Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 07:3 (Fall 2003)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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SBJT 7:3 (Fall 2003) p. 80

Book Reviews

God under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents God. Edited by Douglas S. Huffman and Eric L. Johnson. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002, 325 pp., $21.99.

It is a privilege to review and recommend a volume edited by two scholars for whom I have the deepest personal and professional respect. Professors Huffman (of Northwestern College) and Johnson (of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) have assembled an impressive group of scholars broadly representative of the Christian tradition to defend the God of “historic Christian theism” against the “imposters” put forward by revisionist, pluralist, liberation, feminist, process, and openness theologians. In short, God Under Fire is a challenging yet accessible volume that makes a significant contribution to contemporary discussions about the nature and attributes of God. Insisting that “there is far more overall continuity among those who adhere to historic Christian views of God. .. than discontinuity,” its twelve contributors set out “to provide a corrective to the major alternative Christian versions of God being offered in our day and to present, as best [they] can, the God of the Bible and of historic Christianity: at once the most beautiful and attractive Being in the universe, yet also the most awesome, even terrifying; a God who is supremely relational and supremely sovereign, the absolutely transcendent lover of our souls.”

Of all the possible ways to assess God Under Fire, perhaps the best is to see it positively as an impassioned plea for enduring faithfulness to the “living tradition” of historic Christian orthodoxy, and negatively as an extended critique of theological hubris in many of its contemporary manifestations. Of particular concern to the authors of God Under Fire are those progressive theologies that can be grouped roughly into “constructivist” and “developmentalist” camps. While constructivist theologies are beholden in one way or another to the Enlightenment skepticism of Immanuel Kant and thus insist that “a new Christian God more appropriate for contemporary culture” must be “imagined” due to our inability to know God as he is in himself, developmentalist theologies are “less skeptical about our ability to know God” yet still claim that the God of historic Christian orthodoxy must be abandoned. Since they are convinced that God is in time and as such “is undergoing constant development as he interacts with humans and reacts to human actions, creativity, and cultural progress,” developmentalists conclude that classical theism must be rejected or at least significantly revised because it fails to take both time and development seriously. They suggest that in so doing classical theism reduces the God of Scripture to an essentially impersonal being...

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