JOHN FEINBERG'S NO ONE LIKE HIM

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2003 by Morrison, John D

It may fairly be said that, in a sense, John Feinberg has been working on and toward No One Like Him for over twenty-five years. His doctoral dissertation for the University of Chicago department of philosophy, "Theologies and Evil" (subsequently published under that same title) wrestled with the question of God in the face of seemingly staggering counter evidence (cf. a later edition, The Many Faces of Evil). What Feinberg has at last produced is indeed a magisterial and magnificent magnum opus which purposes to restate, reformulate, or reconceptualize the doctrine of God for evangelical/ Protestant orthodox theology in light of contemporary cultural, philosophical and theological trends, issues and concerns about how we are to understand God and God's relationship to us in the world. Additionally, Feinberg's volume is the second volume of a very significant series of theological monographs intended to engage present biblical, theological, and philosophical scholarship on the central loci of the Christian faith largely from a Calvinist perspective. Feinberg's Calvinism has vast formative effect on the topics, directions and conclusions taken by Feinberg, especially in the latter half of the book.

Thus in the face of prominent contemporary criticisms of "classical" Christian theism, Feinberg is responding to this urgent need by altering, or to use Feinberg's own oft used term, "nuancing" important aspects of the evangelical God-concept in order to answer contemporary needs and questions to make the said God-concept more coherent. In that sense, Feinberg's book is, somewhat like Tillich's Systematic Theology, an answering theology, showing how the God of evangelical orthodoxy, when properly conceptualized and restated, meets the "need" of contemporary persons who feel that God must be one to whom they can relate, who cares for them, who knows and responds interactively with their pain and concerns. For that reason Feinberg's inclusions and exclusions make this work, again, unique. Many topics usually discussed in a "Theology Proper" text are not included here, for they are not relevant to contemporary debates. Yet Feinberg is rightly wary of the cultural demand for a "user friendly" God who only waits upon our whims and wants but who makes no demands upon us-a god who, in the words of Geddes MacGregor, "lets us be." Rather, Feinberg wants to balance what would classically be termed God's transcendence and immanence, or more to the point, God's lordly Majesty and his active personal care and concern for the world and persons therein. It is not either transcendent glory or present compassion, but both/and. This is the reason for Feinberg's repeated theme throughout the volume, that God is "the King who cares." While the statement may sound a bit sentimentalistic, in fact it unfolds through Feinberg's argumentation in multiple fruitful strands to show that if we properly understand the nature of the living God in a way that "makes" (i.e. portrays?) him as relational, concerned, and caring, we are not forced as a result to affirm process theism or the "Open Theism" of God regarding how much sovereign control God has (or rather does not have) in the world. The God Feinberg thus conceives is a uniquely "nuanced" being who is simultaneously sovereign Lord who has foreordained all things, is ever temporal, is truly omniscient, passible in a sense, very relational, but not simple in any classical sense. So in contrast to these and other influential God-world-human conceptualizations, Feinberg remains emphatic in his affirmation about this "King who cares" that there is indeed No One Like Him.

The entire theological configuration requires that we clarify Feinberg's primary dialogue partners in almost every chapter of the book. He rightly concludes, especially within the postmodern contest, that contemporary emphases on becoming over being, the processive over "static" being, has created fertile ground for process or process-like metaphysics, and process theology in particular. As a result, the Whiteheadian-Hartshornian concept of God as dipolar, as emphatically immanent, as empathetic and relational to the extent even as God "lures" the world by his loving "persuasion" to ever greater creativity, novelty, and complexity as we "prehend" the good he provides, so, too, is God enhanced as he prehends from the world, and from human beings especially. This is a democratic god, a god without demands who not only cares and guides but who, in a real sense, shares his responsibilities for the world with us. As a God-concept "King" is rejected as too aloof, too unconcerned, too transcendent to meet our current cultural-personal desire to have God as our friend alongside us in the dark journey into the unknown future. And Feinberg is clearly sensitive to these criticisms of "Classical" Christian theism's royal God-concept. But more recently the semi-processive "Open View" of God (e.g. C. Pinnock, R. Rice, and John Sanders) has arisen as a mediating God-concept alternative to both the Classical Christian theism and Process Theology, seeking as it does the advantages of each, in light of the "plain teaching" of Scripture, without the "pitfalls." These views, or rather their primary spokespersons, along with process thought, are constantly engaged by Feinberg as he, by his altered or "nuanced" modified Calvinist alternative, works strenuously on at least two fronts to mediate the mediation, i.e. to conceptually mediate between the variously problematic "Classical" Christian view of God and the "Open View" of God. Thus he "makes" our concept of God more relational and concerned and more faithful to Scripture and to evangelical theology, while being philosophically coherent (non-contradictory).