God the Almighty: Power, Wisdom, Holiness, Love,by Donald G. Bloesch, (InterVarsity, 329 pp., $24.99, hardcover). Reviewed by David W. Gill, professor of applied ethics at North Park College in Chicago.

"God the Almighty" is volume 3 of Donald G. Bloesch's projected seven-volume systematic theology, "Christian Foundations." Bloesch, emeritus professor of theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, has already received enthusiastic reviews for volume 1, "A Theology of Word and Spirit: Authority and Method in Theology," and volume 2, "Holy Scripture: Revelation, Inspiration, and Interpretation" (for a review of both volumes, see CT, June 20, 1994, p. 37). God the Almighty achieves the same high standard set by its predecessors.

Bloesch himself suggests that "God the Almighty" is "perhaps the most important" volume in his series. While wishing to "counter the inveterate tendency in so much traditional theology to make God remote from the human creation," Bloesch's greater concern is with various modern and postmodern theologies that propose a God who is finite or culpable for human sin and misery. God the Almighty is a magnificent tour guide through a nearly 2,000-year-old theological forest. The major thinkers of the past, from Augustine to Barth, are treated respectfully but critically. More recent thinkers (Pannenberg, Moltmann, feminist and process theologians, et al.) are also an important part of Bloesch's landscape.

The primary agenda for Bloesch's theology, however, is not set by professional theologians past or present. This is a theology anchored in Holy Scripture and addressed to the whole church. Bloesch positions himself as a "centrist evangelical" building on the "core of the faith." He insists that "theology will recover its integrity only when it bows before the reality of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ communicated to us by the Spirit through Holy Scripture and the ongoing commentary on Scripture in the church." What we need, then, is an "expositional theology": "The task of theology is to articulate the message of faith in the conceptuality of the age while at the same time bringing this conceptuality under the searing critique of divine revelation. In the process, cultural concepts and images are transformed as they become bearers of transcendent meaning."

Bloesch proposes a biblical theism over against classical theism as well as modern pantheism and panentheism (which declares the mutual dependence of God and the world). The biblical revelation stands over premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity alike. The theological task is neither to repeat uncritically old formulations nor to re-envision or rename God, but rather to elucidate the divine mystery. God makes himself an object to our understanding even while meeting us as a subject in the divine-human encounter. We cannot ascend a ladder of love, merit, or speculation to God; but God descends to us on a ladder of grace. Bloesch stresses not just the propositional content but the personal address of God's revelation. As such, Bloesch's theology not only illuminates and instructs the mind, it provokes the heart in praise to God--not a common experience in reading twentieth-century theological writers!

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A USER-FRIENDLY DEITY

Bloesch argues that a new and different understanding of God is being promoted today. Immanence, vulnerability, and empathy are displacing transcendence, almightiness, and majesty. Much of this is in reaction to classical theism, which, influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, depicted God as immutable, impassible, and detached from the world.

Classical theism tended to leave God as a first cause or principle of being and underemphasize his dynamic love in relating to the world. Process thought and panentheism are, however, questionable alternatives. Already in the Bible the battle is to affirm God's transcendence over Canaanite goddess spirituality and naturalistic pantheism. Bloesch argues that we must oppose deism, pantheism, existentialism, and process thought with a dynamic biblical theism doing justice both to God's otherness and to his personal immanence.

In the biblical revelation, God is infinite, but not formless or characterless. Theologians speak of God's "immensity, eternity, omnipresence, aseity ['the quality of having life in and of itself'; that is, 'God is radically independent of all creaturely power and being'], spirituality, immutability and impassibility."

We need to be cautious in using these traditional labels, however, for the biblical God chooses to involve himself in the travail of human life, even in our suffering. God is not bound by any necessity or need, but wills to share his love in creation and redemption. Scripture reveals that God is in movement, but not development; he is not pure or static being, but dynamic act-in-being. Essence and existence are one in God. In other words, God's attributes are not to be separated from his essence; his perfections are the radiance of his essence.

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GOD'S POWER AND WISDOM

"Power and Wisdom" are central in Bloesch's account of the attributes of God. While Scripture sometimes describes God's power as unbounded, its fuller perspective reveals a God whose power is not manifested "in arbitrary decrees but in sacrificial, other-serving love."

God is not the "detached, remote being of Hellenistic philosophy" but a "caring, active being--constantly in relation to his people." God is the Creator, Redeemer, Lord, and Master of the world, not only setting it in motion but providentially preserving it from chaos and destruction. God's providence (not to be confused with fate) liberates human beings to fulfill the destiny for which they were created.

God does not directly or deterministically cause all things, but all things remain under his beneficent oversight and power. God's power is not an iron law of necessity but the mysterious, hidden hand at work in all phenomena of nature and events of history, in cooperation with, not in negation of, human freedom.

God's power is closely associated with his wisdom in Scripture. It is in wisdom that he exercises his power. And God's glory, "the transcendent beauty of God manifest in his mighty works in sacred history," is closely associated with both his power and wisdom.

How can evil exist in light of God's power? "The origin of evil lies in the perversion of the will evident among angels and mortals." It is not created by God, but it is under his controlling power. Evil is "a virus of unholy contagion that can be counteracted only by the medicine of the blood of Christ."

A HOLY LOVE

For Bloesch, "Holiness together with love is the quintessential attribute of God. It includes his majesty, glory, and power." Holiness means both separateness from all that is unclean and transcendence over all that belongs to the passing world.

Wrath is the reaction of this holy God to sin, the "strange work" of his love that destroys that which is against love. In the Cross, God's wrath and justice are enclosed in the victory of his love. Only in Jesus Christ do we see clearly this unity of God's justice and love, his wrath and grace.

Bloesch argues that the essence of God's love is agape, the self-giving, redeeming love of the Cross. "Under the impact of agape, friendship (philia) can be transformed into fellowship" and even "eros can be converted into a regard for the integrity and personhood of others."

God's righteousness and justice are the ethical dimension of his holiness. Righteousness not only sets the standard but grants the freedom to live by this standard. For Bloesch, God's holiness, justice, and love become the pattern for a redeemed human holiness, justice, and love.

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Holiness excludes not only immorality but also mediocrity. The life of holiness is not only one of abstention from sin but of active radiation of God's light in the world through our works of piety, witness, and mercy.

On the Trinity, Bloesch argues that it is incomprehensible to human reason but not unintelligible, definable but not fully explainable, paradoxical but not absurd:

God in his essence is one, but the way he interacts within himself is threefold. In the Godhead there is one being but three modes of existence. There is one person but three agencies of relationship. There is one overarching consciousness but three foci of consciousness. There is one will but three acts of implementing this will. There is one intelligence but three operations of intelligence.

God does not simply act in a threefold way but exists within himself in a tripersonal relationship.

As in his earlier work, "The Battle for the Trinity: The Debate Over Inclusive God-Language" (1985), Bloesch argues that "God infinitely transcends gender and sexuality" while at the same time he is the "ground and source" and "creator of gender." Although God contains the feminine within himself, he chooses to relate to us as masculine. He can be described as "like a mother" but he chooses to be addressed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: "In the church, the mystical body of Christ, the feminine side of the sacred again comes to the fore, for we are born in the womb of the church, which then functions as our mother."

CORRECTIVE MEASURES

Bloesch concludes by comparing his proposed biblical theism with the "Biblical-Classical Synthesis" and the "Biblical-Modern Synthesis." The former, influenced by Hellenistic philosophy, tended to try to protect the Absolute from contact with the world of change, decay, and death. But, Bloesch argues, we must resist this tendency to divorce God from culture and history. Biblically, God's perfection is "an indomitable love that overcomes the world rather than a beatitude which towers over the world and remains basically unaffected."

Against the classical perspective, biblical theism reveals to us providence (not fate), truth as God's self-disclosure from without (not just correct ideas), revelation (not rationalism or reason alone), agape love (not just eros desire), blessedness (not just happiness), grace (not merit), sainthood (not heroism), sin (not just ignorance), prayer (not just contemplation), justification (not deification), reconciliation (not just reunion), and resurrection (not just immortality). Bloesch is not interested in uncritically rehabilitating the biblical-classical synthesis.

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Nevertheless, various forms of the "Biblical-Modern" synthesis are also found wanting. The tendency since the Renaissance has been for theologians to accommodate the faith to modernity--and its child, postmodernity. Authority is relocated from God to the self. An overweening confidence in human reason (modernity) has been succeeded by a distrust of reason and a celebration of imagination (postmodernity). The mysticism of nature has replaced the mysticism of transcendence. God is now finite and immanent, captive to the evolutionary processes of nature. Spirituality is re-envisioned as an upward evolutionary ascent of human consciousness. The new world-view is naturalistic, vitalistic, and evolutionary.

While some of this is an understandable reaction to the weaknesses of the biblical-classical synthesis, and may prod some important corrections, it is on the whole a weak and tragic substitute for the real thing. Even the "open-view theism" proposed by some contemporary evangelical theologians gives away too much of the biblical revelation to satisfy Bloesch. We cannot be saved by a limited God--especially not the gods of our cultural enclaves, of our cynical postmodern ideologies, or of our personal consciousness--no matter how tender, authentic, or expressively gratifying. The arrogance of modernity and postmodernity alike is to assume that that's all we have from which to choose. Donald Bloesch has described the one alternative that will meet our need for truth and reality.

I haven't read any theological work as biblically and historically rich, as intellectually satisfying, or as spiritually exhilarating as Bloesch's first three volumes since Karl Barth's "Church Dogmatics." Bloesch improves on Barth by hewing even closer to the biblical lines, by taking account of the past 30 years of theological work, and by writing in an elegant, disciplined style accessible to nearly everyone. His work invites discussion and provokes thought and growth. It is a hearty feast that should be devoured by all pastors, theologians, and lay leaders in our churches.

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