Abstract
Can we say anything objectively about God? If not, then is God real? Or more importantly, is God relevant? Professor Keith Ward dives into the heart of these questions in his book, Sharing in the Divine Nature: A Personalist Metaphysics. Ward begins from his place within the religious community of practicing Christians, a community reaching for theologies anchored to the tradition’s past but also able to meet the twenty-first century’s technological, scientific, and moral moment. Christians today believe their tradition is essential to restoring, healing, and advancing compassion in the world; yet, they struggle to find words to articulate a postmodern metaphysical reality grounded in their present faith. Ward’s proposal offers philosophically sound, theologically creative, morally updated, and thoroughly anchored words for a Christian God that stands up to the demands of the present era.
Ward begins by calling into question theologians, particularly Fergus Kerr, whose theology reflects Wittgenstein’s philosophy and claims of theological non-realism. Expertly, Ward bridges the gap between philosophical metaphysics and theology by exposing an operational Christian metaphysics mostly left unstated in current theology. Ward says, “Metaphysics is . . . unescapable. The only question is, what sort of metaphysics is correct?” (p. 17).
From there, Ward constructs a metaphysics which he describes as a form of personal idealism. By idealism, Ward means that “mind is the ultimate reality, and that the physical world would not exist without mind as its source” (p. 20). By personal, Ward means that God as Supreme Mind is neither closed nor fixed. The Supreme Mind is in relationship with other created minds. The relational share-and-receive dynamic impacts God so that, in a real way, created minds “share in the divine nature.”
Leaving no stone unturned, Ward furthers his argument by exposing logical inconsistencies in dogmatic apophatic theology. He also takes on Aristotle’s legacy through Thomas Aquinas and others by carefully, even lovingly, using Scripture, reason, and experience to refute traditional attributes for God, such as absolutely simple, impassible, and immutable. Ward establishes God’s otherness as a relational otherness, though not wholly other; rather God’s Supreme Mind is the source of the universe and all autonomous, dependent creaturely minds. God’s relational life is not limited to sourcing existence, instead the relationship between God’s Mind and autonomous creaturely minds enhances God’s infinite and creaturely finite existence throughout the time or space continuum. Ward opposes the view that the material world is blindly and pointlessly assembled through a series of random events. Instead, Ward offers an existence within “a spiritual reality, a reality with consciousness, value, meaning and purpose.” To Ward, universal existence is contingent on a personal, real God whose Supreme Mind intends that “we should exist” and that “we should find a fulfilling and worthwhile life” (p. 117) toward the end goal of goodness and love.
Alongside a variety of thinkers, ancient and contemporary, Ward takes great pains to defend certain aspects of God’s nature as unchanging; for example, God’s love is unchanging, God’s infinitude is unchanging, God’s status as Supreme Mind or Being is unchanging, and God as Source of all is unchanging. With deliberate care and attention, Ward works out how God can be affected by God’s relational life with finite creatures while remaining unchangingly true to godly attributes proclaimed as the cornerstone of Western Christian faith for millennia. In other words, for Ward, to say that God experiences suffering and feels with creatures while still being God is not inconsistent.
After preparing the reader for the main course, Ward centers the incarnational, historical Christ event which he asserts is a kind of natural exchange. “God assumes our nature so that we can assume the divine nature” (p. 79). Ward describes the incarnation as union between the finite reality of Jesus and the infinite divine life. In Christ, the incarnated Jesus, humans are endowed with the gift of and capacity to express divine love in a way that affects humanity and God. To Ward, the “end and goal of creation” is the “realization of God’s being as agapistic love in that universal community of love” (p. 80).
Using New Testament theology, Ward illumines Jesus Christ as a paradigmatic reality of salvation, though he is careful to say Jesus is not the only place that God experiences relationship with creatures. Ward is also careful to keep an ontological distinction between human and divine natures, even in Jesus. Although a “synergistic unity” (p. 122) exists between divine and creaturely natures, Ward is clear: they do not collapse into a single nature. The subject–subject relationship, each subject with their own limitations, is preserved for relationship to be actual. Through the divine–human relationship love is manifested in the material world. For the Christian, Jesus is a primary expression of divine love in human form. According to Ward, by way of Plato, because Jesus was divine love in human form living in a world overtaken by greed, hatred, and pride, Jesus died. Atonement, for Ward, is the path Jesus illuminates through his death and subsequent resurrection. To Ward, that path is open to all creatures.
For Ward, Christianity needs a theology, promoted by the scriptural witness and supported by modern ideas, that humbly speaks of God as metaphysically real. If Christianity is to remain relevant to the world’s needs and activities, its God must be extricated from theoretical abstraction. If biblical testimony is accurate, the Christian God participates in the world’s salvation as a collaborative agent, sharing in material nature as the universe shares in the divine nature. Can co-operation between the divine and human agents, as portrayed in the Bible, be defended as plausible in our time? By discarding parts of the Greek influence in Christian ideology, Ward shouts a resounding “yes!” Through relational life between God and creatures, the universe can (and potentially will) reach its fulfillment as an expression of divine love.
Ward’s personalist metaphysics adds profound depth to the broadening conversation, within theological discourse, calling for a new, updated foundational Christian theology which may contribute to the salvation of an imminently precarious world. At our moment in history, if theology is to have any value whatsoever, it must address the possibility of our existential demise. Because Ward integrates modern philosophy with the ancient text while gently, though firmly, dropping arcane theological notions along the way, Ward proposes a God that makes sense and a God worth trusting.