Immense, Unfathomed, Unconfined: The Grace of God in Creation, Church, and Community—Essays in Honour of Norman Young

Abstract

‘What difference does it make if we believe in God as creator? How does it affect the way people live in the world in the present and face the future?’ (15). The editor of this collection frames the book with these two questions by Norman Young, asked and answered over fifty years in his teaching, research, and ordained life. The collection published here derives from a 2010 Melbourne Conference celebrating Professor Young's work, and is deeply affectionate in tone. The essays are grouped in sections which loosely reflect the ‘Wesleyan’ quadrilateral: the editor builds a picture of the nature and work of grace in Scripture, Christian theological tradition, Methodist tradition, and a variety of experience-related areas. A sense of urgency runs through the collection: Norman Young's questions challenge a global Church in his view out of step with its own history (as with emphasis on individualistic piety or prosperity teaching), or with the dilemmas posed by ethnic conflict, the abuse of the earth, and popular cultures. This collection shows mature scholars grappling with the work of God's grace in full awareness of the tragedies and joys of the new millennium in an international Methodist theological voice.The book is edited with a refreshingly light hand, and makes no attempt to bring the contributions into explicit dialogue. Nonetheless the editing guides the reader into critical conversation with and between contributors' themes. How will the paradox of self-emptying love and ultimate power in Charles Wesley's hymns speak to Christian understanding of the earth as a ‘first sacrament’? (Geoffrey Wainwright juxtaposed with Theodore Runyon) How does the claim for the pre-colonial experience of Christ by first peoples, made in the Preamble of the Uniting Church constitution, relate to the Wesleys' thinking on intra-faith love? (Wes Campbell juxtaposed with Tim Macquiban) We have in this collection a glimpse of the internal intellectual economy of a global Methodist diaspora as it considers the implications of incarnation, atonement, and eschatological hope. This makes the collection a useful reference point for present emphases in North/Western hemisphere and South/Eastern hemisphere English-speaking Methodist theology.By way of answer to the editor's initial questions, the collection offers a rich anatomy of grace and its action: grace is the way God enters the world, in summary. Contributions keep evidence of their origin as spoken papers, as in the wry humour of the reflection on ‘grace and grumbling’ in the late section ‘the life of grace’. This collection is clearly aimed at theologically aware practitioners as much as the academy. The reader is well advised to read the final essay first, in which Professor Young offers a reflective theological autobiography: as he has it, the grace of God is ‘manifest supremely in the incarnation’ and ‘helps me to face the reality of the present with hope for the future’ (365, 366). This gives the entry point to understanding the nature and action of grace reported in the twenty-five essays that precede it. Because grace is as it is, the reality of God's grace for Young will always lead to a cruciform ethics characterized by gratitude, and many of the essays develop this theme.This collection is weighted toward the Australian contributors, with notable North American and European voices, but it would be interesting to see how a wider Methodist diaspora would critically engage the themes in this account of grace. In Young's voice, grace is the call on our lives that comes not just from a ‘desire to flee the wrath to come’ as John Wesley might have had it. Our responsible living has its first motive in gratitude and blessing, not fear, and the dominant account of atonement Young offers is reconciliation. To reword the editor's first questions only slightly, ‘How should we live, given that God entered the world in this particular way, embodied in this particular man's life, death and resurrection?’ It is a worthwhile effort to join the collection's contributors to reflect on the meaning of the incarnation and atonement in English-speaking Methodist tradition at this particular moment of global urgency in the early twenty-first century. Has our tradition enough to say to a world with exponentially increasing population, broken by war, economic collapse, and environmental uncertainty? The resounding voice of this collection is yes.