Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God

by Katherine Sonderegger

The mystery of Almighty God is most properly an explication of the oneness of God, tying the faith of the church to the bedrock of Israel’s confession of the lord of the covenant, the lord of our Lord Jesus Christ. The doctrine of divine attributes, then, is set out as a reflection on Holy the One God as omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, and all these as expressions of the Love who is God. Systematic theology must make bold claims about its knowledge and service of this One the Invisible God must be seen and known in the visible. In this way, God and God’s relation to creation are distinguished—but not separated—from Christology, the doctrine of perfections from redemption. The lord God will be seen as compatible with creatures, and the divine perfections express formally distinct and unique relations to the world.This systematic theology, then, begins from the treatise De Deo Uno and develops the dogma of the Trinity as an expression of divine unicity, on which will depend creation, Christology, and ecclesiology. In the end, the transcendent beauty who is God can be known only in worship and praise.

Genres: Theology, Religion, Christian, Christianity, Academic, Nonfiction

539 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2015

Reviews

[Jonathan Platter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sonderegger's first volume in Systematic Theology has already been receiving rave reviews and endorsements. Rightfully so. The book has many virtues: beautiful writing, a spirit of reverence and awe in the presence of God, an integration of philosophical, spiritual, and systematic theology, historical and scriptural sensitivity, and a balance between creative construction and historic orthodoxy. Further, she presents an Anglican vision that is non-partisan, conversant with Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, and Orthodox perspectives -- both critically and appreciatively.

The distinguishing feature of this Volume 1: The Doctrine of God is that it is not a treatise on the Trinity! Rather, Sonderegger intentionally takes a more "classical" route in first discussing God's "unicity" -- to use one of her favored terms. Her reasoning is that in the fervor of the trinitarian revival following Barth, many theologians have dedicated themselves to the question of God's identity to the neglect of God's quiddity -- i.e. addressing "who" God is but not "what" God is. So, God is (identity, who) the Trinity, identifiable by the narrative patterns of the three persons, most centrally through the action of Jesus Christ. Consequently, most contemporary theologians are "christomorphic" (Sonderegger's term).

In contrast, Sonderegger believes trinitarian speculation is incomplete -- or worse, wrong -- when God's being (quiddity, what) is neglected as a matter of theological attention. So, the task of her first volume is primarily to explicate the scriptural witness to God's oneness, unicity, simplicity. She structures the book around three primary attributes (the dreaded "omni-" attributes): omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, with a closing discussion of God's love.

To work through these attributes, Sonderegger enters into exegetical forays with her regulative/methodological concept of compatibilism. Compatibilism, different, though not unrelated, to compatibilism in free-will debates, is the belief that God is radically different from creation while at the same time being radically compatible with it. The fact that it is God that is compatible with creation is important -- the terms should not quickly be reversed. Creation does not have a capacity for God -- she's no run-of-the-mill "natural theologian." Barth can rest assured. Rather, whatever God is, scripture attests to God's intimate presence to, humble power in, and eternal spiritual knowledge of creation.

This perspective leads her to reaffirm these "classic" attributes of the divine essence but with greater sensitivity to modern critiques. Overall, this is an excellent contribution to systematic theology, providing something of a minority report in recent efforts. It is often very readable, in part because she brackets philosophical discussions to excurses and isolated sections. Though her writing is generally clear, the depth and nuance of her proposal takes genuine effort to follow. It is well worth the work.

[Caleb Rolling]

Honestly, my meager philosophical chops and merely proficient grasp of the theological tradition really hurt my ability to dialogue with this beautiful, provocative, and doxological volume. But Sonderegger is cooking something good, even when I can’t always (1) comprehend or (2) endorse where she’s going. My personal highlight is her full-throttled and lengthy metaphysical interpretations of scripture—especially OT passages.

(I did appreciate her brief conclusion on scriptural interpretation, though I think she misreads what Brevard Childs and his so-called “canonical criticism” are really proposing. In truth, I think her instincts are closer to Childs’ than she may let on. Hopefully she offers a more fleshed out doctrine of scripture in later volumes).

[Cody Bivins-Starr · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a recent contribution to dogmatics, this is stellar. It raises interesting questions on methodology, revelation, language, etc. while remaining theologically theological (a la Webster). I walked away from this in awe of the Living God and forced to wrestle with this God .

That being said, some of the arguments get lost in the sermonic portions. This could be that my knowledge of dogmatics only goes so deep, and that’s sure to be the case. But it is also that at times the argument cannot provide a position in between others. Overall very good, excited to dive into the proceeding volume.

[Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sonderegger’s ruminations in the first volume of her Systematic Theology—fixated on the doctrine of the One God—are equal parts intoxicatingly devotional and gloriously imaginative as well as frustratingly flighty, contradictory, and imprecise.

She has three main commitments here. One, Sonderegger has deep affinity for the dialectical tradition of Karl Barth and his 19th-century interlocutors. Two, along with other contemporary theologians like Tanner and Coakley, one of her foundational theological commitment is to “compatibilism”—the notion that God is both radically dissimilar FROM and radically compatible WITH the world. Three, and perhaps most winsomely, Sonderegger is deeply committed to Church Tradition and Scripture as source of language, idiom, and concept for theology.

There’s a lot to love here. Her unabashed reliance of Scriptural image and her own devotional ardor supply the bulk of her writerly power in this book—giving soaring moments of just pure beautiful poetry. Consider just one:

“To speak of God, to name the Divine Perfections, should be honey in the comb, the river of delight, the freshness and strong elixir of love. Love is the Truth of God, but also the Beauty. God is sublime, a zealous Good. Love alone is as strong as death, its passion fierce as the grave. To know THIS God, the Living Lord, is to hunger and to delight and to hunger one more. Theology should pant after its God, the Love that is better than wine, for God is beautiful, truly lovely, the One whose Eyes are like doves. Eat, friends—all theology should ring out with this invitation—drink and be drunk with Love.”

Her ability to uncritically take ancient words and vision and spin them so unselfconsciously into a decidedly postmodern work is very refreshing and energetic.

However, her commitment to still speak the parlance of the Church and its traditional affirmation of God’s Perfections—Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence—WHILE seeking to translate these into a fresher, more contemporary idiom often lends itself to imprecision and contradiction.

So, she’ll affirm God’s Impassibility, Immutability, and Objecitivity—while ALSO affirming his radical “unknowability” and transcendence. This renders functionally incoherent references to God like “Impassible Passibility” or “Divine Immutability Mutability” or his “Objective Subjectivity.” They sound smart and deep and philosophically titillating—but don’t mean all that much definitionally.

Of course, this “functional incoherence” and seemingly “inherent contradiction” is intentional—a lá Barth and the dialectical tradition. She is attempting to be simultaneously positive in her claims of God and respectful of Tradition, while also radically faithful to God’s essential Mystery and inability to be depicted. It’s a heady, impossibly difficult, yet faithfully necessary line she’s trying to toe.

Ultimately, I applaud Sonderegger’s work here. It doesn’t always stick the landing in terms of actual advancing much positive or comprehensible theological claims. But, it’s always prayerful and always enamored with the Object and Subject of its work. And what more can you ask from truly Christian theology?

[Andy Dollahite]

Unrated...TBD. I'm sadly and pathetically double-minded on this, pausing a final judgment until I have opportunity for further consideration and likely at least a second reading.

Sonderegger indeed writes with a unique voice, frequently achieving a dogmatics of startling beauty and reverence. There is so much to be grateful for and her work regularly elicits praise for God in the reader's heart. But not all was pure magic. The prologues preparing her depictions of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and love were plagued by a repetition of thought that detracted from momentum. At times I was begging her to get to the point. Her decision to distribute prolegomena into various sections rather than lay her cards on the table up front is clearly intentional. But am I the only one who doesn't want to wait 500+ pages to find out a systematic theologian thinks Scripture is fallible? This doesn't mean she has no esteem for God's word; her work shows she obviously has profound regard. But it's not irrelevant, and in my opinion shouldn't be tucked into the back corner of the book. More concerning, I thought crucial turns in her reformulations became tediously opaque (e.g. her insistence on a mutable Immutability, passible Impassibility, Love that has no object). Now, this could certainly be because I don't have the intellectual training, foundations, or horsepower to follow her! (Notice the ! mark. She loves to use it too!)

Perhaps my greatest concern is that I'm unsure whether she's passing on the "great tradition" in a new idiom (to borrow one of her favorite words!...there, I used "!" again), or whether she's actually crafting a genuinely novel doctrine of God. My gut reaction is the latter, and that has me eager to pump the breaks. Nevertheless, I think it's necessary and vital for each generation to confess the glories of our Holy God in our own vernacular, not to merely ape our forbearers.

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Sonderegger, Chair of Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, attempts the unusual for our current theological era – a classical systematic theology. The linchpin of Sonderegger’s systematics is the observation, from scripture and from reason, that God is – more. More than we can imagine, more than we can experience, more than we can confine. She moves carefully and lyrically through the traditional attributes of God – oneness, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience – and ends up with a lovely summary that God’s encompassing love holds all these together. In typical systematics fashion, Sonderegger dialogues with important theologians from the past, including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Schleiermacher and Barth, and comes to her own perspective differing from each. She is careful to stress God’s ultimate unknowability, but her answer is compatibilism – that God in God’s infinite excess can work and reveal Godself in our finite and limited world. Sonderegger is also careful not to draw too much inference from Christ’s incarnation to discuss how God works on our world (a methodological point that Barth and I might disagree with, but she does it well). The main drawback is an Episcopal tendency to be sometimes a little too rhapsodic in echoing the Book of Common Prayer and to capitalize a lot more adjectives for God than might be strictly necessary. But all in all, this is a bold and detailed attempt at a systematics for the 21st century, good for seminarians and professional theologians alike. I eagerly will turn next to volume two.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere between 3-4 stars. As far as the theology, there is definitely good stuff here. Sonderegger has a way of writing that is almost devotional, but sometimes I felt like it was too wordy. In the midst of all the beautiful prose, I'd sometimes find myself wondering "what is she arguing again?" I've heard that volume 2 is a bit better in this regard. I found myself wishing for a summary via bullet points at the end of each chapter. Specifically loved the chapter on Omnipotence as Humility.

[Matthew Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to sum up how profound this book is. Sonderegger's way of writing is deeply worshipful, her compatibalist theology is rich, and the ongoing attention to divine presence most welcome. I'll be unpacking this one for a while!

[David Goetz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars. I'll say more later, Lord willing.

[Reinhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great work. It contains a lot of good insights, explanations, and clarifications and oozes warmth. It focuses on the one God. It reads like a corrective to the Trinitarian lean of late 20th-century theology— a lean that I believe is both correct and illuminates the rest of theology. It’s certainly not that she opposes the doctrine of the Trinity, precisely not that! (See below.) She believes it may have been overemphasized. This and the overemphasis on Christology is the motivating force behind this work.

It is divided up into the Omni’s: the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient God. under this rubric, she explores theology proper— only the Unicity of God is explored in this nearly 600-page volume.

The weakness of this book is the lack of editing. Her excellent thoughts are buried beneath mounds of text. I’m not sure if she planned to rival the length of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, or even mimic his somewhat circular, dictation-like style (I also find him a bit long-winded, but Barth tends to have clear ideas that he circles around). In this work, there is too much wood, hay, and stubble that needlessly buries the gold. And I lay this at the feet of her editors.

Sometimes, when an author’s fame rises to the stratosphere, they are given liberties with their work that a humble writer doesn’t have. In my experience, this almost always leads to a worse final product. Later works by celebrity theologians tend to be bloated and worse (Pannenberg excepted). I’m not sure why she was given no editorial constraints, none. Readers deserve editors, writers need them. Constraints make better works.

Some of the liberties extend to punctuation. I have never seen so many exclamation points, question marks, or semicolons in a work of theology, in fact, outside of Tom Wolfe, never in any context. Also, irregularities in typography. All adjectives referring to God are capitalized. I get the idea. She is trying to make a point. But make it with text rather than typography (the whole book!). Makes for strange-looking English (Denglish). She also has some authorial ticks, ‘precisely not that!’ is one of her favorites.

Sonderegger also tends to ask a series of rhetorical questions - a lot of them, one right after the other. Not in the carefully structured way of Aquinas, who asks real, not rhetorical questions. A pile-on of similar questions one after the other. The overall style reads like a lecture transcript, unedited transcripts. It is oral language rather than written language. I can imagine she is a fantastic lecturer. It would actually be much easier to follow as a lecture. While reading, if you lose the thread, it is almost impossible to pick it up. The thread is not in the previous paragraph or the previous page; it is buried a few pages back, and you have to sift through a lot of verbiage to uncover the thread. This is on the reader, but help a reader out!

All this to say, there are some wonderful traits in the work of theology. It is careful, thoughtful, insightful, and unlike a lot of theology, warm and devotional. In this way, it resonates with the Church Fathers. This to her credit. She could very well function as a modern-day Church Mother. (Her voice is needed). But her editors did her no favors by not placing constraints on her work, making her develop a clearer and more concise work. What should be 200 pages has unnecessarily ballooned to 540.

I really hope she develops a full systematic theology in 600 or 800 pages - it would be wonderful. Perhaps one of the greats. I can’t really recommend this present work when there is so much theology to read and so little time.

[Brad East · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a review I'm writing, so I'm saving my words; but I'll put a link back here to the review once it's published. In short: very good; very weird; very different—and each a function of the others.

[Sooho Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A more detailed review to come. But for now, all I can say is, “I have seen the glory of the LORD!”

[Wesley Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katherine Sonderegger’s *Systematic Theology, Volume 1* is a rich, poetic, and often perplexing meditation on the doctrine of God. I found myself regularly thinking, “Yes… and no,” which may, in fact, be precisely the kind of theological space Sonderegger invites her readers to inhabit—a space where affirmation and resistance are not mutually exclusive but spiritually productive.

In this opening volume, Sonderegger begins with the Oneness of God, a deliberate departure from the more typical modern starting point of Trinity. This is not an anti-Trinitarian move, but an insistence that the unity of God is not a theological stepping stone but a profound, generative truth in itself. God, for Sonderegger, is utterly One, and yet always more than any unity we can conceive. There is a reverent retrieval of the divine perfections—omniscience, omnipotence, and even impassibility. While I find impassibility the most difficult to affirm, Sonderegger's articulation of what might be called *passible impassibility* is both disarming and thought-provoking. God's majesty is not compromised by suffering, but revealed in it.

What makes this volume especially compelling is the way Sonderegger engages the resources of classical theism without dismissing the insights of theology from below. She is attentive to God’s subjectivity, to God’s humility, to the ways in which God comes to us—not merely from the heights but from within the depths of human history and experience. God is, in her words, holy humility—sovereign and self-giving, infinite and intimate.

Sonderegger consistently uses masculine and capitalized pronouns for God, which will be uncomfortable or even alienating for many readers shaped by feminist and progressive theology. She addresses this concern directly, though her approach will not satisfy everyone. Still, her theological project demands a hearing—not despite these tensions but, perhaps, because of them.

This is a thorough and deeply theological work that does not yield easily to summary or system. It is devotional as much as doctrinal, and it resists the tendency toward neatness that often characterizes modern theology. I’m grateful for it, challenged by it, and eager to continue with the volumes that follow.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. At times, it's wonderful. Sonderegger's deep engagement with key historical voices is smart, and her writing voice is distinct (though at time the idiosyncrasy weighs a little heavy). Her late chapter on love is particularly insightful.

At times, though, it's a slog. She's got a spiraling way of developing her arguments that can be repetitive, and the book feels simultaneously dense overlong.

The key for me is her interest in engaging God, both as God and personally, rather than an abstract theological topic. Much of the writing either is about how we know God (largely through his humility and condescension) or the experience of experiencing God. Her own knowledge of God isn't limited to how much Aquinas she's read, and that personal nature (like her writing voice when its at its sharpest) is a key strength of the book.

[Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the first two or three hundred pages of this book, I did not understand the delight some find in it, or the reverence with which it is sometimes discussed. Not being well-read in Barth or Schleiermacher, for instance, much was beyond my comprehension, and I was not aided by her elusive style. But Sonderegger's theological searching, at once nuanced and playful, culminates in rapturous, hymnic outpourings of devotion to God. Having turned the last page, a warmth lingers. I don't understand everything she is saying, but reading the Systematic Theology with persistence rewards one with a unique experience. It is theology that ushers into awe and worship.

[Neil White · Rating 2 out of 5]

Systematic theology is one of those places where one's starting place can make a lot of difference. Katherine Sonderegger's starting point in moving to reclaim many of the traditional Greek metaphysical properties as ways of talking about God as well as her focus on the unity of God is a choice that is unusual in most modern systems. There are some good insights in this work and others will appreciate her methodology more than I did.

[Tyler Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sonderegger's flowery prose annoyed me after the first 100 pages or so, as did her frequent digressions. Nevertheless, she interacts so insightfully with so many different theologians and conveys her unique theological vision so clearly, that completing this work was well worth the effort. I sense I am a better theologian for having read this.

[Tynan Brooks]

Dense and difficult. Sonderegger's theologizing is always suffused with a passionate desire to love God. Greatly appreciate the way she counters the trend of foregrounding the Trinity over against the Oneness of the Lord.

[Rusty Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most unique and important contemporary works of systematic theology I’ve encountered.

[raysilverwoman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spoiler alert: God is real (and really One)

[Liam Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Then the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not being consumed.

[Zach Hollifield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a year, but I’ve finished it. Hard to put into words all Sonderegger has accomplished here. However, without question, the greatest of her feats within is to time and again leave the reader like Job following the whirlwind: speechless at the wonder of the One True God.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three words can be used to describe this book: modern, traditional, and innovative. Modern, because the author is sensitive to the modern concerns; traditional, because she draws upon and is mainly in agreement with (or is at least sympathetic toward) these voices; and, innovative, because she is willing to rethink traditional theology in a way that addresses modern concerns but that does not completed capitulate to them. For those interested in systematic theology in general, and, systematic theology of a thought-provoking variety, this is a must read.

[Derrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Undoubtedly one of the most beautifully crafted systematic theologies you are ever likely to read. I have not enjoyed a Systematic Theology this much since Robert Jenson's two volume set (which is ironic, given how deeply Jenson and Sonderegger would disagree on many issues). If you are interested in theology you owe it to yourself to give this a read.