The book I bought in 1990, to commemorate my ordination was, Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God. This wasn’t the first of Paul’s books I bought, (it was – and remains, the dearest!), and it persuaded me that there is theological congruence in the notion of a God who suffers creatively, freely and redemptively. Not the easiest book – but how could it be with a subject which pierces to the core realities and mysteries of tragic yet creative suffering, faces honestly the bliss and anguish of human existence and the divine-human relationship, and does so by sweeping critically and constrcutively across a broad range of Christian theological proposals.
Inside my copy is a letter from someone whose life partner had died, tragically young, and had left a family still with much of its growing up to do. It is a note of gratitude to me, but more significantly the words cannot obscure the questions, the anger, the existential resentment that for one bewildered family, the defining relationship of life was ended. This is a book of rigorous sytematic and philosophical theology, but written by a theologian alert to the pastoral relevance of our deepest thinking about God, and who refused then, as now, to minimise questions for the sake of convenient answers. One reviewer pointed out how unfortunate that there was a second D in the surname – Fides = faith, which is what Paul’s life has been about, to the great enrichment of all of us.
This book helped me in the privacy of the study, to pray to a God who freely chooses to suffer in the creative, redemptive love that is divine, who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and whose Being is an eternal communion and interchange of Love, giving, creating, sharing the Divine life, in the great lived out narrative of God’s eternal purpose. And it did so by making me think – hard – honestly – deeply, about the God I believe in.
The book I’ve just finished reading, The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne, has an essay in it by Fiddes which continues his reflection on what it might mean for God to freely create those who, in order to grow into divinely intended freedom of love and fullness, chooses to forego absolute control over ultimate outcomes. The work of love is that the Triune God will eternally, persistently, patiently, redemptively work, with creative passion and vulnerable self-giving, till all creation sings, in a performance that will never end and therefore need no final encore!
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