God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny and Empowerment?

by Kathryn Tanner

How are God and creatures related? How can one reconcile the sovereigntyand power of God with creatures' capacity to act freely? Kathryn Tanner's important and original work seeks an answer in the featuresand limits of traditional Christian discourse. Her search for a unique kernal orregulative dimension of the Christian doctrine of God-world relations leadsher to identify in the tradition an operative "grammar" of meaningful theological discourse that not only informs the past but can guide the future.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1988

About the author

Professor Tanner joined the Yale Divinity School faculty in 2010 after teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School for sixteen years and in Yale’s Department of Religious Studies for ten. Her research relates the history of Christian thought to contemporary issues of theological concern using social, cultural, and feminist theory. She is the author of God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Blackwell, 1988); The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Fortress, 1992); Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Fortress, 1997); Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Fortress, 2001); Economy of Grace (Fortress, 2005); Christ the Key (Cambridge, 2010); and scores of scholarly articles and chapters in books that include The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, which she edited with John Webster and Iain Torrance. She serves on the editorial boards of Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and Scottish Journal of Theology, and is a former coeditor of the Journal of Religion. Active in many professional societies, Professor Tanner is a past president of the American Theological Society, the oldest theological society in the United States. For eight years she has been a member of the Theology Committee that advises the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops. In the academic year 2010–11, she had a Luce Fellowship to research financial markets and the critical perspectives that Christian theology can bring to bear on them. In 2015–16, she will deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Reviews

[Scott Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding and helpful work on divine and human agency. It is tough and dense but worth the effort.

[Sooho Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this, her first book (actually dissertation-turned-book), Kathryn Tanner tackles one of the most head-throbbing debates of the Christian Tradition: Divine sovereignty vs free will. Are these really mutually exclusive positions? For many modern theologians (and laymen) it is absolutely the one or the other--any middle ground is incoherent. Ironically, though, Tanner calls the dichotomous divine sovereignty vs free will incoherent. (Very briefly) Below is how Tanner makes her meta-case.

First, the Christian Tradition has maintained coherence between God's sovereign power and human will with a nuanced understanding of God's (utter) transcendence based on God's wholly otherness. Tanner draws on creatio ex nihilo and stakes two rules for coherent Christian discourse: (1) God is utterly transcendence and, therefore, (2) God is immediately related to creation. (Confused? So was I for a couple weeks and I barely understand it now. Here's my best take: Since God is Creator and wholly other from creation, God is utterly transcendent. In other words, God and creation are not on the same playing field: they have a "noncompetitive relationship." What follows is that God is immediately related to creation: because God is utterly transcendent, there is no need for a medium or middle ground for God to relate to creation. Thereby, God is both utterly transcendent and immediately immanent.) 

Second, taking the two rules for discourse, Tanner shows how the divine sovereignty vs free will debate is fictitious because it betrays a competitive mindset. In that debate, God is brought down or humanity is brought up to equalize the playing field: what one does takes away from what the other is able to do. For free-will-ists, God and humanity are equal, so God must limit himself to make room for humanity's free will. For divine-sovereign-ists, humanity's free will is emptied to make room for God's governance. Tanner closes by saying that both sides, sadly, works with a Pelagian mindset (Pelagius was one of the earliest and most infamous heretics who claimed that people can work their way into heaven or into receiving grace from God). Free-will-ists affirm what Pelagianism fights for, whereas divine-sovereign-ists reject the Pelagian man--not the Pelagianism mindset. Of course, not all those who side on either/or falls into incoherence--Tanner admits that. But this debate is popular in our modern time, therefore Tanner offers her critiques and recommendations--which should be carefully taken. 

This book, more than her other ones, is much more technical. Caution is given to tread slowly: be prepared to be confused. But continue on, because the reward is refreshing. Theologians: Let us be vigorous meticulous with our language because they do matter.

cf. www.sooholee.wordpress.com

[Daniel Crouch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite her critique of modernity (a critique of my very heart), I found Tanner both clear and creative in her project of meta-theology through the insights of the Yale school.

[Joseph Sverker · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely brilliant study. Very consistently applied method och post-liberal linguistic methodology. One learns much by reading this.

[James Korsmo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is highly technical, dealing with the philosophy of theology and focusing on the linguistics of God talk. But it's profound in its argument, and I think it will prove essential to my thinking about theology going forward. Tanner makes two essential arguments about God talk, that build on one another: (1) God's transcendence "goes beyond necessary relations of identity and difference," and (2) "God's agency is immediately and universally extensive" (81). The first centers on the idea that God's transcendence can't be defined simply as being "higher" than human or natural existence. This even includes the assertion that we can't simply define God's existence in contrast to our own. The second rule, which follows on from this, asserts that God's being and activity is on a different plane (a vertical plane, as she describes it) than human/natural existence and agency, so that we shouldn't think of God needing to be inactive in order for creaturely agency to be active. Both of these are worked out in detail, especially with relation to agency, investigated historically through a look at how these rules have been enacted in various theologians over time, and then related to what this means to the practice of theology in the modern world. This is a dissertation, and it shows, but I think her clear thinking puts a fine point on some key insights. I'm glad I finally dusted this one off and took the plunge.