What do you think?
Rate this book
God In History: RIGHTS REVERTED 6/7/2007
Book by Hodgson, Peter C.
Paperback
First published May 1, 1991
3 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 15, 2015
This book has a striking agenda, to develop a constructive, postmodern theology of the God-World relationship rooted in a retrieval of Hegel via Troeltsch. The starting point is disaffection with the "classic" understanding of God's relation to the world as expressible in a salvation history definsitively shaped by its end in God's triumph over the world. By contrast, Hodgson's goal is to understand that relationship as figured through a series of "shapes of freedom" in a history that is open-ended. God transcends history, while also being present in history and vulnerable to it. At best, it is likely that history will continue without a consummatory end. At worst, we will annihilate ourselves and our history with us. While by faith we can imagine in some way that human history has a deeper or higher significance in God, Hodgson claims that our only ways of articulating this are in statements that are "paradoxical to the point of bordering on unintelligibility." (251)
Hodgson's most comprehensive conception of God is "the One who loves in freedom," setting the world free and becoming concretely free in and through relationship with the world. In this conception, God conceived abstractly in terms only of transcendence of history is "triune figuration," a process modeled on Hegel's logic of spirit. This idea of God is the idea of the absolute, "absolving" itself, setting itself free, through a process of self-othering and self-reconciling. This triune process is what properly is meant by the classical "immanent" Trinitarian symbols of Father, Son and Spirit, and the "economic" Trinitarian symbols of divine operation in the world. The crucial point Hodgson hopes to secure with this idea is that only in formal or logical terms is God absolute over against history, outside of relation to the world. One could say that God directs or drives history in a strictly formal sense, pointing to the triune, Hegelian process of history.
But the matter of history matters, too. God's absoluteness is better understood not as a directing of history but as an absolving, a releasing of history by God, to be God's other, through which God might come to full (formal and material) reality. Thus, human liberations, however passing, matter for their own sake. They might be moments toward a putative final divine triumph, but this is by no means assured. They are, however, concretizations of God the absolute in history. Perhaps God's only concretizations in history. So it would be a mistake to suppose that they are of value, if at all, only in reference to some suprahistorical in-breaking of God into history to end history.
If liberation in history matters, so, too, do all the failures of liberation, though. Nothing in history lasts forever. So even though Hodgson shines his light on "shapes of freedom" as the presence of God in history, the theological understanding of history nevertheless conceives of history as a "de-configurative process" wherein the shapes of freedom are woven together and torn asunder. In terms of the idea of God as the One who loves in freedom, history is the sign and the object of divine love, a love that suffers with those who suffer.
Now, a "metaphysical faith" that freedom wins out is warranted by the appearance of the various shapes of freedom and especially by the seeming irrepressibility of human desire for freedom. However, it is crucial to recognize that the shapes of freedom realized in history are historical achievements - they are products of liberative praxes. Thus, the third element in Hodgson's most comprehensive conception of God as the One who loves in freedom refers to liberative action or "transfigurative praxis" on the part of historical actors. Inchoate freedom can go awry in many ways. The marks of genuinely transfigurative praxis are seen in the subjective freedom of actors, intersubjective freedom among them, objective freedom achieved in a culture and institutions of communicative freedom, and (although not discussed directly in this book) a "transubjective" openness to transcendence.
In historical actuality, the God-World relationship is always marginal and passing - at least as best we can know. Hodgson's perspective is tied to Christian revelation, although he acknowledges other spiritual traditions may embrace other figures. He hopes that they would be shapes of freedom, too, that would thus be consonant with and confirm the metaphysical faith he elaborates.
The chief downside of the book is that (it seems to me) it is cluttered with far too many discussions of ancillary figures. While such discussions can be helpful in terms of a sense of where Hodgson is coming from, they obscured my understanding of where he wants to go. Too often, it seemed, Hodgson offered counter-assertions in reaction to those figures rather than developed arguments.
To be fair, this is just one of many books by Hodgson, and fuller arguments for positions advanced here might be offered in those. I will likely read more of them, especially New Birth of Freedom, from 1976.
Hodgson's most comprehensive conception of God is "the One who loves in freedom," setting the world free and becoming concretely free in and through relationship with the world. In this conception, God conceived abstractly in terms only of transcendence of history is "triune figuration," a process modeled on Hegel's logic of spirit. This idea of God is the idea of the absolute, "absolving" itself, setting itself free, through a process of self-othering and self-reconciling. This triune process is what properly is meant by the classical "immanent" Trinitarian symbols of Father, Son and Spirit, and the "economic" Trinitarian symbols of divine operation in the world. The crucial point Hodgson hopes to secure with this idea is that only in formal or logical terms is God absolute over against history, outside of relation to the world. One could say that God directs or drives history in a strictly formal sense, pointing to the triune, Hegelian process of history.
But the matter of history matters, too. God's absoluteness is better understood not as a directing of history but as an absolving, a releasing of history by God, to be God's other, through which God might come to full (formal and material) reality. Thus, human liberations, however passing, matter for their own sake. They might be moments toward a putative final divine triumph, but this is by no means assured. They are, however, concretizations of God the absolute in history. Perhaps God's only concretizations in history. So it would be a mistake to suppose that they are of value, if at all, only in reference to some suprahistorical in-breaking of God into history to end history.
If liberation in history matters, so, too, do all the failures of liberation, though. Nothing in history lasts forever. So even though Hodgson shines his light on "shapes of freedom" as the presence of God in history, the theological understanding of history nevertheless conceives of history as a "de-configurative process" wherein the shapes of freedom are woven together and torn asunder. In terms of the idea of God as the One who loves in freedom, history is the sign and the object of divine love, a love that suffers with those who suffer.
Now, a "metaphysical faith" that freedom wins out is warranted by the appearance of the various shapes of freedom and especially by the seeming irrepressibility of human desire for freedom. However, it is crucial to recognize that the shapes of freedom realized in history are historical achievements - they are products of liberative praxes. Thus, the third element in Hodgson's most comprehensive conception of God as the One who loves in freedom refers to liberative action or "transfigurative praxis" on the part of historical actors. Inchoate freedom can go awry in many ways. The marks of genuinely transfigurative praxis are seen in the subjective freedom of actors, intersubjective freedom among them, objective freedom achieved in a culture and institutions of communicative freedom, and (although not discussed directly in this book) a "transubjective" openness to transcendence.
In historical actuality, the God-World relationship is always marginal and passing - at least as best we can know. Hodgson's perspective is tied to Christian revelation, although he acknowledges other spiritual traditions may embrace other figures. He hopes that they would be shapes of freedom, too, that would thus be consonant with and confirm the metaphysical faith he elaborates.
The chief downside of the book is that (it seems to me) it is cluttered with far too many discussions of ancillary figures. While such discussions can be helpful in terms of a sense of where Hodgson is coming from, they obscured my understanding of where he wants to go. Too often, it seemed, Hodgson offered counter-assertions in reaction to those figures rather than developed arguments.
To be fair, this is just one of many books by Hodgson, and fuller arguments for positions advanced here might be offered in those. I will likely read more of them, especially New Birth of Freedom, from 1976.
Displaying 1 of 1 review