Abstract
One might expect that a book with the title Human Anguish and God's Power, published during the COVID-19 pandemic, would be a theological response to that ongoing catastrophe. In fact, David Kelsey's weighty tome emerged from the Warfield Lectures he delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. But as fate would have it, Kelsey's book is a timely one, as theologians and pastors are confronted once again with questions about the ‘role’ or ‘purpose’ of God in the face of tragedy.
Human Anguish and God's Power, it should be stressed, is not intended as a theodicy. Kelsey does his utmost to demonstrate why Christians should avoid ‘making sense of’ or ‘reconciling’ human anguish and divine power. Indeed, attempts at reconciling the two in the form of trite consolations are the very problem Kelsey seeks to address. These problematic consolations revolve around the idea that suffering is ‘God's will’, and that it must therefore serve some higher purpose, even if that purpose is not yet transparent. This kind of talk, Kelsey argues, evokes an ‘understandable outrage at God’ (p. 2).
The focus of the book, however, is not on the pastoral issue of consolation as such, but on the theology that lies behind misguided efforts at consolation. This is, Kelsey states upfront, a book of ‘doctrinal theology’, and not of ‘pastoral theology’, though, as noted above, it has pastoral issues and concerns at its foundation. The aforementioned pastoral responses to suffering are not problematic because they are insensitive, though they are that too. They are problematic, in Kelsey's view, because ‘they attribute to the Triune God a theologically simplistic, misleading, and univocal concept of power’ (p. 207). Much that passes for pastoral consolation, this book argues, is essentially sub-Christian, running roughshod over the ‘rules’ that ought to govern Christian talk of God, and serving only to increase rather than alleviate anguish. Kelsey's book attempts to clarify what those rules are, and how they engender more responsible and modest affirmations regarding the crucial issue of divine power.
Two of those rules concern the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. The book aims to be Christocentric, by which Kelsey means that ‘the life-trajectory of Jesus Christ as it is variously narrated in the canonical Gospels’ is the ‘lens’ through which Scripture's account of God's relating to all that is not God is read (p. 9). Concretely, this means that just because a canonical narrative seems to depict God as ‘causing’ (or commanding certain humans to cause) some kind of suffering, one is not at liberty to infer that ‘God's will’ explains all of what Kelsey terms ‘negative mysteries’ (p. 387). This kind of inference is blocked by Kelsey's Christocentric hermeneutic, that is to say, by the ‘privileged status of canonical accounts of God's “way of Incarnation” in the life-trajectory of Jesus of Nazareth’ (p. 387).
A second pillar of Kelsey's argument, arguably more load-bearing than the Christocentric pillar, is the doctrine of the Trinity. Though Kelsey does not set out to develop a robust doctrine of the Trinity, he insists that this doctrine ought to govern our understanding both of who and what God is: the God whose concrete actuality is constituted by ‘communion in love among the three “Persons” of the Trinity’ (p. 47). For this reason, Kelsey thinks it prudent not to approach the concept of divine power directly. Rather, this concept must be treated downstream from, first, an account of God's triune life in se, and second, from an account of God's three-fold relation to all that is not God in creation, reconciliation and consummation.
The argument of Human Anguish and God's Power consists in three major steps. Part I sketches a characterization of ‘what’ and ‘who’ the Triune God is in terms of God's intrinsic glory. Kelsey ventures the claim that glory is ‘the most adequate comprehensive characterization of the Triune God's intrinsic reality’ (p. 25). It is so because ‘it most clearly and richly maps onto the classical Trinitarian doctrine of God’ (p. 26). All other intrinsic qualities of God, most pertinently, divine sovereignty and divine power, are best explained subsequent to an account of the triune God's glory. In following this procedure, Kelsey aims to specify divine power as the power of God's gracious and intrinsic glory, and therefore as a power ‘that is faithfully self- expressive in the ways in which God empowers realities other than God in their own right and for their own sakes’ (p. 32).
Axiomatic for Kelsey is that ‘God does as God is’ (p. 72). An account of divine sovereignty must therefore correspond to an account of the way in which God is sovereign in Godself, apart from the economy. Kelsey offers one such account in Part II of the book. Divine sovereignty, according to Kelsey, is essentially divine self-regulation (p. 98). The Triune God, Kelsey claims, is ‘in charge’ of God's own life. But precisely because it is the glorious Triune God who is ‘in charge’, this self-regulation takes the form of unrestricted generosity, even to the extent that the persons of the Trinity are willing and open to knowing the ‘passions’ of the other persons (pp. 99–100). This move away from the doctrine of intrinsic divine impassibility is crucial to some of Kelsey's corrective measures.
Divine self-regulation takes different forms depending on which of the three ‘narratives’ of the economy—creation, reconciliation and consummation—is in view. With respect to God's relating in providential care, for example, God's self-regulation entails that God relates in such a way that God is ‘constrained and conditioned by reality other than God’ (p. 107). According to Kelsey, traditional accounts of divine providence, because they are insufficiently Trinitarian, and because they do not take heed of the asymmetrical relation between the ways God relates to what is not God, struggle to articulate this self-committed and self-conditioned God, and thus fail to ward off some of the problems that attend the notion of sovereignty.
Part III offers further reflection on the theologically problematic assumptions about power that underlie certain misguided attempts at pastoral consolation. Kelsey takes aim at traditional accounts of God's power (with Thomas Aquinas's treatment of divine power as their paradigm), claiming that these accounts tend to reduce God's power to God's power to create ex nihilo, and thereby privilege ‘the unrestricted power of God's creating all else as alone definitive of God's power’ (p. 258). This reductive understanding of God's power, Kelsey argues, produces a vagueness—particularly around the question of how God's power relates to the various sorts and degrees of power given to creatures—that leaves the traditional account of God's power vulnerable to being ‘clarified’ by more culturally conventional understandings of power (pp. 213–14).
Taken together, Parts II and III, which focus on the three concrete ways in which God relates in the economy, are intended to discipline our theological speech in such a way that the ideas that God ‘controls what happens’ or ‘sends suffering’ or ‘causes suffering for good purposes’ must be deemed ungrammatical. If one follows the rules of genuine Christian talk of God, however, one is led towards vocabularies that ‘describe God's relating to creatures creatively, circumambient of creatures, and as one among them, at once radically free of them and closer to them than they can be to themselves’ (p. 359).
On the one hand, Kelsey seeks to put as much distance as possible between human anguish and God's power. These two realities do not make sense within some greater whole. There is an inescapable contradiction between them, one that necessarily leads to ‘stammering’, and perhaps even to anomie, on the part of the Christian. This is the subject matter of Part IV. On the other hand, Kelsey also seeks to depict God as the compassionate One who takes our anguish to Godself in the person of Jesus. The only ‘sense’ that can be offered to a human in a horrific situation, Kelsey suggests, is the fact that ‘God will be playing some active role in it as companion’ (p. 405).
For all of Kelsey's densely packed and interconnected argumentation, the account of divine sovereignty recommended in this book is intended to be ‘unsystematic’ (p. 166). Kelsey intriguingly calls into question the commonly held notion that canonical Scripture comprises a single narrative that moves from creation to reconciliation to eschatological consummation. What we have in Scripture, according to Kelsey, is not one narrative but three, each with its own distinctive ‘narrative logic’. Talk of divine power, or indeed of any of the divine attributes, must be sensitive to these distinctions. So, for example, what is true of divine power as God relates to creatures in reconciliation is not necessarily true of divine power as God relates to creatures in eschatological blessing. Theologians must for this reason resist the desire for a single, unified account of God's power. This is a salutary intervention within discourse concerning the doctrine of God. It is debatable, however, whether Kelsey achieves the unsystematic account of divine power that he sets out to accomplish. If anything, the rules Kelsey sets for theological speech seem to necessitate an acutely systemized form of theological discourse.
There is also occasional confusion regarding the identity of the three strands of the economy. Kelsey tends to identify these as creation, reconciliation and eschatological consummation—this is of course the traditional taxonomy. But at other times the three strands are identified as creation, providential care and eschatological consummation (p. 209). ‘Liberative promise making’ also seems to stand in for ‘reconciliation’ at certain points, though it is not quite clear if these are the same thing. This confusion relating to the ‘second article’ in particular has the potential to undermine the book's intention to be Christocentric. Parts I and II of Human Anguish and God's Power, which establish the rules and grammar that Kelsey seeks to put to the test in Part III, proceed with relatively minimal reference to God's relating to all that is not God in reconciliation. Put otherwise, the Trinitarianism of Christian theology is amply on display. The Christocentrism appears somewhat lacking, at least in the foundational moments of the book. Nevertheless, Human Anguish and God's Power is a robust work of doctrinal and biblical theology that offers a well-reasoned and compelling conception of divine power that moves beyond the notion of control and toward the notion of God's wise companionship and care.