"The recent book edited by John Polkinghorne, 'The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis' is trying in some sense to accomplish the impossible," according to Peter J. Haas, Abba Hillel Silver Chair of Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve University. In Haas' view, the book "is attempting to bring together in harmonious conversation three distinct and ever more mutually exclusive discourses. First, of course, is [the discourse of] contemporary scientific descriptions of the world, from Darwin to Chaos Theory and beyond. The second is the Western theological tradition concerning the creator God who is traditionally held to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent, and who recompenses all good and evil if not in this world then in the afterlife. Finally, these two discourses are to be read into each other through the third, namely, a Christian, more specifically a Protestant, religious voice."

In other words, no matter how hard we are trying, we always bring to the science religion debate our particular science and our particular religious tradition or experience. Although we are speaking to a generality, we are speaking from our particularity as Hindu chemist or Muslim physicist or Catholic biologist, and perhaps even as Catholic microbiologist as opposed to Catholic anatomist. And each of our trainings and upbringings expose us to and protect us from certain aspects and experiences of the world. We may be speaking to "science and religion", but we are speaking as "mathematician and Baha'i".

Given today's text, with its discourses of "contemporary scientific descriptions of the world" and of "the Western theological tradition" as well as "a Christian, more specifically a Protestant, religious voice", we can ask along with Haas whether "the success achieved here, if any, has any relevance beyond the Western Protestant theological community from which it emerged"? Please read on to discover it has or has not, for as Haas also notes

"only by moving beyond the specifically Christian discourse of love, grace and cross, can a new theology emerge that will really encompass the wider Western faith community. But where such a kenosis of Christian speculation into the larger world would leave anything recognizably Christianity is another question altogether...."

But one most definitely in need of being asked.

Dr. Haas was ordained as a Reform Rabbi from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1974. . After receiving ordination, Rabbi Haas served as an active duty chaplain in the United States Army for three years, developing an interest in moral philosophy and moral education. Upon completion of his military duty, he enrolled in the graduate program in religion at Brown University (Providence, RI) receiving his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies in 1980.That Fall, Dr. Haas moved to Nashville, TN to take up a position as Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies in the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. Prof. Haas left Vanderbilt at the end of 1999 to become the Abba Hillel Silver Chair of Jewish Studies and the director of the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH. Professor Haas taught courses on Judaism, the Holocaust, Western religious ethics, science and religion, and the religion and politics of the modern Middle East. Among his books are a study of the use of moral language in Nazi Europe and most recently a study of the moral discourse of classical Rabbinic Judaism. His current research interests include the relationship between science and religion in the contemporary world. He has delivered presentation at numerous conferences in Israel, as well as in England, Italy and Germany and Belgium.

The series on "The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis", a compilation of essays edited by John C. Polkinghorne, (Paperback; 210pp.; ISBN: 0-80284-885-0; Eerdmans Publishing Company; and April 2001) will continue throughout July on Wednesdays, with essays by Malcolm Jeeves, Arthur Peacocke, and Holmes Rolston III scheduled to appear. For those interested in more information about the book, or in purchasing it, please go to<http://www.eerdmans.com/shop/product.asp?p_key=0802848850>.

-- Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: Beyond "God wants...": A Review of The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis From: Peter J. Haas Email: <pjh7@po.cwru.edu>

The recent book edited by John Polkinghorne, "The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis" is trying in some sense to accomplish the impossible. It is attempting to bring together in harmonious conversation three distinct and ever more mutually exclusive discourses. First, of course, is contemporary scientific descriptions of the world, from Darwin to Chaos Theory and beyond. The second is the Western theological tradition concerning the creator God who is traditionally held to be all-powerful, all-knowing and benevolent and who recompenses all good and evil if not in this world then in the afterlife. Finally, these two discourses are to be read into each other through the third, namely, a Christian, more specifically a Protestant, religious voice. My goal in what follows is not to argue whether or not such a synthesis is possible. I will focus rather on asking whether or not the essays in front of us have been successful in accomplishing this task or at least successful in pointing to how such success might be achieved. At the end it will be worth asking if the success achieved here, if any, has any relevance beyond the Western Protestant theological community from which it emerged.

I wish to begin by pointing out that the problem the book addresses is an extraordinarily difficult one, tied up inextricably with the histories of Western science on the one hand and Christian theological discourse on the other. At the start of Christianity, of course, these two facets of Western intellectual life went hand in glove. For the first few centuries of the common era, the early Church struggled to make its message meaningful to a population, especially in the Greek-speaking east, that was educated and philosophically sophisticated. And it was also struggling to make room for itself in a world that was hardly suffering from a shortage of religions from which to choose. So the leaders of the early church early on made an alliance as it were with the science of their day; determined to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christianity was not just another tradition or superstition coming out of the East, but was in fact the Truth, fully compatible with the most advanced philosophical and scientific thinking of the day. As a consequence, Church thinkers worked hard to define their new religion in Hellenistic, rather than merely Jewish, terms. The adoption by the early Church of Platonic and Aristotelian thought created an important and powerful synergy. As was the case also later on in Judaism and Islam, Aristotelian scientists and Christian theologians worked closely together and often in the same person. Through this synthesis, the two "books" of revelation, nature and the Bible, were shown to be speaking of the same Truth.

This alliance between what we now call science and religion began to break down in the sixteenth century with the work of Copernicus, and more significantly, the works of Kepler and Galileo. As the cosmology of the scientist began to move off in its own direction and according to its own internal logic, it moved in directions that traditional Christian theology found unprecedented, then alien, and finally threatening. The single Truth of revelation and nature was seeming to break apart. To be sure, there were attempts to hold these two parts of the Western intellectual tradition together. Even the physics of Isaac Newton did not completely effect a separation between science and a sort of Christian deism, although it clearly introduced a strain into the relationship. Ultimately, however, the gap became too wide to ignore. By the late nineteenth century, it was even possible to talk about "warfare" between science and religion ("religion" meaning, of course, Western Christianity) and elements on both sides proceeded to stake out positions that systematically and uncompromisingly excluded the other. Yet the conviction that somehow religion (again, meaning Western, generally Protestant, Christianity) and scientific cosmology were not incompatible never fully died. There was always the sense, however submerged in public discourse, that the Book of Nature and the Book of Revelation, to use the medieval terms, were written by the same Author and expressed the same Truth. The trick was finding some new language in which to articulate that relationship.

This brings us to the book at hand. The positions today, to put them starkly and simplistically, are that traditional Christian theological discourse has understood Creation as we now see it to be the direct work of the Creator. That is, the cosmos from the "macro" scale of the stars and galaxies to the "micro" scale of life forms on Earth, are essentially as they came from the hand of God at the time of the Creation. On the other hand, scientific cosmology, again from the galactic to the genetic scale, has come to see the present reality as the current state of on-going secular evolutionary processes that have unfolded according to their own internal laws. So if one nowadays wishes to read the two Books as addressing a single truth, then one must find a way of reconciling these two views. This kind of reconciliation is all the more difficult because popular discourse still accepts the nineteenth century warfare model in which one can only accept either "Darwinism" or "religion".

But attempts have been, and are being, made to articulate such an intermediate position. One that immediately comes to mind is "Intelligent Design", which holds that God works through evolution, allowing chemical and physical processes to push forward on their own until at certain crucial junctures the divine intervenes to nudge the progression in one direction or another. One of the problems of this proposed solution is that it calls for the laws of nature to be violated at (from our point of view) arbitrary points along the way. It seems to me that the approach being explored by the essays collected here are designed to deal with just this critique. The authors all hold, it seems, that God has allowed evolutionary processes to proceed unhindered (hence maintaining the integrity of science) but in such a way that the final divine goal for creation will nonetheless be achieved, and in a way perfectly comprehensible within classical Christian discourse. One of the first questions that comes to mind is whether or not this new way of looking at creation does in fact remove God so far from the process that it can no longer be honestly called "Christian" or even "Western" in some generally acknowledged religious sense. It is to this question that I now want to turn.

Let me begin with the very title and subtitle of the book. Together these are meant to point to an approach to Christian theology which has been developing over at least the last half century or so. It builds on what has been called "process theology", which holds that Creation (and God?) are still "in process", that is, still blossoming out to full expression, or to use more traditional language, still actualizing their full pre-ordained potential. The thesis which the book before us proposes to develop is the idea that this sort of Creation-in-process has been put into motion consciously, as it were, by an act of chosen self-limitation on the part of God. The language on the back cover puts it better than I could, the "Kenosis" of the title, the blurb tells us "refers to God's voluntary limitation of his divine infinity in order to allow room for finite creatures who are truly free to be themselves." By positing this self-limitation on the part of God, room is opened up for articulating in a new and science-friendly way the answers to a number of questions in the science versus religion debate. Ian Barbour, in the first chapter of the book, lists five that he sees as the most crucial: the relation between modern science and (Christian) theology, the problem of theodicy, the reality of human freedom, the Christian understanding of the Cross and patriarchal symbols of God. The claim is that by allowing actual limitation into the divine realm, and so the consequent lack of closure on any articulation of the Truth, an opportunity is created for dealing with each of these more adequately in light of current scientific cosmological speculation. At its basest level, the working assumption of these authors is that the self-limitation of God amounts to allowing real contingency in the scheme of things, a point upon which science and religion can now agree (Barbour's first point). This has the further implication that while human freedom is real, so is what cruelty and evil flow from that freedom (hence accounting for theodicy, Barbour's second point). And insofar as the cosmos is thus not complete, we have to acknowledge that no description of reality or of God can ever be regarded as all-encompassing and final (Barbour's third and fifth point). The bottom line, as it were, is that we can no longer hold on to the notion that God and people occupy isolated realms. In the openness of Creation, both God and people are in engaged in a common project of finishing creation, and so share common interests and have a stake in a common fate, as it were (thus Barbour's fourth point).

One of the positive accomplishments of this approach is that it maintains the integrity of the scientific method. But it does so at the expense of the traditional Christian conceptualization of the deity. I would like now to take just a moment to focus a bit more closely on this cost, and in particular on the notion of the self-limitation of God. On the positive side, there can be no doubt that this notion of divine self-limitation does in fact help us to deal more seriously and creatively with certain basic theological conundra that arise in light of modern science. The authors collected in this book show us these theological possibilities at their best. But the claim, of course, raises certain new problems of its own, several of which are in fact recognized by the contributors to this volume who go on to address them in more or less adequate terms along the way. Let me call your attention to a few of these problems. One of the most obvious question, it seems to me, is why a deity would want to limit itself in this way in the first place. The implicit, and sometimes explicit answer of the book, is that such a move is an act of love (hence the title). But that, it strikes me on reflection, is ultimately a solution without a meaning. Empedocles already argued that all activity in the universe was provoked by the two forces of love (attraction) and hate (repulsion). But he was talking about a physically perceptible relationship between two objects. How are we, on the other hand, to envision a meaning for "love" in a cosmos in which there is only one all-encompassing, stable and fully self-sufficient being? Or to put the question another way, exactly what, before creation, would be the object of this purported love and why would this posited deity want, need or have it? This formulation of the question leads directly into a second question, namely, what it might possibly mean to say that God "wants" something in the first place. That is, what "need" is the deity "satisfying" by allowing a free-wheeling creation to unfold? Let us leave aside for the time being the obvious anthropomorphism behind the statement "God wants..." and just ponder the nature of the deity being posited by the predicate "want." This seems to be such an obvious theological issue that I was somewhat surprised that it was not addressed more fully in the book. Juergen Moltmann does speak to the problem in a roundabout way when he talks about the initial act of self-limitation, as "the first act of grace." This does move us away from anthropomorphic language of wanting and does tie into what Christianity has always held as an attribute of God, namely grace. But this linguistic maneuver in the end really does not explain anything either. It seems in fact counterintuitive to say we have a perfectly powerful and beneficent God who then limits that all encompassing benevolence and so allows for contingency, injustice and evil all in the name of grace. If this were so, would grace really be worth it? And who, or what, exactly is being "graced" in this process?

A third question, I suppose, asks what it means for a deity to be limited, especially if the agent of that limitation is itself an imposition of the deity. It is not at all immediately obvious, for example, that an all-powerful deity can create a self-limitation that the deity then cannot reverse. It is of course a wonderful theological and logical conundrum to ask whether an all powerful actor can do something irreversible. I do not wish to state at this point that this conundrum is insoluble, but it certainly deserves some contemplation. It seems to me that there are interesting, even troubling, theological implications to any answer you would give to that question, as the reader can well imagine. I am disappointed that our authors opened this wonderful theological door but then did not walk through.

Let me push this critique one step further. The limitation of the deity has the corresponding effect of elevating the power of human beings. John Polkinghorne makes this quite explicit, at one point (page 95) quoting P.J. Hefner to the effect that we can refer to human beings as "created co-creators." Now mind you, this is, at least for some of our authors, not an accidental byproduct, but the very point of God's gracious self-limitation. It is precisely to elevate people, give them true freedom, and so make them partners with God that we have this divine circumscription to begin with. This is what the book as a whole seems to see as the true meaning of the cross, namely, the meeting of the human and the divine in a joint experience of both suffering/passion and redemption. This is where the "kenosis", the divine "emptying forth", gains purchase. The implication, further, is not merely that God comes down to human level, but that humans are at that very point also being called up to some divine level. It is precisely this honest and open encounter between humans and God that is the central core of the Christian message, on this view.

An important point to note at this juncture is that speculation on the possibility of divine limitation is in fact not new in Western religious thought. Something very similar stands at the base of medieval Jewish mysticism, receiving a kind of classical articulation in the Lurianic Kabbalah. This is hardly the place to go into the details of this rather complex system. But it will suffice for my purpose here to point out that in that kabbalistic tradition, there is a self-limitation on the part of the deity (zimzum), which becomes fixed (or irreversible) (Shevirat HaKelim) in such a way that the deity needs human collaboration to effect final salvation and redemption (tikkun). This final salvation is both of humankind and of the deity. Kabbalistic thinkers spent considerable time and intellectual energy teasing out the inner workings of the deity and the dynamics of creation that would lead to this sort of cosmological situation. In short, to make it work, the Jewish thinkers ended up going way beyond simple motives of "love", "want", or "grace". These they would have seen in some ways as already symptoms of the divine catastrophe, not its cause. They took seriously the deeper implications of "creation as kenosis" and struggled to get at the basic structures of divine reality that it implies. There is nothing in this book that indicates that the authors drew on any of this prior thought, or were aware of it. In fact, the book before us starts the work from scratch, re-inventing the wheel so to speak, and so in comparison seems barely to penetrate the surface. Of course it also has to be said that moving beyond love and grace in the direction carved out by the Kabbalah would bring urgently into question what would make the resulting theology "Christian" in any classical sense of the term. In that light, the essays really need to draw on their own theological tradition to maintain their authenticity. But this does lend a certain parochialism to the results.

This last point brings me to a final reflection with which I will close this essay. Leaving out the very relevant kabbalistic tradition points, I think, to both a strength and weakness of the book. As to its strength, I think it points to a determination on the part of the contributors to deal with the science-religion debate in (modern Protestant) Christianity in its own terms. That is, our authors are taking a very serious look within the Christian discursive tradition itself for ways of dealing with modern scientific method and cosmology. The essays are routinely sensitive and thought provoking. There are at least two weaknesses. One I have already alluded too, that is insufficient attention paid to the theological implications of kenosis as creation. The shift in our notion of the deity is much more profound than these essays seem to recognize. The second weakness is that in the end all of these essays are coming out of only one slice of Western religion thought, namely modern Protestant (even Anglican) Christianity. This is by no means to dismiss what may have been accomplished in the book. But it is to say that there is a much larger audience out there, and ultimately there will have to be a way of affirming other religious traditions, Judaic, Islamic, etc, that do not share the language of the cross. Maybe the answer to the first weakness is also the answer to the second. That is, only by moving beyond the specifically Christian discourse of love, grace and cross, can a new theology emerge that will really encompass the wider Western faith community. But where such a kenosis of Christian speculation into the larger world would leave anything recognizably Christianity is another question altogether, and one deserving its own essay.

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Published   2002.07.11