A Big-Enough God by Sara Maitland

...each of them also celebrates the human capacity to discover God through creation...

...A novelist and nonfiction writer of con-siderable reputation, Maitland acknow-ledges, "I am not a theologian...

...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 incompati-ble discourses can be needed to describe something...

...Taken as a whole, however, and in the spirit with which it is pre-sented, it is well worth reading for its invitation to a fearless and joyful em-brace of the world as God's gift and of human existence as the joyful celebra-tion of that gift...

...Luke timothy Johnson 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...

...Much attention is given, however, to as-sertions concerning the church's philis-tinism (with which no one would argue), and-far more dubious-to the argu-ment that priests resist poets because they fear the poets' power...

...On the other hand, she seeks this theology within the framework of revelation...

...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...

...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...

...This chapter also has its pleasures and penetrating insights...

...I find it hard to agree that we have lost "nothing worth mourning in embracing this century's intellectual ex-plorations into the nature of self, of per-sonhood...

...In addition to telling us that she was born Presby-terian, became Anglican, and then joined the Roman Catholic church in 1993-with all that such a progression by an avowed feminist might suggest about indepen-dence of mind or comfort with paradoxshe describes some of the characteristics of the theology for which she searches...

...Her presentation in this essay also has a certain abstraction and academic apprehension that was strikingly absent from the introduction and first essay...

...The four essays, then, deal in differ-ent ways with creation as the revelation of God...

...A corollary of this is that the choice of discourse (for example, the discourse of faith used to describe real-ity as "gift from God") is not only a real choice, but also one filled with inevitable risk, for the same reality can be de-scribed quite differently within anoth-er mode of discourse...

...On the one hand, she seeks a theolo-gy that celebrates difference as some-thing desirable, and one that has transformative potential, effective to-ward political and social change...

...The third essay, "Artful Theology," starts with the corollary of an open-ended creation, namely that "to be a per-son 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...

...Maitland contrasts the timid, fearful functional-ism built into such apologetic systems as "creationism," with the wild cele-bration of God's activity that becomes possible once one embraces the theories of contemporary physics about the age, size, and awesome freedom that charac-terizes this universe which appears not so much as "having been created" but "in the process of creation," and there-fore as a system fundamentally open to God: "God has built risk in, and creat-ed things thus, so that, not merely at the moral and individual level but at the cos-mic level, the creation can participate in its own creativity...

...Where she seeks a more expansive sense of theology and a "large-enough God" is from a source of revelation she con-siders underappreciated, namely, cre-ation: "I want to bring to the study of some of the discoveries of the mathe-maticians and physicists the same ap-proach as many Christian spiritual and mystical writers...suggest we bring to the Scriptures...

...Telling the read-er how she came to the search for a "big-enough God," she also shows some-thing of what that quest means...

...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 con-cludes homiletically with "notes on the practice of joy...

...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...

...She asks the reader, therefore, to see her project not as scientific but as a "medi-tation, a contemplation of God in this par-ticular aspect of revelation...

...This first essay is filled with excellent things...

...These characteristics are themselves funda-mentally catholic in character, striking the traditional ecclesial notes of uni-versality (difference) and holiness (trans-formation...

...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...

...This position, however, de-pends on a highly selective reading of these ideologies as well as the evidence presented by the daily news concerning the population shaped for several gen-erations by them...

...The first, "Dice Throwing Made Easy," begins with Stephen Hawking and ends with Niels Bohr...

...She provides sharp sketches of Dar-winism, Marxism, and Freudianism, making the case that these ideologies can-not be ignored, and insisting that the loss-es represented by embracing their contributions are more than offset by a gain in a sense of incarnation, solidari-ty, love, and responsibility, not to men-tion a restored sense of the resurrection of the body...

...This is the part of the book where the subtitle, "A Feminist's Search for a Joyful Theol-ogy" is most pertinent, both because she spends some time in the introduc-tion addressing the question of female language about God, and because the ex-plicit identification and acknowledg-ment of one's own social location and "voice" is distinctively feminist in its ap-proach...

...Appropriate to the highly personal style of lecture and essay, Maitland's introduction is basi-cally autobiographical...

...I am Christian, a feminist, and a writer: a fic-tionalizer, a liar in Plato's definition...

...The second essay, "What Am I," il-lustrates this point by turning to the de-scription of the human person within the discourse of faith and the discourse of the social sciences...

...Now they appear as classic essays, investigations of a single topic from sev-eral angles, written with equal parts deftness and purpose...