All Things Come Into Being Through Him – Review
All Things Come Into Being Through Him. A Christology of Creation, by David Brown, April 2023. Sacristy Press, ISBN 978-1-78959-276-4, 416 pages. RRP £30 (paperback)
Jesus referred to the Shema as the greatest commandment of the law. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul – and with all your mind”. Yet how challenging it is to think rigorously about God. Perhaps more often for us to believe is to gain a sufficient understanding and then to run on trust. But we are thinking beings, and we are called to love God with our minds as well as our affections, so belief must be a continual journey of exploration.
David Brown wrote this book as a “thoughtful and prayerful study” whilst a Research Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast. He explored two basic ideas in Christian theology: how a God who is beyond being can be understood as ultimately responsible for all that exists; and what it means to believe that all things came into being through the Word of God. In this he was thinking hard about ideas which are the very foundation of our creation theology. As Green Christians we may often turn to the first pages of Genesis. Yet how are to understand in our minds the spirit of God which is described there as sweeping over the face of the waters? (Genesis 1:2). As Christians we love God who is revealed to us in the face of Jesus. The Shema grounds us in loving, which includes exploring with all our minds, “the God who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Brown takes us on that journey. I hesitate to say that this is not a book for the general reader. Certainly it needs sufficient stamina to work through 400 closely argued pages, and cope with an academic vocabulary, but it will reward.
Brown starts with a critique of God as “person” and so begins to explore how “to create does not mean to do something at the beginning that causes something to exist; to create means to be that in which creatures participate” (p. 28). This allows for some fresh thinking about the providence of God, of what it means to know that God is omnipotent – and how to square the divine goodness with the fact that bad things happen in our world. The core of Brown’s argument is that we can participate in God who is utterly transcendent and “other” to all creatures because of the incarnation. Creation is a relationship, he says, the incarnation constitutes that relationship, and the divine-human union in Christ is how creatures depend on and participate in God. Brown goes on to show how that fits with our understanding of the cross, and in conclusion, with the resurrection.
I began to read this book in hospital, waiting for my wife to undergo tests, and then for us both to see the oncology consultant. After hearing the diagnosis our lives fell apart and I laid the book aside for the best part of a year. How to love with all my mind the God who allowed her death to happen? Likewise, how can we understand God in relation to the climate crisis? Such are vital questions, which is why this book is a valuable resource in our responding to the call of the Shema.
Andrew Norman
Green Christian Chaplain
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