Abstract
Douglas F. Ottati’s Theology for Liberal Protestants is a theological contribution to those liberal protestant denominations that have often not articulated a robust theology. It summarizes and evaluates a wide range of thinkers and theological ideas according to a piety that is based (very loosely) on an Augustinian emphasis on sin and grace, and a liberal willingness to reform doctrines based on advances in science, an emphasis on historical interpretation, and social reform. The style is accessible to those without much theological background and remains fairly general, although some more detailed theological discussion appears in the footnotes. The author’s systematic framework is based on his Trinitarian description of God as Creator-Judge-Redeemer, although God-as-Judge becomes a function entailed in God-as-Redeemer, such that the description of God is in practice a two-fold description of God as Creator-Redeemer.
The first volume of Theology for Liberal Protestants attends to God as Creator. The author proposes a theocentric view of creation in which humans are one movement within the larger, dynamic system of patterns of cosmic ecology, which are ordered to the glory of God. This emphasis on divine providence as the gathering of the many trajectories and interdependencies into a unified dynamic movement that can never be reduced to a static, frame is arguably Ottati’s most significant contribution to the doctrine of creation, although he does not go into detail regarding the precise nature of the interrelationships between various trajectories.
The author’s theocentric understanding of creation leads him to argue for a Creator that is not anthropomorphized as a personal agent. While this avoids depicting the Creator as a controlling tyrant, it does not explain how the incarnation of God in the person of Christ (and the anthropological emphasis that this entails) is related to our conception of God as Creator, nor does the author consider what it means to speak of the members of the Trinity as persons. Thus, while Ottati’s framework is based on the depiction of God as Creator-Redeemer and he asserts that creation and redemption must be thought together, the doctrine of redemption does not influence his discussion of creation in any significant way. However, perhaps these questions will be addressed in the author’s second volume.