To write a systematic theology is no small feat. To do so while engaging the major thinkers of modern theology requires an intellect of considerable strength. But also to engage the biblical text while maintaining any lyricism is rare indeed. In fulfilling all these criteria, Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology, volume 1, is a work nearly without parallel in modern theology.
Sonderegger's theological claims are indivisibly linked with her method. The volume has a first-person voice – it is as if the reader is hearing a lecture on the history of theology with a critique and constructive proposal suggested throughout. This mode of engagement might strike the most analytic as somewhat occasional, but the reader should resist such a judgement. Rather, by adopting this strategy Sonderegger is not only reminding the reader of multiple ways of dealing with particular questions, but also relocating the theological conversation from the realm of speculation to that of encounter with the One God. For this reason, Sonderegger's chief interlocutor is the biblical text, and it is this decision regarding theological method that lends her text its singular voice. Sonderegger is seeking to move the theological task back towards scripture in order that the theological project itself might better reflect an encounter with the One God. It has, therefore, the same quality of both inexhaustibility and (perhaps to some frustrating) indeterminacy that one encounters when engaging the Bible itself: meaning is contained therein, but it is most basically an account of the God who cannot be determined. Readers are intended to learn about God, yes, but what is intended most basically is to direct the reader to encounter with God.
Though it has become customary in more recent systematic theology to begin with a study of God's triune life, Sonderegger takes a different path: not all, she writes, is Trinity. This decision positions Sonderegger's thinking decisively, for if this volume is defined by one theological voice alongside scripture, it is Karl Barth's, whose insights are present throughout even as one of his chief motifs is challenged. For Sonderegger speaks of God's revelation in and to the world without speaking yet of Jesus Christ, grounding her understanding of the divine attributes not in that person but in divine presence. Her decision to begin with the One God also reflects her focus on the Old Testament, for if there is a paradigmatic instance of God's presence for Sonderegger it seems to be at Mount Horeb, where Moses encountered the bush that burned but was not consumed. In fact, the burning bush marks out two assertions that are tracked throughout this volume. First, that God is YHWH, the one who is. There is a metaphysic implicit here, but also a rejection of many theological approaches. God is presence, power, and wisdom – He does not have these traits. Second, the burning bush indicates that there is no incompatibility between God's presence and the integrity of the created, material world. The bush burns, but it is not consumed. Implicit here are implications for human knowledge of God and for christology as well.
Sonderegger takes up three divine attributes – omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience – from this place of divine presence. But her discussion of these attributes is actually a reflection on divine unicity. Divine unicity is for Sonderegger the ground of omnipresence: God is present as the Hidden One. Unicity is ‘a metaphysical predicate’ (p. 15) and a claim about God's existence but also about our knowledge of God: ‘radical oneness, radical uniqueness, demands thought beyond any class, any universal, any likeness’ (p. 25). Transcendence therefore serves as the grounds of divine presence in the world and hiddenness there: ‘The Oneness presented to us on Horeb is marked out by its contrast with the visible, formed, and figured: the negative correlate to Oneness is the idol, the similitude fashioned out of the likeness of creatures’ (p. 24). There is no space where God is, and so there is no space where God is not.
This hiddenness is paired with divine humility, which Sonderegger also introduces as an aspect of divine omnipresence. The ‘emptiness’ of Israel's temple and the formlessness of God's presence at Horeb (p. 66) suggests that God is present everywhere ‘in invisibility and power’ (pp. 66, 71). Divine hiddennness and humility also emphasise the profoundly moral character of the divine attributes (p. 151). God's presence is non-competitive with creatures, even as it is God's presence that endows creatures with life.
Sonderegger takes up omnipotence, which she describes as the perfection of God's humility, while similarly combining the innovative and the traditional. She names as inadequate both the traditional Augustinian approach (divine power as ‘doing what one wills’) and Schleiermacher's more modern account of God as Absolute Cause. Augustine's approach imagines God deliberating in a ‘frictionless world’ (p. 250), and therefore executing all of his decrees without the frustration or resistance humans experience. Sonderegger rightly diagnoses this approach as too anthropomorphic – not by virtue of its emphasis on divine sovereignty, but in its dependence on a model of divine deliberation that raises insoluble puzzles about the relationship between God's intellect and will. By contrast, Schleiermacher's approach rejects deliberation and emphasises instead a cause that acts from within, the One who awakens a longing and offers a direction like ‘the Beacon in threatening seas’, efficacious because it is there, not because it deliberates and acts (p. 262). The danger here, however, is that God becomes lure and not fire, not clearly enough personal relation.
Sonderegger works to mediate these two views of divine power in a discussion of the book of Numbers. That puzzling book where Israel seems stuck on an endless carousel of wilderness wandering is for Sonderegger the revelation of the ‘living core’ of the Holy God (p. 273). This is Sonderegger at her best. Numbers both is the revelation of God's presence in the world, as ‘we catch a glimpse, as in a glass darkly, of the Paschal Mystery of Christ, blazing within the Personal Life of God’ (p. 292). And yet it is also an example of what it is for Sonderegger to think theologically. Numbers is the theological task, the human struggle to speak of the presence of the One God hidden in our midst, and what is heard is God speaking to us: ‘Even in this alien land, this wilderness, Holy Scripture discloses our very own lives to us’ (p. 276). The story is not about us, but it does draw us to that relation that constitutes our being: ‘The Power of God, turned toward the creature, is personal: it concerns liberty, the birth of persons’ (p. 287).
In her discussion of omniscience, Sonderegger again swims upstream, foregrounding God as Wisdom over God as Mind. Wisdom, too, posits a relation, a knowledge that pertains from within. God is not Mind or super-computer; rather, ‘He just is Reason and Knowledge and Truth, eternally and therefore, in time’ (p. 351). And here is Sonderegger's basic theological premise: ‘the prime relation – God to the world – is utterly unique, beyond all category and causal sequence, because in the end, the Relatio must be nothing else but God Himself’ (p. 353). It is the ‘self-communication’ of this very life and light that is the source of Christian doctrine and Christian hope.
And here there is yet another resonance with Mount Horeb, for this theological landscape is holy ground. The work tracked here is significant not only because of what it asserts, but because it reminds us that an encounter with the Oneness of God through the communication of God's presence is the true source and end of all theological reflection. And in this way, Sonderegger's systematics bears a resemblance to that other book whose meaning cannot be exhausted, whose truth is both direct and implied. Her work beckons the divine presence in a discourse that exists too often in the realm of falsehood and fact. We are beckoned to remove our shoes, invited to contemplate the God who is hidden and revealed.
