The basic claim of Charles Helmer’s suggestive book is easily summarised. Despite receiving little consideration in the broader Christian tradition, the witness of scripture indicates clearly that God hears. As such, God’s hearing can and should feature in expositions of God’s creative and redemptive work.
Engaging Genesis, the Psalms and John’s account of the raising of Lazarus, the first chapter establishes a framework for reflection. In the Hebrew Bible, petitions for God to hear are requests ‘for a particular kind of loving and just attention to an urgent need that is accomplished by means of the significant personal presence of the covenant God of Israel, which entails a sure response’ (p. 38, emphases removed). This response, according to the New Testament, is most fully realised in the incarnation of the Word, for Christ – who is eternally heard by the Father – vouchsafes God’s hearing to those who comprise his body.
The second chapter engages the second and third volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Helmer’s solid exposition yields a number of intriguing claims: that human beings are ‘primed’ to speak to and be heard by God, given that the Father eternally speaks and hears the Word; that God’s hearing of human petitions, particularly those ventured in prayer, has God’s gracious movement and speech towards us as its precondition; and that Christians can be confident that God hearkens to prayer, given their union with Christ as ‘the Always-Heard Word of God’ (p. 207).
Helmer’s third chapter launches his constructive project in earnest. It begins with the application of a Thomistic handbrake, arguably intended to slow the movement of those inclined to follow Barth along some unconventional metaphysical pathways. Helmer argues that God has a logical (or ‘non-real’) relation to the world, and he contends that this kind of relation is the condition of God’s ‘intimacy with creation’ (p. 91). At the same time, and building on Barth, Helmer proposes that the economy of God’s hearing has an antecedent in God’s (triune) immanent life. Because God is eternally present to Godself, speaking and hearing Godself, ‘we can, in a highly qualified way, claim that there is “hearing” in God’ (p. 102).
Building on the familiar claim that the self is formed relationally, and drawing on work in interpersonal neurobiology, chapter four contends that God’s ‘deep hearing’ is transformative. That is especially the case in the context of suffering: an affirmation of God’s attention and God’s ‘significant personal presence’ (p. 140) liberates one from isolation and enables one to view oneself as a child of God. Expositions of such attentive hearing and presence, moreover, are preferable to ‘passibilist-liberationist’ construals of divine solidarity as co-suffering. Helmer makes the point in a memorable way: the ‘ears of God are better than the suffering of God … The hearing of God is … a gift of far greater existential blessing than to experience God as co-suffering’ (p. 164).
The fifth chapter offers a christological finale, grounded in the claim that the incarnation establishes a new modality of divine hearing. Given the hypostatic union, Jesus’ ears become God’s ears. And even as Christ dies, his message (temporarily) drowned out by the clamour of an unhearing world, his resurrection and ascension vindicate God’s hearing. Now, Christ is always in the business of hearing those whom he calls his own, for the ‘Spirit brings the words of Jesus’ followers to Jesus’ ears, and Jesus’ words to the Father’s ears’ (p. 193). So it is that Job’s mournful cry (‘O, that I had one to hear me!’ [Job 31:35]) can be received as an occasion to reflect on the fact that God does and will hear, and that this hearing counts among the benefits that Christ secures for his people.
This is careful and rich work. Helmer does not only address a neglected topic and then nicely circumscribe his engagement with it (no small feat); he tenders interpretative and constructive claims with precision and finesse. And even as I myself would challenge Helmer’s lines of reasoning at certain points, his concern to balance a doctrine of divine aseity with an affirmation of God’s hearing in se seems particularly important. Identifying hearing as a dimension of God’s immanent life supplies a valuable frame for an economy of divine hearing, both with respect to creation and the unio cum Christo. It ensures, too, that Helmer’s critique of ‘passibilist-liberationist’ thinking is not a cranky reaction to those who dare to question the protocols of ‘classical theism’, but is instead a starting point for a proposal of genuine theological and ethical seriousness.
Among the possible lines of critique, I would mention three. First, I wonder if the book needed deeper and more frequent engagements with liberationist thinkers. If one grants that liberationists draw attention to unheard and suppressed voices, ought not such thinkers to feature more heavily in interpretative and constructive work on divine hearing? Might they offer insights that could valuably complicate – or, perhaps, bolster – a project that is largely guided by Aquinas and the main lines of the European Protestant tradition, and seems angled towards Anglo-American evangelicals? While Helmer mentions Deaf Theology in his opening remarks, a broader range of interlocutors could have made a good book even better. Or, at the least, laid the ground for further study.
Second, I think that the topic of tragedy should have been engaged directly, ideally as a counterpoint to Helmer’s vivid account of God’s presence. To be sure, Helmer is attuned to the ‘wilderness’ of suffering as an occasion to cry out to God. That is an important dimension of his treatment of the Hebrew Bible and his concluding meditation on Job. But the book as a whole does not linger with voices who express a profound sense of dislocation from God – a sense of dislocation that is often tied to trauma of various kinds. What can be said, theologically, about and to those who seek ‘a particular kind of loving and just attention’ yet do not encounter God’s ‘significant personal presence’ (p. 38) and do not believe that the ‘hearing God’ is listening – even as they may continue to believe that they comprise members of Christ’s body?
Third, I wanted more reflection on how (and, perhaps, whether) God hears those who exist outside of ‘the community that lives under the reign of [Christ as] king’ (p. 194). While Helmer invests heavily in the unio cum Christo, he effectively skirts the issue of whether this ‘union’ is definitive of humankind as such or is limited to those whom God predestines to life. Yet this issue is raised, acutely, by Barth’s doctrine of election; and this issue has obvious significance in contexts of religious pluralism. Ought one to suppose that God hears all petitions, given God’s election of humankind, regardless of whether those petitions arise within Christian communities – even granted that it is important for Christian theologians to think intensively about how God hears those who pray in Jesus’ name? Or does God attend closely to petitions from those who explicitly avow faith in Christ, while merely receiving – or turning a deaf ear to – the petitions of those who dispose themselves differently?
These critiques and questions do not, of course, detract from Helmer’s achievement. They are best understood as starting points for discussion of a topic that deserves careful consideration, and that Helmer has ably brought to our attention.
