the category of substance with anything else. In fact, it seems to me that one could easily read Shults as assuming the category of substance in most of his writings for substances are things that stand in relations, undergo change through time, and so forth. There can be no emphasis on relations unless there are things that stand in relations. This criticism of Shults' work is not new by any means, and it applies to many contemporary theologians. Perhaps Shults could follow Anselm and say something to the affect of `Substance is not an appropriate category for God, but until we have a better metaphysical category we will keep on using it.'

2) There is a great amount of disdain for the doctrine of divine simplicity. It certainly is a doctrine that has fallen on hard times in recent discussions in theology and philosophy of religion. I agree that several articulations of the doctrine are problematic and should be abandoned. However, Shults fails to note that there are various articulations of the doctrine. Some of these versions do not suffer from the problems that plague the others, and as such several of his complaints against various theological doctrines that depend upon simplicity may not be justified. (The same is true of the doctrine of immutability.)

3) In Shults' discussion of negative theology he rips it out of its' context within the via triplex, thus distorting the doctrine.

4) Several things are lacking in his discussion of divine infinity. First, he wishes to emphasize God's intensive infinity. I found it interesting that Duns Scotus only got a few sentences in this chapter since Scotus is unique in his doctrine of infinity. Scotus places divine infinity at the heart of his understanding of God and develops an interesting account of intensive and extensive infinity and how they work together. None of this is mentioned by Shults, but to be fair he is trying to offer a brief overview of the entire history of the doctrine. Second, nowhere does he make it clear what he means by intensive infinity other than vague references to relationality. Shults' previous writings on divine infinity have been seriously criticized on this point and others, so I expected him to offer a better articulation of the doctrine that dealt with these criticisms.

5) There are many times where Shults' sees problems in a doctrinal articulation that simply are not there. For instance, his discussion of God and time starts out by saying that the question of whether or not God is timeless is a poor way of framing the discussion. Why think a thing like that? Necessarily, God is either temporal or atemporal. The two are logically contradictory and as such only one can be true of God. There are no other options. He fails even further in his discussion when he says that all temporal categories do not apply to God because they are creaturely categories. This is a failure because it would seem to commit him to divine atemporality, which he has already stated we need to get beyond. It is a further failure for he wishes to continue to discuss God and time in terms of absolute futurity, but futurity is a creaturely temporal category and as such we cannot use it to speak of God. For the sake of brevity I will simply say that his rearticulation of the doctrine of divine eternality is an absolute mess. Fortunately for Shults he is in good company on this point for many contemporary theologians have doctrines of divine eternality that are hopelessly incoherent.

Yo L-Ron, why you be trippin bout da intensive infinity
and gettin up in my grill bout da absolute futurity
I get da napalm in my pants
when I do dis dance
Cuz you got me thinkin panentheistically

Yo L-Ron, you say I ain't got no duality
and that my boy Descartes ain't got no reality
Now I wonder where I've gone
When I sing this song
Cuz you say I needs me some relationality

Yo L-Ron, why you be smackin on da Reformation
when dats where I go to get da information
you use da Rahner, da Gunton
da Jüngel and da Moltmann
And now you cauzin me da onto-hesitation

Yo L-Ron, why you be dissin the patristics
when dey be givin us da bumpin logistics
you say I'm at a loss
cuzza Levinas
and should be blingin out these new characteristics

Yo L-Ron, why you be callin me da paleo
and pimpin up da dialectic lingo
I got da imma-nence
down wit da tran-sen-dance
but you be hatin da classical radio

Yo L-Ron, you say I be fumblin on antinomies
Cuz I be followin on da classical affinities
You say da Armin-i-an
and da Calvin-i-an
Be eatin dem some funky falsifalities

Yo L-Ron, why you be dumpin on modernity
makin Newton out da chump wit his causality
you bustin on da Leibniz monadology
and be pressin on my gonadology
Now I ain't got no more mackin old theodicy

Yo L-Ron, why you be hoppin eschatology
contructin yo-self da brand new ontology
You use da Pannenberg and da Jenson
and be pointin god in a whole new direction
you be blowin minds with da massive thinkin-ology

Yo L-Ron, now dat I know I'm all wrong
I'll keep on singin dis song:

Dat you mixed up all my mental categories
And I pooted out my false presuppositories
Now I gots da conceptual place
to liberate ma mind and replace
I was oh-so-wrong, you made me oh-so-right
Cuz your brain be takin up so much space