Theology Today - Vol 25, No. 4 - January 1969 - BOOK REVIEW - Who Trusts In God: Musings On the Meaning Of Providence

491 - Who Trusts In God: Musings On the Meaning Of Providence

Who Trusts In God: Musings On the Meaning Of Providence
By Albert C. Outler
141 pp. New York, Oxford University Press, 1968. $3.95.

In a climate of theological opinion, which is characterised by themes like the absence of God and the death of God, it takes courage to write a book on providence, which has to do with the presence of God in the world and in human history. Professor Outler here delivers a challenge to the radical theologies of the day, with professed hesitation, but with unrestrained zest. Some readers may doubt whether tile radicals need to be taken so seriously, others whether they can be disposed of with schoolmasterly reprimands. At all events, they are there, they hit the

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headlines, they are widely read, they help to spread the idea that "traditional Christianity has had it," and, it may be added, they create such an impression of the volatility of theology as tends to bring the whole enterprise into contempt. It was time that some one stood up for the "traditional belief," even at the risk of being called a "fossil."

Outler sees the present vogue of disbelief as the late harvest of a concern for human maturity and human freedom which burgeoned in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The view, first enunciated by Voltaire, that in order to promote the human it is necessary to eliminate the divine, has become vastly more plausible after two hundred years, now that advances in science and technology have virtually enabled man to assume the role of his own providence. Moreover, the infiltration of humanism into theology, which has been proceeding steadily since the Enlightenment, has mounted to a flood with the collapse of the neoorthodox attempt to dam it with a soteriological, or Christocentric island.

In defining the problem of providence as that of the presence of God in the world Outler stresses the importance of distinguishing between nature, history, and spirit, as the three concentric circles which together constitute the field of human existence. Nature is a closed system in which there is no need for God as a "working hypothesis." History, as the arena of human freedom, is not susceptible of causal explanation, and the introduction of God as a deus ex machina to account for the accidents of history ("acts of God") merely reflects the lure of causality. Spirit points to the moment of the present-not the chronological moment which has no extension and which can therefore be accommodated in deterministic schemes-but the existential moment in which the self experiences itself as "given" and in this experience transcends the limits of space, time, causality, and communes with the spirit of the provident mystery that encompasses us. The mode of God's presence in human affairs is communion, not causality; it is grace, not force; it is affective rather than effective.

Is this a reductionist version of the "traditional" doctrine of providence? Outler denies the charge and claims that he has merely pruned away antiquated notions of divine intervention which failed to distinguish the domains of nature, history, and spirit. But what he offers is a doctrine of God as the Creator and Provider of the order of nature, which is still evolving, and of the possibilities of human freedom in history; God's providence, it is to be feared, is saved only by a subtle shift in the meaning of the term. The God who is the Creator and Provider of all the potentialities and potencies in creation is strikingly reminiscent of the God of Leibniz. And though Outler in a fine chapter on the problem of evil rejects the notions of divine immutability and

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impassibility which are presupposed in classical theodicy, and rightly stresses the biblical notion of God's hazardous involvement in the history of his creatures, this involvement is not intervention, but a presence in grace, which is rather like that advisory role which the American presence in Vietnam was originally supposed to have. God's provident presence has its paradigm in his presence in Christ, and especially in his passion and death; it belongs to a "theology of the cross," but apparently it draws nothing from a theology of the resurrection, which, if it means anything at all, means divine intervention in nature and history. By the same token, the Christian style of life is described as one that is buoyed up by its consciousness of God's provident presence in the exigencies of existence; it finds support in some fine old rousing hymns, but not, it would appear, in prayer.

The book contains the Sprunt Lectures for 1967 and retains the style of the spoken word; it is lively, sometimes racy, even slangy. The use of the word "apophatic" to mean something like analogous or parabolic or anthropomorphic, seems odd to me. And some of the Latin is improbable: it is doubtful if an event can happen in medias res; it is certain that the plural of deus ex machina is not dei ex machinae.

George S. Hendry
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey