A Big-Enough God: A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology.

A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology Sara Maitland 

Henry Holt and Company, $22.50, 191 pp.

The four chapters that make up the bulk of this non-bulky and attractive book were first worked out in a series of four lectures to the Anglican clergy of inner East London during Lent 1992. Now they appear as classic essays, investigations of a single topic from several angles, written with equal parts deftness and purpose. Appropriate to the highly personal style of lecture and essay, Maitland's introduction is basically autobiographical. Telling the reader how she came to the search for a "big-enough God," she also shows something of what that quest means. This is the part of the book where the subtitle, "A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theology" is most pertinent, both because she spends some time in the introduction addressing the question of female language about God, and because the explicit identification and acknowledgment of one's own social location and voice' is distinctively feminist in its approach.

A novelist and nonfiction writer of considerable reputation, Maitland acknowledges, "I am not a theologian. I am Christian, a feminist, and a writer: a fictionalizer, a liar in Plato's definition." She asks the reader, therefore, to see her project not as scientific but as a "meditation, a contemplation of God in this particular aspect of revelation." In addition to telling us that she was born Presbyterian, became Anglican, and then joined the Roman Catholic church in 1993--with all that such a progression by an avowed feminist might suggest about independence of mind or comfort with paradox--she describes some of the characteristics of the theology for which she searches.

On the one hand, she seeks a theology that celebrates difference as something desirable, and one that has transformative potential, effective toward political and social change. These characteristics are themselves fundamentally catholic in character, striking the traditional ecclesial notes of universality (difference) and holiness (transformation). On the other hand, she seeks this theology within the framework of revelation. For worried readers, it should be said at once that Maitland could not be more explicit in her affirmation of the teachings of Scripture and tradition. Where she seeks a more expansive sense of theology and a "large-enough God" is from a source of revelation she considers underappreciated, namely, creation: "I want to bring to the study of some of the discoveries of the mathematicians and physicists the same approach as many Christian spiritual and mystical writers ... suggest we bring to the Scriptures."

The four essays, then, deal in different ways with creation as the revelation of God; each of them also celebrates the human capacity to discover God through creation. The first, "Dice Throwing Made Easy," begins with Stephen Hawking and ends with Niels Bohr. Maitland contrasts the timid, fearful functionalism built into such apologetic systems as "creationism," with the wild celebration of God's activity that becomes possible once one embraces the theories of contemporary physics about the age, size, and awesome freedom that characterizes this universe which appears not so much as "having been created" but "in the process of creation," and therefore as a system fundamentally open to God: "God has built risk in, and created things thus, so that, not merely at the moral and individual level but at the cosmic level, the creation can participate in its own creativity."

This first essay is filled with excellent things. Not least is her observation that "Bohr's theory of complementarity shows us not that something can be two things at once but that two incompatible discourses can be needed to describe something." A corollary of this is that the choice of discourse (for example, the discourse of faith used to describe reality as "gift from God") is not only a real choice, but also one filled with inevitable risk, for the same reality can be described quite differently within another mode of discourse.

The second essay, "What Am I," illustrates this point by turning to the description of the human person within the discourse of faith and the discourse of the social sciences. This chapter also has its pleasures and penetrating insights. But I found Maitland's enthusiasm for the contributions made by contemporary thought to our understanding of the human person not nearly so infectious as in the case of mathematics and physics. She provides sharp sketches of Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, making the case that these ideologies cannot be ignored, and insisting that the losses represented by embracing their contributions are more than offset by a gain in a sense of incarnation, solidarity, love, and responsibility, not to mention a restored sense of the resurrection of the body. This position, however, depends on a highly selective reading of these ideologies as well as the evidence presented by the daily news concerning the population shaped for several generations by them. Her presentation in this essay also has a certain abstraction and academic apprehension that was strikingly absent from the introduction and first essay. I find it hard to agree that we have lost "nothing worth mourning in embracing this century's intellectual explorations into the nature of self, of personhood."

The third essay, "Artful Theology," starts with the corollary of an open-ended creation, namely that "to be a person is to be a creator," but rather than pursue the implications of, for example, human artisanship, she argues that "a vibrant and serious attention to the creative arts, and a profound respect for their makers, is a hallmark of a healthy church." Once more, the essay is not without its virtues, as in its assertion that the telling of stories about the divine is a vital part of the theological enterprise. Much attention is given, however, to assertions concerning the church's philistinism (with which no one would argue), and--far more dubious--to the argument that priests resist poets because they fear the poets' power.

The fourth essay, "Angelic Woodlice and Other Delights," tries to make the case that the proper response to the revelation of God in creation is joy: "Quite simply, joy is a virtue and we must practice it, show it forth `not only on our lips but in our lives,'" and concludes homiletically with "notes on the practice of joy." As with so much in this book, it is a distinctive and refreshing approach to the pious life. But as in the previous two chapters, I found myself putting as many "no's" in the margin of my review copy as I did "yes's," as I found the consistency and cogency of her assertions weakening rather than strengthening.

Not everything in this book works equally well. Taken as a whole, however, and in the spirit with which it is presented, it is well worth reading for its invitation to a fearless and joyful embrace of the world as God's gift and of human existence as the joyful celebration of that gift.

Luke Timothy Johnson is professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.