In Faith and Evolution: A Grace-Filled Naturalism, Roger Haight presents a significant response to the desire of twenty-first-century Christians for a faith conversant with science. Haight does so, not through the common typologies, but rather in the mode of Karl Rahner in Foundations of Christian Faith:

Accepting evolutionary insights as a given, Haight seeks to provide intelligibility to Christian faith within this horizon. In any such enterprise, there will be both gains and losses. Although concepts and images that have been part and parcel of the Christian experience can be enhanced with richer meaning in this dialogue, they are sometimes deprived of the impact experienced by Christians for centuries. And so it is with Haight's enterprise. This review frames itself around such gains and losses in three areas: the issue of language, the metaphor of Presence, and divine intervention and self-limitation.

In raising the issues that evolution poses to a theology of creation, Haight retrieves John Haught's question, “What is God?” and signals his intent to seek a religious language that “rises above the anthropomorphism of ordinary religious language” to appropriate a language “as critical as the one used by scientists to understand material exchanges of nature” (62). Opting for a dialectical approach that counteracts the language of a “naïve faith” (63), his intent is to preserve the utterly transcendent being of God from inadequate human predicates, counteracting the tendency to “think about God in baby language when addressing the world that has been described by the mature and measured language of science” (70). This intent raises the question of the nature of language in theology and science. It seems to imply that science utilizes language differently from theology, an implication that can be addressed within an epistemology of critical realism applicable to both disciplines.

The approach of critical realism contends that claims in both science and theology are necessarily informed and constrained by the spatial, temporal, and material constructs of finite experience. From this perspective, neither science nor theology can speak naïvely as if a one-to-one correspondence exists between the words it chooses and the realities to which they refer, for example, the big bang and the Resurrection. However, neither can these disciplines speak as if their words were simply useful fictions bearing no intrinsic connection to their referent. Thus, language in both disciplines must be used critically and conditionally, employing appropriate imagistic language—analogy, models, and metaphors—and striving to signify as accurately as possible that to which each refers. Therefore, to characterize the language of religion as infantile and science as mature fails to adequately consider their provenance and their mutually provisional nature.

His search for appropriate language for God in an evolutionary framework leads Haight to appropriate the metaphor of Presence and thus establishes the foundation of his creative movement throughout the remainder of his text. The Presence of God is “act or energy or dynamism” (72). Hence, God is not a being or a person. With this assertion, Haight buttresses his aim to advance non-anthropomorphic language of God as Presence. Yet, Haight also contends, “Acceptance of the doctrine of creation implies the acceptance of a God who is personal” (80). In a footnote, however, he acknowledges the tension surrounding the experience of Presence as personal, pointing out that while some experience Presence as “personal love in creation,” others experience its “cruel absence” (80, n. 62).

This insistence on Presence as personal has a distinctly anthropomorphic ring to it. How does one move from the conception of Presence as being, energy, act, and dynamism to Presence as personal? Haight acknowledges that this assertion derives from the human experience of Presence as loving acceptance, forgiveness, healing, and energizing, rather than from evolutionary science. Therefore, Haight appeals to experiential credibility beyond the bounds of evolutionary science. Is it possible, however, to examine creation in an evolutionary context and extrapolate characteristics of a personal Presence from creation itself? If one considers the processes that characterize evolution (continuity and natural law, emergence and creativity, and chance and causality) or the trends that exist in evolutionary unfolding (complexity, consciousness, and emergent subjectivity), can one discern fundamental attributes of this Presence that both transcend and yet affirm individual and communal experience? In his work, Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming-Natural, Divine and Human,Footnote ²⁶ scientist-theologian Arthur Peacocke proposed such attributes based on his observation of evolutionary creativity.Footnote ²⁷

Given the being of God as the transcendent ground of the universe, Peacocke observed that the structures and processes of creation that emerge from this ground display both a remarkable unity and a fecund diversity, suggesting that its source must be both essentially one and yet unfathomably rich in being. The regularity of these structures, moreover, demonstrate the supreme rationality of the creative ground of such an orderly universe. The persistence of such order in the midst of an evolving universe implied to Peacocke that God is not only creator but also sustainer and preserver of the cosmos throughout the passage of time. Because the cosmos, however, also reveals a remarkable dynamism through which new entities appear in the course of time, the Creator must be conceived not only as original creator, faithful preserver, and sustainer but also as continuous creator of the cosmos. Furthermore, such continuous creativity in the cosmos leads to the emergence of the human person from the very stuff and processes of the cosmos. Hence, Peacocke concludes, God, as the creative source of such a personal being, must be at least personal or supra-personal in nature. Although Haight may find this approach too anthropomorphic, the conclusion that Peacocke reaches is similar to Haight's own regarding Presence as personal and does so in conversation with the insights of evolutionary science. Such an approach may have augmented Haight's intent to lend credibility to Christian faith by operating within the horizon of evolution itself.

Within this horizon, both theologians and scientists, including Darwin himself, have observed that the epic of evolution seems to involve too much pain and suffering to be the creative work of a benevolent being. For Haight, this observation raises the issue: “Can the idea of a benevolent God be defended if the world is a divine creation into which conflict, violence, predation, and suffering are systematically built?” (26). He responds to this question through a discussion of divine intervention in the context of primary and secondary causality, concluding that, as primary cause and sustaining presence, “God does not intervene in the world, in the process of evolution, or in historical events” (76). Rather, “God . . . provides the power of being by which the finite agent operates” (77).

From this perspective, Haight again avoids anthropomorphism and preserves Presence from any involvement in temporal affairs as a secondary cause. However, does this reduce God to an ever-present but neutral bystander in the affairs of history? Does the primary causality of Presence equally support secondary causes both good and evil? Because Presence as Spirit is immanent within creation, could God influence events without intervention? Even so, is the appeal to Spirit and grace in chapter 4 sufficient to redeem a Christian understanding of God in relation to creation?

In a footnote Haight amplifies his argument concerning divine non-intervention, stating, “In the end, the self-limitation of God is a bogus concept. The pure act of being cannot be self-limiting” (76, n. 47). This dismissal of divine self-limitation, however, does not square with centuries of thought concerning this concept from mystics, geologists, scientists, and theologians. Divine self-limitation as zimzum (tsimtsum) or “contraction” is associated with the sixteenth-century kabbalist mystic Isaac Luria and has more recently been retrieved by theologians like Jürgen Moltmann. The concept refers to the self-imposed “withdrawal” of the omnipresent and infinite God to enable finite creation—that which is not God—to exist. Like Presence, zimzum implies the paradox of divine transcendence and immanence as the Divine contracts and yet sustains creation in being. Using the language of energy, which Haight also applies to Presence, the nineteenth-century geologist Clarence Luther Herrick wrote of “creation [as] the self-limitation of energy.” Herrick understood energy as “pure spontaneity” and contended that “Energy as infinite can but be self-limiting. The self-limitations of the Deity are ipso facto creative.”Footnote ²⁸ In the twentieth century, physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne spoke of a kenotic God in relation to a cosmos “made to make itself.” In the Creator, kenosis refers to God's voluntary limitation of divine attributes—omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and causal status—to allow creation to be and to act according to its nature. Similarly, biochemist-theologian Arthur Peacocke concluded that God freely limits divine power in an evolving universe as the definitive demonstration of God as love “because, in creation, he deliberately limits himself, by allowing a cosmos to remain in being which is other than himself.”Footnote ²⁹

On further reflection, could Haight's dismissal of self-limitation in Presence also turn on the linchpin of the nature of Presence itself? Conceiving Presence in evolution as pure being, energy, and act may not lend itself to ascribing self-limitation. Nonetheless, if this Presence is personal, having the qualities and activities of selfhood such as loving, accepting, forgiving, and empowering, might self-limitation also bear experiential credibility? The point is, once Presence is deemed personal, it implies a beingness to which one can impute certain qualities, including self-limitation. If the experience of Presence is experientially flexible, labeling insights as bogus seems a stretch.

Clearly, the limits of this review cannot do justice to the contribution that Roger Haight makes to theology and spirituality in Faith and Evolution. His expositions of the world revealed by science and of what I term “knowing and naming” in science and faith laid a firm foundation for his unfolding project. Haight's insights on the coherence of the immanent creativity of God, Spirit, and grace and his proposals concerning Christology “from within” are incisive and thought-provoking. I was intrigued by the absence of explicit engagement with the construct of “Trinity,” as well as by the brevity of his treatment of panentheism. Each piqued curiosity and the desire for dialogue. Although, as T. S. Eliot wrote, words “strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden” of the mysteries of God in the context of evolution, Haight's engagement stimulates innovative approaches to imaging God and the God-world relationship and offers a broad point of entry into the mystery of God in a religiously and theologically pluralistic world.