No-One Like Him. The Doctrine of God

Trinity Journal, Spring 2002 by Bray, Gerald

John S. Feinberg. No-One Like Him. The Doctrine of God. Wheaton: Crossway, 2001. 879 pp. $35.00.

This is a book which is bound to excite the envy of professional theologians everywhere. In stark contrast to the majority of contemporary publishers, Crossway has given the author a free hand to make it as long and as comprehensive as he wanted to. The reader quickly develops the impression that no argument has been cut short and no approach has been left untreated as Feinberg makes his way through the jungle of modern theological thought. In fact, this encyclopedic work is several volumes rolled into one, and most of its chapters are so exhaustive in their treatment of the subject that they can stand on their own. Certainly there can be few readers who will have the knowledge, stamina, and concentration needed to get through the entire text in one go.

The book is divided into three major parts, of which the first is "Concepts of God." As the title suggests, this section lays the theoretical foundation for the doctrine of God. It consists of three lengthy chapters, each of which is further divided into three subsections. The first chapter discusses the idea of God in itself, the different ways in which he can be conceived (as a "being" or otherwise), and the ways in which he can be thought of relating to our universe. The second chapter is devoted to the notions of "modernity" and "postmodernity" and presents a thorough analysis of contemporary thought in general. The third chapter is devoted to process theology, which Feinberg evidently feels deserves a full-blown refutation.

The second part of the book is called "The Being and Nature of God," and it consists of six chapters. The first deals with the classical arguments used to "prove" the existence of God and the next three cover his attributes. The fifth chapter is an extended discourse on God's relationship to both time and eternity and the last expounds the doctrine of the Trinity.

The third and final part of the book also contains six chapters and is headed "The Acts of God." The first chapter examines the thorny question of the divine decrees) and the second discusses the nature of creation. The last four chapters look at different aspects of divine providence and develop the classical themes of free will versus divine sovereignty and the problem of evil. There are also a relatively short introduction and conclusion, a number of endnotes, and two indexes, one of Scripture passages and the other of general names and subjects.

No review can hope to do justice to the riches which this book contains. Teachers and students alike will be deeply in Feinberg's debt for making so many issues related to the doctrine of God so readily accessible. He not only deals with issues like process and open theology, but interacts with specific writers, whom he quotes at some length. It is easy to imagine that students writing a paper on one of these subjects will not feel the need to look any further than this for their information, since there is so much presented on all sides of an argument.

Feinberg is himself a Calvinist, though of a relatively moderate variety, and some of his views will be looked at askance by classical Calvinists. For example, he believes that a better case can be made for understanding God's eternity as time-related (i.e. "everlasting") than for seeing it as something outside time altogether. He also resolves the predestination/free will controversy by something he calls "compatibilist specific sovereignty," which apparently means that God's sovereignty is compatible with limited free will in certain areas. That is a very difficult doctrine to defend and it will not surprise anyone to discover that a number of Feinberg's colleagues will be unable to follow him very far down that particular road.

Feinberg's strength and first love is philosophy and it is here that his book truly excels. His treatments of such matters as the so-called "proofs" for the existence of God range so widely and so deeply that it is hard to see that they will be surpassed among evangelical scholars for another generation. He is also very good on the different attributes of God, though he himself admits that it is difficult to classify these satisfactorily. In the end, he opts for a moral/non-moral distinction, but has to concede that it is difficult to put particular divine attributes in one category to the exclusion of the other. In the opinion of this reviewer, the oppositional approach (moral versus non-moral) is the basic problem, and it would have been better to take a different model altogether, classifying the attributes according to what they deny about time, space, and matter, and what they affirm about quality. That would have avoided simple opposition, and offered a more systematic approach to them, though it has to be said that the overall scheme is of little importance, since each attribute is discussed at such length.

In two areas, it appears that the book has lost a certain balance. One is in the treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity, which is extremely brief, considering the amount of space devoted to topics like process theology. This is a pity, because so much of the most creative thinking in recent years has been on this subject, though perhaps it is not surprising for one who is basically a philosophical theologian. The Trinity is not a philosophical doctrine (in spite of the fact that it uses philosophical terminology), and it is symptomatic of Feinberg's approach that he places his discussion of the word "person" elsewhere (at the end of his chapter on the existence and being of God) and does not index it. The other oddity is the chapter on creation, which could probably have been left out, since it is not, strictly speaking, part of the "doctrine of God." In fact, the entire third section would probably have been better as an independent book because it deals more with what God does than with who he is.