Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics by Andrew Davison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics by Andrew Davison Rudi Te Velde Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics. By Andrew Davison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 423. $34.99 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-1087-0404-5. This wonderful book is the fruit of the growing interest among theologians in the notion of participation and the participatory way of thought, not only as found in an exemplary way in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but more broadly as characteristic of a Christian (biblical and patristic) understanding of God’s creative and saving presence in the world. It is a form of theology that dares to speak freely in a metaphysical register without feeling cornered somehow by the secular presuppositions of modern philosophy. The book shows signs of being influenced by the Radical Orthodoxy movement, with its predilection for Platonic participation. Even though the book does not assume that movement’s full force of a critical and polemical stance towards modern secular culture, it does oppose modern varieties of nominalism, with its individualist ontology, voluntarism, and the modern split between the human subject and the world. The general approach is positive, aiming at setting out a broad Christian vision of the world that has the notion of participation at its heart. The book’s closest parallel, explicitly mentioned as a source of inspiration, [End Page 326] is Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation (2011), which has introduced many readers to a participatory account of theology. The author proves himself to be an excellent teacher who in a clear and simple language draws a persuasive and well-informed picture of the Christian participatory view of the world in its relation to God. To the author, participation means first and foremost that the world is approached in terms of sharing and receiving, or of communion. The spirit of participation is recognizable, for instance, in the question posed by the apostle Paul: “What have you got that you did not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7). The double message of participation is that a creature is nothing apart from God’s gift, while at the same time, by God’s gift, it truly exists and has being. The book’s subtitle is “A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics.” The perspective may be called distinctively theological, even in the sense that the relevant sources used to elaborate the participatory way of thought include biblical texts. The author acknowledges that Plato is the philosophical father of participatory thinking, and that the presence of participation in the writings of the Church Fathers (not least Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and in the Latin west, Augustine) is due to the comprehensive influence of Platonist metaphysics in the period of late Antiquity. The most prominent source in this book is, undoubtedly, Thomas Aquinas, “the master of the participatory perspective” (7). The author does not intend his book to be a scholarly study about participation in Aquinas; nonetheless it is Aquinas with his broad and consistent participatory vision in the whole of theology who provides the author’s main point of reference. The book is divided into four parts. The first part—“Participation and Causation”—treats of creation, the notion that everything comes from and depends upon God. Creation is approached from the angle of the Aristotelian four causes: God is the efficient cause, the creative agent by which everything is made; he is the (extrinsic) formal cause in the sense that creatures are made “after God’s likeness” and have a characteristic form corresponding with the idea in God; he is the final cause in the sense that creatures are made for the sake of God and have their fulfilment in God; and God is not the matter out of which things are made, but rather creatures are made out of nothing (ex nihilo). In this way, the author describes a threefold pattern of God’s creative causality, which is then linked explicitly with the Trinitarian life in God which is the exemplary model of participatory relatedness and communion. Part 2 is devoted to language—“The Language of Participation and Language as Participation.” It begins...