Reforming the Doctrine of God.

Wilson, James R.

Reforming the Doctrine of God. By F. LeRon Shults. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005. x and 326 pages. Paper. $35.00.

This work is an exploration of the conceptual space in which problematic formulations of deep Christian intuitions about God's knowing, acting, and being are reformed and presented as the gospel that reforms our longings for wisdom, justice, and harmony. Shults seeks to conserve the intuitions that God's knowing, acting, and being embrace all things, which are linked with the experience and understanding of God as the intimately faithful, powerfully loving presence of hope. The formulations from which he seeks to liberate these intuitions depict God as a single immaterial substance or subject whose timeless knowledge and causation of temporal events precedes time. The space within which his reconstructive work takes place is the nexus of three trajectories emerging in twentieth-century treatments of the doctrine of God: "the retrieval of divine infinity, the revival of trinitarian doctrine, and the renewal of eschatological ontology" (p. 1). While his work focuses on the conceptual dimensions of this space, Shults' approach thematizes the mutual interdetermination of thinking with acting and being in relation to God. In other words, Shults recognizes that the space opened up by the three trajectories has practical and liturgical as well as conceptual dimensions. His rearticulation of the gospel of God's omniscient faithfulness, omnipotent love, and omnipresent hope, therefore, aims to integrate the hermeneutical, agogic and doxological moments of theology. This integration is most obviously present in the subsections referencing "The Ecumenical and Reformative Appeal," and "The Gospel of," each of the three trajectories.

The work is divided into three parts in which Shults outlines the challenges facing construals of infinity as immaterial substance, Trinity as a single subject, and eternity as first cause (part 1), traces the emergence of renewed reflection on "intensive Infinity," "robust Trinity," and "absolute Futurity" in the work of prominent Reformed, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox theologians (part 2), and sketches a proposal for weaving the trajectories together in a doctrine of the biblical God that is good news in our contemporary culture (part 3). The epilogue notes the author's sense of place within the theological dialogue and situates the present work within his overall program for "reforming Christian theology" (p. 297).

This artfully written book is a delight to read. It is truly innovative and engaged with some of the most creative theological discussions underway, as well as solidly rooted in the biblical text and traditional resources from the Patristic era through the magisterial Reformation. It is primarily aimed at scholars and students of theology, but its proposals, if taken seriously, will have profound implications for the life and ministry of the church it aims to serve.

James R. Wilson

Union Theological Seminary

Richmond, Virginia