God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence Book

In The God Who Risks, John Sanders outlines biblical grounds for a relational view of God. He then anchors his perspective in Christian theological history, before exploring philosophical and applied theological implications of open and relational theology, over against more determinist theology.

There is so much in Sanders' work that is helpful. In his discussion of the Bible, he takes seriously diving flexibility and repentance and the possibility of a genuine divine emotional life. In his work with the New Testament, his discussions of fulfillment of prophecy are especially strong. "Many conservatives focus on scriptural predictions and their fulfillment for apologetic purposes … because the predictions are thought to be precisely fulfilled. This is a rather curious claim given the fact that the disciples as well as others did not see Jesus fitting into their understandings of messianic predictions." Instead, Sanders argues that God's faithfulness is more important than God's predictive powers. Sanders also argues other ways in which prophecy can be fulfilled without God knowing the future: through God knowing how God will choose to act, through conditional fulfillment (only if people respond in certain ways), and through God's wisdom (like "a consummate social scientist") based on "God's exhaustive knowledge of the past and the present." Sanders highlighting Mary's consent at the annunciation, God's improvisatory presence in the early church, and the phrase "significant others" to describe humans' relationship to God are all also interesting and delightful.

In Sanders' chapter on the Christian tradition, he is less polemic and critical than in The Openness of God. He still is working against the foil of the Augustinian and Calvinist tradition but has more interest in placing the roots of open and relational theology in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, particularly the work of the pre-Augustinian Cappadocian fathers, and in the Wesleyan freewill tradition. I'm particularly intrigued by the connections to Orthodoxy, as the work of Brad Jersak and others have drawn me to elements of this tradition's Christology (divine union/divinization) and eschatology (unending and universal extension of God's love and mercy).

There are three further thoughts I had in tension while reading The God Who Risks that merit further exploration. Sanders the relationality of God. "Relationality is an essential aspect of God. The tripersonal God is the perfection of love and communion -- the very antithesis of aloofness, isolation and domination." And yet in discussing the freedom of God and the nature of the divine project, Sanders writes very unrelationally of God, as if God's need for freedom is more central than God's love and as if human free will is a necessity of the rules God has established for creation, rather than an implication of what it means to be made in God's image. I can understand and am drawn to Tom Oord's work in centering kenotic love the divine image and in open and relational theology. While in some ways this is simply following Sanders' own logic more faithfully, it's a rebuke of his statement, "The divine nature does not dictate the sort of world God must make."

Sanders also continues what I viewed as a weakness of The Openness of God, centering philosophical and theological faithfulness to the reading of biblical text while decentering human experience. Pentecostal spirituality only receives the very briefest of mentions. And while Sanders critiques certain aspects of the determinist tradition as intellectually inconsistent, he emphasizes less how much they insult the integrity of our own experience. An example would be his discussion of the compatibilist understanding of human freedom, which argues humans have free will, but only to the extent that our desires are free. There is a loophole here that our desires may be bound by God's determinist will, such that we appear to be exercising free will while remaining very much unfree agents. This isn't just intellectually indefensible, but is an insult to our human experience of genuine freedom. In discussions of agency and providence, only libertarian freedom, within the limits we face through our genetics, our past, and other factors, honors our experience of reality.

Lastly, The God Who Risks makes me wonder if beauty could be a helpful criteria of theological truth. The Christian theological tradition has so prized logical sensibility and biblical grounding that it has perhaps deemphasized other important criteria for truth, such as experiential coherence and evocation of worship and wonder. As it does from an experiential perspective, from an aesthetic lens, an open and relational theology has immense advantages. The Augustinian/Calvinist determinist theology is at times ridiculous, as when we imagine that "prior to creation God foresaw such things as Caesar crossing the Rubicon" or, for that matter, my path of crossing a particular street on any given day. In other aspects, such as double predestination, it is downright ugly. In contrast, elements of open and relational theology are beautiful. In discussing God's dynamic omniscience - God's complete knowledge of the past and present and God's omnicompetent and wise engagement with an unknowable future - Sanders beautifully discusses God's love. "Personhood, relationality and community - not power, independence and control - become the center for understanding the nature of God…. Love must be limitless, precarious and vulnerable…. Love takes risks and is willing to wait and try again if need be…. The third criterion is that love is vulnerable, since lovers grant the beloved control over themselves." Critics might argue that a God who loves so vulnerably is reduced in majesty through this weakness. Yet to my eyes, such a God is more beautiful and compelling than the invulnerable, irrelational alternatives.