Journal: Trinity Journal
Volume: TRINJ 16:2 (Fall 1995)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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TrinJ 16:2 (Fall 1995) p. 233

Book Reviews

Paul S. Fiddes. The Creative Suffering of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 281 pp.

Paul S. Fiddes, Tutor in Christian Doctrine at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, presents in this slim volume a carefully crafted and theologically sophisticated vision of God’s purposive suffering for his own sake and for the sake of his creation. The presentation of this vision is remarkably dialogical, insofar as Fiddes interacts at length throughout his discussion with major proponents from four main theological traditions: the Kreuzestheologie (theology of the Cross) of recent and contemporary German theology; process theology; the death of God theology; and classical theism. While Fiddes charts a course distinct from all of these traditions, and while he endeavors at each step to utilize insights from all four in his own positive reconstruction of the doctrine of God, it is clear that he finds the most promising direction to be found by modifying process theism to accommodate Barth’s insistence on the God who loves in freedom (p. 15).

Process theology has accurately diagnosed the fundamental problem of classical theism, argues Fiddes. With classical theism’s commitment to the doctrines of God’s self-sufficiency, immutability, and creatio ex nihilo there simply is no real explanation for why God has created the world. As he states, “If the world is totally unnecessary to God, then creation rests upon a decision of God’s will for which no reason can be found” (p. 65). Furthermore, and more distressing for Fiddes, if God need not have created the world, this endangers the authenticity of his love, for it entails that he might have been the same undiminished God while he chose not to love his creatures whom he chose not to create. He writes,

But there seems to be something profoundly unsatisfactory about this notion of God’s choosing to love the world in such a way that we can say “he need not have done so” or “he could have done otherwise.” It does not seem to touch the core of the meaning of love, which must be more than willing the good of another as one alternative among other possibilities… It cannot be truly love if one can choose otherwise. (p. 71)

But while the nature of true love requires that there is no “otherwise” in God’s loving the world, it does not follow that the process alternative is entirely satisfactory. In process theism, God loves the world necessarily in that 1) God’s very existence requires the world (i.e., some world or other) as the object of his love, and 2) God’s very nature necessarily loves the world that is both other than him and one with him. On the positive side and to

TrinJ 16:2 (Fall 1995) p. 234

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