99 - The Doctrine of God

The Doctrine of God
By Ronald Gregor Smith
192 pp. Philadelphia, Westminster, 1970. $5.00.

"Ronald Gregor Smith may well be the most important English speaking theologian of this generation and this, I believe, is his most significant book." This is a large claim. It is made by his successor in the chair of Divinity at Glasgow in an admirable introduction which gives a brief sketch of the man and his work and helps us to realize how great a loss the world of theology sustained by his death in 1968.

The book now published represents as nearly as possible the Warfield Lectures which Gregor Smith was due to give at Princeton. Four were virtually complete. The last two have been skillfully reconstructed from notes which he had already made. There is little doubt that we have thus been put into possession of his last theological testament. It is a remarkably impressive document with some of the qualities of Buber's I And Thou, which Gregor Smith himself introduced to the English-speaking world.

Rarely in reading a book have I been so conscious of a man wrestling with his material, his traditional concepts, his resources in language. His earlier studies and personal contacts-in Scotland, on the Continent, with the S.C.M. Press in London, as editor, as translator, as teacher -are all brought into the service of the task which for any theologian constitutes the question, "How can I bear witness to God himself, how can I find words to express the inexpressible reality of the living God?" Sometimes in his earlier writings he seemed to be speaking either obscurely or extremely. In this last book there is, besides the sense of wrestling, a feeling of a man who has attained maturity and a confident faith of a quite unusual intensity.

I suppose that if one theme can be singled out as dominant in the book, it is the necessity of using today the language of history rather than that of being in bearing witness to God. This conclusion is not reached in any facile way. There is a careful and balanced critique of the traditional ways of speaking of God in terms of being but also a firm decision that " 'God as Being' is not a satisfactory category for Christian theology." Instead, "God is a name that we may use, and must use, in fear and trembling, as the one who is ineffable, yet gives himself a 'local habitation and a name,' in his movements and transformations through history." On a number of occasions he refers to Carl Michalson, with

100 - The Doctrine of God

whose approach he evidently felt much sympathy. To spell out what it means to speak of the transcendence of God in history was, it seems, Gregor Smith's (as I think it was Michalson's) highest ambition.

Perhaps the section of the book where some amplification would have been most welcome is that in which he refers to Schubert Ogden and incidentally to Whitehead and Hartshorne. He offers a brief criticism but does not seem to me anywhere really to come to grips with the world picture of modern science and the difficulties it raises for using the name God. The drama of history cannot be independent of the context in which it is played out. What kind of contextual theology is to accompany the theology of historical manifestation?

This relatively short book is full of striking sentences some of which have an almost poetic quality. It calls for a responsive wrestling akin to that with which the author composed it. Whether or not the prefatory claim may be justified, I have little doubt that this is the most searching and challenging book on the doctrine of God written in recent times by any British theologian.

F.W. Dillistone
Clare Hall
Cambridge, England