Book Review: Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love

Abstract

Ask Beasts: Darwin and God of Love. By Elizabeth A. Johnson. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. xvii + 323 pp. $32.95 (cloth).Taken as a whole, Elizabeth Johnson's of work can be read as a prismatic attempt to develop a doctrine of trinitarian God who seeks full flourishing of all life. Johnson has pursued this work because, as she first put it in her groundbreaking 1992 book, She Who Is, she wants us to perceive that the of God functions. Although reality of God always exceeds human thought (which is why she writes of symbol of God rather than simply of God), how we imagine God to be, Johnson thinks, informs kind of Christians we are and, accordingly, kind of world we create. Johnson has now added one more facet to this ongoing project in Ask Beasts: Darwin and God of Love. Here, she asks what focusing our attention on God as Creator contributes to our theology of God.Logically enough, Johnson thinks that it only makes sense, when inquiring about character of Creator, to consider creation as significant theological data. This does not mean producing a natural theology. Instead of reading a doctrine of God from world, she examines extents to which scientifically described qualities of world we inhabit are both consonant with and pose challenges to scripture, tradition, and practice of Christian faith. What, she wonders, are theological implications of what science is teaching us about our cosmos? After a lengthy, detailed, and nuanced appreciation of Darwin's life and work, Johnson spends balance of book elaborating several trajectories for further consideration. NeoDarwinian understandings of evolution, contemporary cosmology, genetics, and theoretical physics combine to paint a picture, when rendered using a theological palette, of a creation established and mysteriously sustained by a God of infinite love who has endowed that creation with freedom to realize itself in an open, undetermined manner, over barely imaginable eons of time. In this portrait of creation, chance and contingency provide opportunities for life to emerge in ever-greater complexity, carried forward and mysteriously informed (but not determined) by breath of life that is Holy Spirit. The Christian God is life-giver: God who creates, sustains, and redeems out of unalloyed love that this God is.The matter that composes creation described by science is neither relatively neutral stuff' of scientific materialism nor evil flesh of gnosticizing currents that have historically tended to denigrate body over soul or spirit in Christianity. …