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The Lord Is Good: Seeking the God of the Psalter

2018; Eisenbrauns; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/bullbiblrese.28.4.0651

2576-0998

Rick Wadholm,

Christopher Holmes offers an engaging and intentionally contemplative movement through ideas of goodness in relation to God as trinity drawing (particularly) upon the works of Thomas Aquinas (among others) in his own contemplative reflections of God as good. While not sufficiently a reflection on the goodness of the Lord in light of the Psalms, this volume instead treats the Psalms more as a backdrop motif that is intent more upon contemplative theological reflections than upon biblical exegesis. Readers may at once be struck by the very invitational manner in which this volume has been written to join in knowing the goodness of the God of Israel, the God the Church confesses as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This can be a welcome call that in fact draws upon the language of the Psalter itself to not only describe God’s goodness, but to explicitly invite worship of, and participation in, God’s goodness.Chapter one opens with discussions of divine simplicity (an often misunderstood theological claim) that call for the goodness of God and understand that goodness to be essential to God’s own being-ness (chs. two and three explicitly develop this theme) and not simply something God does (expounded in ch. four). As part of his project, Holmes also offers a Thomistic counter to Barth’s own dialectical appropriation of divine simplicity (pp. 23–27).Chapter five offers a view of creation as the goodness of God enacted, carrying the reader into ch. six on issues of goodness and evil in light of the foregoing discussions of God’s goodness. Here Holmes includes descriptions of his angelology and how one might understand the Satan. The movement from goodness to evil then leads into ch. seven as a call for being taught the goodness of the Lord through his statutes. This prepares for the discussion of the Son as God’s self-revealing goodness in the Spirit of the Father that is perfecting creation in Christ Jesus (ch. nine).Holmes is intentionally confessional (drawing upon the very intent of the Psalms and the Fathers) and Trinitarian in his construction. His Trinitarian readings are of such a nature that he even confesses to an overly Christocentric approach in his earlier works (pp. 186–87). Readers will not find exegesis of the Psalms but will find a wealth of later dogmatic reflections intersecting with the Psalms (and the rest of the canon of Scripture) brought into conversations with one another. As such, Holmes seems to presume readings of Scripture are actually apparent, for instance, when he declares that Mark 10:18 clearly shows Mark as in mind the procession of the Son from the Father (p. 153). This would be reading later dogmatic confessions back into the Gospel account. This is evident at many points with regard to the way the Psalms are engaged via ecclesiastical confessions and dogmas offering contemplative materials for this.It is far too often that academic studies of theology and Scripture have tended toward objectifying distance, treating such matters as artifacts for study. Holmes has attempted a work that decidedly breaks with this abstraction and at once attempts to offer a confessional reflection upon God in all God’s goodness without also leaving beside careful attention to theological reflections upon these themes. His work will likely be considered dense reading in philosophical theology for those unaccustomed to the works of Aquinas but will prove fruitful for careful consideration and appropriation to scholars and students seeking to understand scholarly meditations on Scripture and, most particularly, the God of Scripture intent upon eliciting response.