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Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason, The
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Farwell, James W
The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason. By Oliver Davies. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, no. 12. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 210 pp. £45.00 / $75.00 (cloth); £17.99 / $27.99 (paper).
According to Oliver Davies, Christian cosmology finds itself on hard times. Pressured by modernity's predilection for scientific explanations that enable instrumental manipulation of the material world, Christian cosmology is now largely reduced to a claim about the world's origin. More political than theological, this claim amounts to little more than that God is the world's proprietor, a thin substitute for a fulsome account of the meaning of the world as created. As a result of this modernist reduction, "our intimacy with God is set outside our intimacy with the world, and neither is fully integrated into the concept of createdness as revealing the deepest nature of the world in which-as creatures-we live" (p. 6).
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Davies finds a coherent cosmology in premodern theologians like Thomas Aquinas, Origen, and Bonaventure (chap. 2). They conceive of human reason not as an explanatory exercise external to the world-as-data, but as the intellectual activity of human beings integral to the very order they seek to understand, in which they themselves are situated as creatures of God. Davies does not argue that we should (or could) return to a premodern cosmology, but that the intuitive structural link between the reasoning human being and the creation in which it is situated is an important theme for the construction of a postcritical Christian cosmology.
Davies incorporates that theme in an account of Scripture influenced by the later Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and others: Scripture manifests the staged intensifications of God's relation to the world both as creator of the world and kenotic, compassionate subject within it. Davies s account is simultaneously an interpretation of Scripture and a demonstration of the Trinitarian-pragmatics that he takes to be the semiotic pattern immanent to Scripture (pp. 96-97). In this pattern, the "referential" dimension of language (to God as creator) and the "addressive" dimension of language (with God the creator) are dialectic-ally linked. Flying unapologetically in the face of Derrida's critique of phonocentrism, Davies goes on to liken the relationship between God and world to the relationship between author and text (pp. 115-116). The author both produces the text and is a voice within it, read in the context of other voices, experiences, and texts. Like a text, then, creation manifests a pluriform presence of God and world to one another. Interpretation is akin to participation in the "Primal Text" of the world, and Scripture both participates in and reveals the semiotic structure of its being (pp. 118-120).
There is moral content to the semiotic pluriformity of the world as God's text, a call to conform to reality as self-giving, relational, for-the-other, and embodied. The latter is manifested preeminently in Christ's self-giving through the institution words of the eucharistie meal, wherein through speech he gives himself as Body as the world is created by Word. The eucharist then shapes a counter-modern rationality, "forms us in the possibility of a new way of receiving the real, through sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. We discover in worship a primordial attentiveness before the one who is the ultimate other-in-relation" (p. 145).
Davies's link between eucharistie semiotics and a cosmology rooted in a biblical account of language is provocative if not entirely seamless. Focusing on the words of institution permits the link, yet does so at a time when sacramental theology is increasingly turning to the epiclesis as the key to anaphoral ethics. In that context, Davies produces a work that is at once radical and very traditional for a Western theology-one that is well worth reading.
JAMES W. FARWELL
The General Theological Seminary
New York, New York
Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2005
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