A Theology of Divine Vulnerability

<P>A Theology of Divine Vulnerability: The Silence that Gives Light uses three claims for confidence in the idea of God. The first is that God is responsible in some quite fundamental way for the existence of the universe—for the fact that there is anything at all. The second is that God’s own existence, and essential goodness, are not vitiated by the presence of evil in the world. And the third is that God knows we are here—that God loves the creation and shares fully, somehow, in the joys and especially in the pains of transient life. Peter Hooton considers these claims on the whole sympathetically. He prefers—to traditional Christian views of God’s omnipotence—a more nuanced understanding of God’s power and draws on a rich plurality of voices to describe God as much more loving than wrathful, as persuasive rather than coercive, as more passible than impassible, and the Christian’s relationship with God as essentially a compassionate participation in the reality signified by the crucified and risen Christ.</P>