66 - God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment?

God and Creation in Christian Theology:
Tyranny or Empowerment?
By Kathryn Tanner
Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988. 196 pp. $39.95.

Langdon Gilkey once called providence "the forgotten stepchild of contemporary theology." Even when the relation between divine and human agency is not forgotten, as in contemporary philosophical discussions about God's omniscience, it has been maltreated by opposing arguments that pass each other by without any apparent contact. Agreement seems not only delayed but positively precluded. One side's claims for human responsibility leave no room for God's sovereignty; while the other side's assertions of divine prerogative effectively blot out human freedom. This impasse produces, quite literally, a significant incoherence in Christian thought.

For Kathryn Tanner of Yale University, such incoherence is not endemic to the subject matter, but rather the expected result when philosophers and theologians do not formulate the issue of God's relation to the created order in its proper terms. Accordingly, we continue to trip because we do not pay adequate attention to the ground on which we walk by assuming as obvious starting-points premises that were actually historically delivered and, in some cases, historically corrupted. Tanner's

68 - God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment?

aim in her book is to remove the impasse on which we stumble and recover coherent Christian discourse "by disturbing the complacent self-evidence of modern assumptions used to interpret traditional Christian language." The way she does this is by journeying behind these assumptions to the historical and philosophical presuppositions that produced and sustain them.

Displaying an admirable historical sensitivity, Tanner recognizes that we can only navigate where we are conceptually if we know where we have been and how we arrived at our present position. With the help of several examples drawn from classical (Aquinas, Luther) and more contemporary (Barth, Rahner) figures, she shows how incoherence arises when theological language leaves proven paths for conceptual dead-ends, rendering theology unable to meet its obligations of affirming both the transcendence of God and the freedom of God's human creatures. The theologian's task, Tanner explains in Chapter One, becomes a "grammatical" one of remapping the conceptual terrain with "meta-level rules" directing theological language about God and creatures back on track.

After specifying such rules in Chapters Two and Three, Tanner uses her analysis of the concept of divine transcendence to show what went wrong with Gabriel Biel's semi-Pelagianism and the sixteenth century de Auxiliis controversy involving Domingo Baņez and Luis de Molina. Both cases turned the divine/human encounter into an either/or proposition such that the free agency attributed to God had to be taken away from humans and vice versa. In Chapter Four, Tanner shows how these tendencies were reinforced through theology's encounter with the cultural and philosophical deliveries of modernity and its seemingly pervasive confidence in self-sufficient human capabilities. Her proposals to counteract these "inevitably Pelagian results" and restore the possibility of coherence to modern theological discourse are highly nuanced but involve attention to the rules she has set out coupled with a renewed emphasis on divine sovereignty as the transcendent source of created agency.

Pointing to lacunae in a book on so large a topic is not so much to criticize the author as to draw up a wish list on behalf of her readers for her future explorations. One notable omission is the lack of a detailed treatment of the origin and reality of evil in the world. In a post Holocaust world, any theologian who presumes to emphasize divine sovereignty and speak of God's "universally extensive and immediate agency" such that "created beings have no domain of operations independent of God's agency," and God's will is "necessarily efficacious, infallibly effective," owes her readers some attempt to come to grips with the presence of evil in God's good creation. Tanner mentions and tables such a discussion in a footnote. Granted, an adequate treatment would have produced a vastly larger book. Still, one would have liked more indications of where she would take this topic or at least some hints of

69 - God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment?

how she evaluates the attempts made by the other authors she discusses to deal with it.

Throughout, Tanner is a lively writer, helpful to the reader with lucid previews and summaries of some very philosophically complex material. She intends not to produce a new theology but rather a way to measure the theologies we have already inherited or those we shall devise. One cannot ask much more of an author than what Tanner tries to provide, a way to understand our past and a way to go forward into our future. Students of historical theology will appreciate her insightful analysis of the Christian theological tradition and its roots in Greek neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism. Contemporary theologians and philosophers would do well to familiarize themselves with Tanner's directions along the intellectual terrain on which future discussions of God's ways with the world should tread. She is a reliable guide, and her book may be quite fruitfully appropriated and-pace Gilkey's earlier remark-adopted.

Joseph M. Incandela
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, Indiana