The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence

This book gave me finality to the argument between both extremes of Calvinism and Arminianism....I agree with Sanders that, on the other hand, man is mostly a "theomorph" of God since we are created in His image instead of God having anthrophomorphic qualities in order to communicate with man.I especially agree with his implied hermeneutics, i.e., we cannot know God outside of Biblical revelation and SHOULD not attempt to guess His attributes and its qualities outside of revelation. Worse, we should not develop dogmas and doctrines out of these guesses/extrapolations especially when they contradict the rest of scripture, i.e., God relents, God repents, God weeps, etc. The hyper-Calvinist side is especially fond of making "intelligent" guesses about God which redound to creating a different God other than the God of revelation. This is subtle idolatry.Sanders builds his case impliedly on the example of Christ. Christ is God, BUT he limited His omnipotence (Philippians 2), He limited His omniscience ("Only the Father knows..."), etc. One must remember that Christ is co-equal with God, is the image of the invisible God and, hence, God can do what Christ can do including that of limiting Himself. Hence, God's sovereignty, according to Sanders, should not be limited to what man "thinks" God should be, but WHAT HE IS according to revelation in scripture.This book has made me say a final GOODBYE to Calvinism and its roots in Classical Greek philosophy and its attempt to extrapolate a God BEYOND the Bible.

This book has been an eye opener to me. Its essential assumption is the question, how can we know God? And the answer: only in asmuch as He has revealed Himself. I always thought that Scriptures that wrote about God as changing His mind were an anthropomorphism, a human way of speaking about God. But where would we get the knowledge about God to decide if this were the case? We would need higher information, so to speak. But there is none.......So reluctantly, at first, I had to admit that most of my views on God were actually based on what I thought God would be like. We know all the "omni's". Sanders challanges this idea and he does so forcefully.To my surprise, this did not diminish God. On the contrary, in stead of being a director dictating His play, He actually uses the input of the actors (good and bad) and still proceeds towards His goal. Like using David's sin to have the Messiah come forth (ultimately) from Bathseba. An amazing God, a great God indeed. Reading this book I was moved to tears and I stand in awe before the Lord of Lords. My Lord and my God!

I thank God for this book. Although I was not raised within the Church--my Father was an unbeliever, and forbade me to attend church--I came to know Christ as my Savior as an adolescent. Perhaps because of my peculiar circumstances, I soon experienced an overwhelming hunger to know my God more intimately. I devoured whatever books pertaining to God and theology (esp. apologetics) I could lay my hands on. Men like R. C. Sproul, Francis Schaeffer and J. I. Packer were powerful influences in my formative years. As a Philosophy major in college, I was also profoundly influenced by the works of Plato and Aristotle. I was not infrequently amazed, even delighted at the ways in which the Platonic conception of the Divine seemed to dovetail with the Biblical portrait of God. Because of these various influences, however, I eventually began to have difficulty relating to God. How can an immutable, impassive God feel anything for or with me? Can such a God truly relate to my sufferings? And if not, then is He truly loving? To my mind, at any rate, love necessarily entails openness, vulnerability . . . A God Who remains eternally unaffected by the sufferings and joys of His creation is indeed Wholly Other; we might describe His actions as loving, but not His nature.Worse, I found myself deeply troubled by the question of evil. What is one to think of an omnicausal God in light of the Holocaust? It is one thing for those who have never experienced such horrors to piously assert that "All is well; God is control!"; it is another matter entirely, however, for those who have suffered the horrors of an Auschwitz. Despite the oftentimes Byzantine strategies of the defenders of the omnicausal view of God to maintain some sense of human accountability, I could never free myself of the awful sense that this God was like Nietzsche's Superman--i.e., beyond Good and Evil. In fact, the more I thought on it, the more their God acquired an almost Machiavellian cast: The Divine ends justify His means, however painful or horrific or wasteful. As a child, I suffered abuse (mostly verbal) at the hands of my Father; how could I not conclude that it was ultimately the hand of my omnicausal God that had struck me? He had sovereignly ordained that I be made strong, and my Father had apparently been the means to that end. "Ours is not to question why," a Calvinist friend once told me. Yet I could not let it go . . . As painful as my own sufferings had been, they were trifling when compared with those of the African slaves or the Jews of Nazi Germany. As a Christian, what was I to say to them? Should I insult them with pious platitudes like "Be not troubled; God is control! Our God reigns!"? It is an easy way out, to be sure; but is it Biblical? Could it be that people embrace this theology because they do not wish to truly grapple with these questions, preferring to treat them as abstractions, as intell

Contrary to Justin's opinion (he must not have read the book very carefully), Sanders presents a view of God that harmonizes with Scripture (something the clasical/reformed tradition cannot do without discarding thousands of texts), reason and our experience as human beings. Sanders takes the reader through those pesky Old Testament texts that so many want to dispose of, as well as the New Testament, and demonstrates that God's interaction throughout salvation history has been one of relation and risk. He further explores Christian tradition, and shows the relational aspect of much of the thought of the early Church Fathers and other avenues of Christian thought. While more of a survey than an exhaustive analysis, there are numerous endnotes which direct the reader to more expansive research. There is enough about this book to keep you studying for a long time.Despite what has been asserted, Sanders does not contradict himself. God could have chosen to create a world in which relationaily was not a component, although trinitarian theism recognizes the eternal relational aspect of God's being. However, because God IS relational, He sovereignly chose to create a universe in which relationship, not control, was the primary focus. Those who dogmatically define "sovereignty" as meticulous control will certainly not agree with Sanders' conclusions, but will have a hard time refuting him without resorting to name calling and charges of "heresy".This is not a book one can skim through, it must be read thoroughly and studiously. This book requires thought on the part of the reader, something that is not too often evident which much "evangelical" Christian material these days.

Some of my Evangelical brothers will hate this book because it presents a coherant, biblical, and powerfully attractive alternative to aspects of historical Calvinism. Being a reluctant Calvinist, I found myself hard pressed to argue against this well-reasoned theology of a God who is really like the God of the bible--a God of passion, who acts and reacts, who takes human freedom seriously, committing himself to an authentic history of salvation, not a pre-scripted story written before time. What is at risk here is a particular theological tradition, not biblical revelation. This book is forcing me to reexamine my own assumptions.