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a divine source of being that resides not in a timeless present located somewhere "up above," but in the future, essentially "up ahead," as the goal of a world still in the making. The term "God" in this revised metaphysics must once again mean for us, as it did for many of our biblical forbears, the transcendent future horizon that draws an entire universe, and not just human history, toward an unfathomable fulfillment yet to be realized.

Many readers will be surprised by Haught's invocation of the biblical witness. How can this picture of God be reconciled with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the personal God who wants to do business with us?

For the most part, Haught makes no effort even to begin reconciling this God with the God of Scripture, and we have to say that we just don't know how he would do so (or if he considers the question largely irrelevant).

There is, however, one significant exception, and it is not encouraging. Haught seeks to ground his account of God's "eternal restraint" in the Crucifixion. "The image of a vulnerable, defenseless, and humble deity may seem shocking to many," Haught writes, "but it is … in a God who submits to crucifixion that Christian faith invites us to put the fullness of our trust."

That is very true. But we also put the fullness of our trust in the Spirit promised to all those who say with their lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised him from the dead.

The closer we look at Haught's book, the harder it is to see how the questions that preoccupy him are forced on us by Darwin. They seem for the most part to be questions about the nature, sovereignty, and foreknowledge of God, the problem of evil, divine action, and so on: questions that have been the stuff of theology from the beginning. Nor is it clear how Darwin provides new answers to these questions.

Consider, for example, the matter of God's foreknowledge. Many Christian thinkers over the centuries have acknowledged the tension between God's foreknowledge and human freedom, and have sought to resolve it in various ways. This has been a prominent theme in the work done by the "openness of God" group, including John Sanders, Gregory Boyd, Clark Pinnock, and others who have argued that, contrary to the dominant tradition, God does not know the future in the way that a chess player knows a game that has already been played (and which he is now playing through again). In many ways their "open" God resembles the God of Haught's theology.

But there is a crucial difference. Openness theologians appeal to the authority of Scripture. They point, for example, to many passages that depict God as changing his mind. Moreover, and crucially, they feel obligated to explain how their understanding of God can be reconciled with other, perhaps more numerous, passages that affirm God's foreknowledge. Now these efforts may not be satisfactory to classical theists, but there is no debate from either side about the normative status of the biblical revelation.

Many of Haught's passages would be easy to translate into pre-Darwinian theological language. Consider this one:

contemporary astrophysics now provides reasons for concluding that even in the earliest microseconds of its existence the universe was not in a state of maximum entropy … but was already structured intricately according to the exceedingly narrow range of mathematical values that would allow for the eventual evolutionary emergence of inwardness and freedom.

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May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6