The Creative Suffering of God

by Paul S. Fiddes

The theme that God suffers with his world has become a familiar one in recent years, overturning centuries of belief in an impassible deity. This book both surveys recent thought about the suffering of God and proposes future directions for this important area of Christian theology. Fiddes discusses four trends of current thought--the "theology of the cross" in modern German theology as represented in the works of Barth, Moltmann, and Jüngel; American process theology; "the death of God" theology; and the rejection of the idea of divine passibility by modern followers of classical theism--while reflecting on the main theme of his study. The book affirms that God freely chooses to limit himself, to suffer change, to journey through time, and even to experience death while remaining the living God.
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Genres: Theology

281 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 1988

About the author

Paul S. Fiddes is an English Baptist theologian and novelist. Fiddes is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford, Principal Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow of Regent's Park College, Oxford and a former Chairman of the Oxford Faculty of Theology. He holds a DPhil in Theology from Oxford (1975) and was awarded a DD from Oxford (2004). He is Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Bucharest, and a Fellow of the British Academy (2020).

Reviews

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Fiddes is a handy theologian and his "Creative Suffering of God" reflects this wonderfully. Fiddes, writing in the 80's I believe, was really a forerunner for many of the "open theism" theologies that have cropped up in recent times. In fact, Fiddes' model is not without flaws and is left unbuilt, which he himself admits, and yet in this book alone is a more comprehensive and robust concept of God than many open theists today. Granted, I have not read anything else from Fiddes, so I am confident he has built upon this work if he is still writing in this area, and so I will have to see about that; but nevertheless, despite my firm dogmatic disagreements with Fiddes' conclusions, he is a worthy interlocutor and skilled theologian.

Fiddes essentially puts in his bid to be a part of the "suffering God" club. But he wants to do it in a way that makes the doctrine helpful and not superfluous. In this he weaves between Barth, Moltmann, and Process Theology. He basically tips his hat to Moltmann for being a groundbreaker in Theology of the Cross, but doesn't want God's suffering to be eternal, or a part of the essence of God. For if this is the case, then God's suffering is really just god vs. god and the cross is simply the apex manifestation of said eternal bickering. Fiddes does not think this is helpful for human beings, even if it allows us "solidarity" or whatever that means.

He likes process thought, but wants to keep it trinitarian, and he also weaves between Paul Tillich's existentialist theology which he doesn't really think is existential at all. He charges Tillich with grasping at air when Tillich tries to make God's wrestling against Ungrund synonymous with our pain and suffering. The leap from the ontological to actual is simply wanting.

Rather, to conclude, Fiddes puts forth a model that allows suffering in God that is not eternally within himself but outside himself. That is to say God is truly affected by his creatures, and contingent experiences, because God freely chooses to be a God that limits himself in knowledge (knowing potentials and possibles but not actuals) and thereby experiences, as it were, the new creative paintings that are completed by his creatures...the initial concept, perhaps, only known to God as a possibility. This allows God to change, and Fiddes recognizes that this change cannot be for worse, and not for any ontological "better" but for God to be a God to further actualize himself in "this way" through unique experiences of suffering with his finite creation. This brings up the question of whether God could have chosen otherwise, and he charges Barth with plumming the depths we can never know and creating a primordial unknowable monad, wheras Fiddes simply says we cannot know, all we can know is that God has done so and we cannot conceive it otherwise since it is not otherwise (I suspect Fiddes is playing slight of hand tricks with the "necessity" card).

There is more I can say but I will spare it. I, indubitably, will be interacting with this book in the future as I continue my studies on impassibility.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiddes has earned my respect with this book. You simply do not come across a theologian of this caliber that often.

Fiddes' argument is that God suffers, he suffers fully in the depths of his being, and that this free act of being influenced by the world, coming fulling into time and the world, even onto death, is essential to understanding God as free love and as a God who has hope for mending a broken world.

Fiddes engages an impressive group of theologians to make his case. He starts with Aquinas, offering a precise critique of impassability and his metaphysics of causation. Fiddes articulates a notion that God enacts loving influence rather than direct authoritarian causation that overrides free-will. To often a notion of causation gets posited that makes God the author of evil (i.e. as we see in fundamentalist Calvinism).

He moves on to process theology, while highly appreciative, not uncritical. It is important to point out that many theologians recycle the philosophical categories of the medieval era that are simply incongruent with what we know of physics. For this reason he looks to the process philosophers, (who were both theologian, scientists, logicians, and metaphysians) to offer workable metaphysical categories to talk about divine causation. Fiddes certainly has impressed upon me the need to reconsider how we talk about being and causation.

He moves on to offer a theological argument that God suffers the influence of the world and far from trapping him in the processes of the world, these are the very means of bring hope of a different world. God's suffering for the world in the cross is that means by which the world has hope of redemption. He is most influenced by Moltmann, his mentor, but again, does not settle with his conclusions either.

He goes on to the death of God theology, arguing that a suffering God explains the phenomena of divine "absence" that these theologians were grappling with. He goes on to Hegel and Barth discussing the relationship of Christ, the cross, and the overcoming of nothingness and hostile "non-being."

It is refreshing to read a theologian that this constructive. As I said, while he was the student of Moltmann, he does not do as many theologians do and merely sit in the camp of their predecessors. I get annoyed when people declare that they are "Barthians" or "Thomists" as if these figures are infallible. Fiddes engages minds across the theologian spectrum, refusing to fall into proof by assertion, and offers a constructive argument.

Writing in the 1980's, this makes him one of the early open theists, and perhaps superior to the later writers such as Pinnock.

This book has given me a lot to think about, so I am going to go back and reread it and think more.

[Joseph Sverker]

This is an extraorinarily complex book that I found rather hard to grasp. There are probably many insights in here since Fiddes take some of the most influential theologians of the 20th century as a starting point. I think it would benefit the book if he showed the connections between the chapters a bit better though.

[Theron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provisionally, I'll have to give this 3/5. I read it, read it fast. I have much more to learn and after that I'll re-read this tightly argued book by Paul Fiddes.