How God Acts: Creation, Redemption, and Special Divine Action

Written by Denis Edwards Reviewed By John Jefferson Davis

Denis Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology in the School of Theology of Flinders University in the Netherlands. Edwards has been associated with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California, and workers in this area including Robert John Russell, Ted Peters, William R. Stoeger, and Nancy Murphy. This volume will particularly interest teachers, pastors, and seminarians who have special interest in the interface between Christian theology and the natural sciences.

A major focus of the book, as indicated in the title, is how God acts in the natural world and how the biblical narrative of creation and redemption can be understood against the background of a modern scientific cosmology in which the universe has been developing in a long evolutionary process lasting some fourteen billion years. Edwards proposes a “non-interventionist” model of divine action, in which God “does not intervene in the sense of acting to break into creation from outside” (p. 47) and does not violate or undermine the laws of nature. God is “radically interior to every aspect of the universe from the very beginning by the very act of creation” (p. 46), acting in and through secondary causes, and hence does not need to act through miracles, as these have been traditionally understood in the Christian faith. This “non-interventionist” view of divine action, while having some appeal, has serious limitations as well.

One of the major theses of this volume, influenced by the thought of Karl Rahner, is that creation, incarnation, redemption, and new creation form a “seamless garment” in the one unified plan of God for the universe: from the beginning God chose to create a world in which “the Word would be made flesh and the Spirit poured out.… Creation, incarnation, and final fulfillment are united in one act of divine self-giving” (p. 40). The incarnation is no afterthought, and the entire sweep of cosmic history can be seen as the footsteps of the Holy Spirit and part of a redemptive plan of God that includes not only humans but animals and other living creatures and the material universe itself (p. 125). Edwards paints a very attractive theological canvas in which the divine purpose is shaping the forces of the cosmos over vast stretches of time and space for a magnificent redemptive end. God works through natural processes of a deterministic nature, but is also guiding chance events as well (p. 55).

The proposed “non-interventionist” model of divine action is problematic as well as statements that the cross of Christ was “not directly willed by God” (p. 27) and that Jesus’ death was “not necessary” (p. 139). If on the “non-interventionist” model miracles as such are not allowed, then it seems difficult to understand how the universe and humankind can be radically transformed at the very end of history as we know it (cf. p. 154). If Edwards allows for radical discontinuity with the laws of physics at the beginning (creation ex nihilo) and hopes for radical transformation at the end (to avoid “heat-death” of the universe scenarios), then why not allow for the possibility of radical discontinuity with the laws of nature (miracles) in the middle of history?

Edwards could still retain the considerable merits of his theological proposal and yet allow, as has the historic Christian tradition, for the possibility for such special divine interventions. These criticisms notwithstanding, Edwards’s volume is to be commended as a significant contribution to the current discussion of divine action and the interface between Christian theology and the natural sciences.


John Jefferson Davis

John Jefferson Davis is senior professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and a winner of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences award for excellence in the teaching of science and religion.

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