Creative Suffering of the Triune God : An Evolutionary Theology

The debate of the relationship of God to suffering and the conceivability of a suffering God has become more urgent with impact of human suffering in the 20th and 21st centuries. Schaab proposes that the key is recognition that the triune Christian Gods intimate relationship to creation, and expands Peacockes evolutionary theology.

The global reality of suffering and death has demanded an authentic theological response in every era and has impelled debate concerning Gods relationship to suffering and the conceivability of the suffering of God. The scope and impact of this suffering in the last century have driven this debate to acute pitch, demanding How shall one speak rightly of God in view of the suffering that is inherent and inflicted in the cosmos? While in former ages, some looked to an omnipotent and impassible deus ex machina in answer to this question, many contemporary theologians have revised their understanding of God in relation to the world. With these theologians, this book proposes that a truly viable response to cosmic suffering is the recognition that the triune Christian God participates in the very sufferings of the cosmos itself. To support this position, it sets itself within the theology and science dialogue and specifically within the work of scientist-theologian Arthur Peacocke. Informed by the understandings of evolutionary science, grounded within a panentheistic paradigm of the God-world relationship, and rooted within the Christian theological tradition, this work contends that the understanding of the Triune God as intimately involved with the suffering of the cosmos is viable and efficacious in view of the suffering of the cosmos and its creatures. It develops a female procreative model of the creative suffering of the Triune God, an ecological ethics based on the midwife model of care, and a pastoral model of threefold differentiation of suffering in God as steps toward Christian praxis in response to the mystery of God within the pain, suffering, and death of cosmic existence and human experience.