The aim of this book is to marry a revitalised theology of Trinity and Creation to an adaptation of Whiteheadean metaphysics. Bracken suggests three possible contemporary stances in these matters (borrowing from Paul Lakeland) namely ‘late modernism’, ‘true post-modernism’ and ‘countermodernism’. He situates his own essay in the ‘late modernist’ range. Not conceding the ‘end of metaphysics’ hypothesis, he believes that a contemporary Christian theology can be fruitfully explicated with the resources of what he terms Whitehead’s ‘hermeneutical metaphysics’ (pp 54ff). What Bracken finds lacking, or at least insufficiently developed in Whitehead is the concept of ‘society’ as Whitehead develops it in Process and Reality. Here Bracken finds Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality a useful means to focus more particularly on the interrelationship of individual actual occasions and the societies by which they are in part conditioned. Armed with a strengthened metaphysics of inter-subjectivity, Bracken will be able to turn to effecting a marriage between metaphysics and the theology of the Trinity and of Creation.

Although traditional mainstream theology has always recognised that the Trinity is constituted by an ‘opposition of relations’, emphasis on the primacy of identity over difference has tended to obscure what one might term divine sociability. Orthodoxy has almost always insisted on the ‘unbegotten’ nature of the Father and consequently understood the Trinity as the emergence of the many out of the one, so to speak. By way of annexation of a number of post-modern themes, of process over being, of difference over identity, of relation over entity and of inter-subjectivity over individuality, Bracken reworks the traditional doctrines of trinity and creation in such a way as to conform as far as possible to post-modern dogma, while at the same time affording them a traditionally metaphysical explanatory rationale by tracing a route of connexion to Whitehead. The divine persons become the outcome rather than the foundation of the traditional notion of perichoresis and the trinitarian relations serve as an ‘ontogenetic matrix’ which serves to unify the field of creative activity both in God and in its finite manifestations. The essential divine sociability of the trinity becomes the pattern of all creative manifestations, but particularly of the essentially social nature of human being.

The present writer is entirely in sympathy with the author’s belief that the doctrines of trinity and creation are the relatively untapped resource for a new ‘metaphysical’ explication of essential Christian doctrines. The author recognises the extent to which this is already adumbrated in the work of Karl Rahner and other catholic theologians but seems to be unaware of the enormous contribution to this discussion by Wolfhart Pannenberg in his masterly Systematic Theology [1] Bracken cites Rahner’s views on the identity of the economic Trinity with the doctrine of God in himself. He contrasts this with what he takes to be the classical view of Aristotle/Aquinas. For these thinkers God is not ‘self-actualising’ (p. 19), is ‘a fixed object of thought’ (p. 19) and although the theories of primary and secondary causality allow a semblance of self-actualisation in created beings, the theory leads inevitably to what Bracken calls ‘theological determinism’ in which the entire unfolding of the created world is fixed by the divine will from its first moment. (p. 21) resulting in a comprehensive scheme of cause-effect relationships governing the whole of creation (p. 22). All secondary causes (including human beings) are reduced to ‘instrumental causes’ for the execution of its (God’s) purposes. It is from this unsatisfactory account of things that a Whiteheadian metaphysics of process is invoked as a more satisfying solution. This whole account of the ‘classical’ position is clearly the setting up of a ‘straw man’ and must surely raise the hackles of any serious Thomistic thinker. Although the Thomistic enterprise inevitably has to confront paradoxes and problems in the question of divine/created relations, Bracken seems to have little sympathy for the transformation of the notion of God in which God’s ‘thought thinking itself’ becomes the purest form of activity (esse purum) which is the ground and source of the self-realisation of finite beings from potency to act. Stresses and strains, which are perhaps at times intolerable, in the classical doctrine there may be and it may be true that a Whiteheadian metaphysics is able to overcome some (perhaps not all) of these, but Bracken’s account surely does less than justice to the views he is attempting to replace.

The second chapter compares and contrasts Whitehead’s ‘hermeneutical metaphysics’ with the general theories of language and communication and the assimilation of difference in Habermas and Lonergan. Bracken shows how Whitehead’s theory of presentational immediacy undercuts the linguistic and cultural determinism which Bracken identifies with the views of thinkers such as Sellars, Quine and Rorty. He concludes that Whitehead’s view better assimilates the universality of difference with the possibility of social agreement than either Habermas or Lonergan ‘in today’s highly pluralistic world’ (p. 74) and so allows for the possibility of ‘a variety of epistemologies or ideals of rationality, depending upon the particular cultural context in which they are operative.’ (p. 75)

The third chapter takes up the problem of universal difference by way of a comparison of Derrida’s conception of ‘différance’ with Whitehead’s notion of creativity. This is crucial for his attempt to transform the traditional understanding of creation and the ensuing understanding of the God/world relationship by way of the Whiteheadian account of creativity. For both Derrida and Whitehead, Becoming displaces Being in primacy. As a consequence the principle of potentiality displaces that of activity and works, not ‘from the top down’ but ‘from the bottom up’ (p. 83) and is no longer to be understood as identified with the Divine actuality. Indeed for Whitehead, Bracken argues, ‘God is an instance of the operation of creativity, not the transcendent source of creativity.’ (p. 84) It is at this point that Bracken recognises that he must modify Whitehead in such a way as to reconcile his position with traditional doctrine. What he proposes is that ‘creativity is the nature or principle of activity first for God and then, by a free decision on God’s part, likewise for all creatures. But … creativity is not operative from above, but, properly understood, from below. That is, within God creativity is the underlying principle for the existence and interrelated activity of the three divine persons.’ (p. 84) Creativity is thus to be understood as immanent within creatures, rather than transcending them and ‘may aptly be described as “the divine matrix” within which the three divine persons and all their creatures exist in dynamic interrelation. The remainder of the chapter consists in a working out of the consequences of all this for a Whiteheadian account of the relation of actual occasions (individuals) to the totality of the world in its relation to the divine antecedent and consequent wills in such a way that bad totalisation, termed Logocentrism, is avoided by the universal distribution of creativity both in the trinity of persons and throughout the created world—as a consequence of which it appears that ‘no single actual occasion has, therefore, any enduring significance; its significance lies in its being the latest member of a temporally ordered nexus or “society” of actual occasions.’

The present reviewer has to admit that the working out, to this point, of the essential question of the relation of the ‘One in the many’ remains to a degree elusive. What Bracken aims to show however, is that a renewed theology of the Trinity must serve as the basis for understanding not just the relation of the trinitarian life to human inter-subjectivity but must retain what he sees as a merit in Aquinas’s view, namely the relation of God to the entire extent of creation. He plans to do this by way of strengthening the Whiteheadian notion of a society as a nexus of actual occasions in such a way as to see creativity as running through the life of the Trinity and the whole of creation in a single overarching unity. It might be argued however that in Aquinas the pattern of intra-Trinitarian relations shows up significantly only in the relation of God with rational creatures, notably in the doctrine of grace, whereas the imprint of Trinitarian life in the sub-rational world is merely by appropriation and not by a more immediate reflection of the divine relations. The divine missions of ‘giving’ and ‘sending’ seem, for Aquinas, to be confined to the conferring of grace. In creation in general the divine persons act as a single principle. (As Rahner has shown, the ‘follow-through’ of the pattern established in the perichoretic trinitarian relations is weak both in relation to creation in general but even in the doctrine of incarnation, where Aquinas believes that any one of the divine persons could have been incarnated.)

The conclusion of this chapter is perhaps crucial for the reconciliation of this understanding of the God/world relationship with orthodox Christian belief. Bracken believes that bad totalisation, or Logocentrism as he terms it, can be avoided by moving from a conception of God as transcendent entity to one of ‘transcendent activity, namely, Whiteheadian creativity as it first constitutes the tripersonal reality of God as a divine community and then the ongoing reality of creation as a sub-community within the divine communitarian life…’ God remains necessary to the world in a way in which the world is not necessary to God because ‘the world shares in the divine communitarian life of God only through the free gracious decision of the divine persons.’ (pp. 102–103) On the prior point I am not clear that this is different to any great extent from conceiving God as transcendent esse, participated in by the whole of creation. The whole point about esse in Thomistic thought is that it is not an ens, but rather pure activity expressed in the divine persons (again not entia) and shared by ‘free gracious decision’ by the created world. Even more worrying is the reduction of the world to the status of a ‘sub-community within the divine communitarian life’. How can this view be rescued from what Hegel termed ‘acosmism’ in reference to Spinoza? As I understand it, this is what is called for in the fourth chapter which is entitled: ‘Intersubjectivity: The Vertical Dimension’. By way of an excursus into Buber’s notion of the ‘Between’ prior to I-Thous relationship, Nishida’s logic of Nothingness as ‘place’, of Nobo’s notion of an ontogenetic matrix and a contrast with Hegel’s Absolute Spirit Bracken returns to what he terms the ‘Whiteheadian logic of inter-subjectivity.’ For Whitehead the notion of inter-subjectivity relates not merely to human inter-subjective relations but to the relations, both internal and external, by which actual occasions are constituted and constitute an extensive (time-space) continuum. He concludes that the unifying concept of creativity in Whitehead is directly comparable to Nishida’s Absolute nothingness and Nobo’s ‘ontogenetic matrix’. He finds an analogy between Nishida’s ‘inverse correspondence’ and the traditional notion of relations of opposition. He concludes that this ontogenetic matrix is to be thought of not as some reality distinct from and prior to the divine nature but precisely as the divine nature expressed in the opposed relations that constitute the Trinity and which, by free divine decision, are shared by the whole of the created world. The ontogenetic matrix is not somehow prior to God, nor God to it but ‘Rather the divine persons coexist with the ontogenetic matrix as their ground of being or internal source of existence and activity’ (p. 128) The further characterisation of this creative matrix is as a field of activity rather than an entity ‘which achieves concrete actuality only in and through the particular entities which it empowers to exist.’ (p. 129)

The question that does not, at least at this point, seems to be considered is what the comparative status is of the divine persons on the one hand and actual occasions in the world on the other. It will be argued that societies, in the Whiteheadian view, are more stable and enduring than the actual occasions which compose them; that, whereas actual occasions arise and disappear in time, the societies they constitute do not. How does this reflect back on the divine persons? Clearly they cannot be subject to what Aristotle would have described as the principle of generation and corruption. How then are we to account for the fact that the ontogenetic matrix gives rise first to non-evanescent members of the trinitarian society, but then to temporally contingent and evanescent members of subsequent societies. Perhaps we can look for enlightenment on this point to the following chapter on ‘Intersubjectivity: the horizontal Dimension.’

It turns out however, that the problems raised and dealt with in the fifth chapter make little contribution to these difficult questions but are more directly concerned with the nature of societies and the conceptual apparatus required for their successful analysis. Here Bracken relates the systems analysis of Ervin Lazslo to Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality and both back to what he perceives to be an insufficiently developed account of these matters in Whitehead. Room must be made, he argues, for a real if analagous agency both for social and systemic structures in the highly complex societies of today’s world of human social and economic activity. What Bracken wants to retain versus Lazslo is the ongoing possibility of the survival of alienated human beings and their power to resist the distorting and dehumanizing pressure of economic systems. He thus sketches a layering of social structures which stretches all the way from e.g. the structure of an atom to something as complex as, though he does not make use of this illustration, the global market.

The final chapter assesses the advantages of this marriage of traditional religious belief to a neo-Whiteheadian metaphysics for a renewed dialogue between scientific world views and religious belief. Bracken takes as his starting point here the work of Philip Clayton. [2] In seeking to understand how there can be a dynamic relation of God to the world which goes beyond deism, Bracken follows Clayton in fastening upon the notion of emergent properties or ‘supervenience’. (p. 161) Like Clayton, Bracken opts for a ‘strong’ theory of supervenience consequent to which ‘causal activity can, at least in principle, take place primarily on the mental level, with physical changes on the neuronal level as a by-product, rather than the reverse…’ (p. 162) Two problems that such a theory must be able to resolve are the way in which God can be said to be active within the world and the human soul achieve immortality and resolve them without recourse to what Bracken sees as the discredited concept of ‘spiritual substance’. Not entirely satisfied with Clayton’s treatment of these problems Bracken again looks to Whitehead or at least a neo-Whiteheadian theory to deal with these. If Whiteheadian ‘societies’ are ‘understood as enduring structured fields of activity for successive generations of dynamically interrelated “actual occasions” … then one has an analogy for the classical notion of substance without any of the theoretical difficulties…’ (p. 165) Bracken seeks to modify the strict individualism of Whitehead’s theory by claiming that what constituent members of a complex society have in common is not a single real characteristic, realised variously in its members, but rather their situation within a unified field of activity which is ‘an objective reality … distinct from themselves as interrelated subjects of experience.’ (p. 167)

In the final pages of this last chapter Bracken summarises the advantages of his theory not only for providing a common ground for discussion of those questions about the nature, origin and destiny of the world which exceed the limits of empirical science, but for offering a new metaphysical exploration of the traditional Christian doctrines of Trinity, Creation and personal immortality. To take the last point first, it will be noted that Bracken’s view reinstates personal immortality rather than the Christian doctrine of resurrection of the body and he explicitly excludes ‘the limiting conditions of life in the body’ (p. 177) His theory of supervenience consequently does not really provide an alternative to the notion of spiritual substance but a substitute for it in which the supervenient life of the mind is absorbed into and upheld as a non-corporeal actual occasion by its absorption back into the divine field. I suspect that both Whitehead and orthodox Christian believers might have difficulty with this.

His final outline of the Trinitarian doctrine and its relation to the world does not, it seems, really overcome the philosophical difficulties which notoriously cluster around the reconciliation of divine transcendence with the existence of a free creation. It seems that the reconciliation is stated rather than explicated. Desire to have his cake and eat it seems to the present reviewer to land him in an insoluble contradiction. It is stated first that ‘They [divine persons] are one God … because they preside over a single all-comprehensive field proper to themselves in their own divine being … this divine field of activity has no necessary connection either with the field of activity proper to this world or with the field of activity proper to any other world, possible or actual…’ yet ‘the reality of this world is necessarily emergent out of the field of activity proper to the three divine person in their dynamic interrelation.’ (p. 174) Thus is reaffirmed the traditional doctrine that the relation between God and the world is real from the side of the created world only and not in God. Yet a page or two later in moving on to an account of personal immortality, Bracken writes: ‘the idea that God and all of creation occupy a common field of activity helps to explain’ the personal immortality of human beings. (p. 176) In the one instance we have two separate fields proper to God and the created world respectively, separated, presumably by God’s free act of willing creation. But, subsequently we find that they ‘occupy a common field of activity’. What has not been demonstrated is that a Whiteheadian account of creativity needs a doctrine of God or creation at all and, if it is needed, as Whitehead seemed to think, how it really avoids the paradoxes and problems that endlessly plague doctrines of free creation except by way of pantheism.

Bracken’s book concludes with an appendix in which he reviews a number of contemporary co-workers in the field of philosophical theology and stakes out initial responses to their positions which he sees as a field for further inquiry. In the course of this he refers to the important work of Colin Gunton [3]. He makes reference to Gunton’s three trinitarian ‘transcendentals’: perichoresis, particularity and relatedness, and to Whitehead’s perceptive remarks about the failure of the Greek Fathers to generalise the theory of mutual immanence or internal relations. Since this appendix is headed: ‘A Research Program for the Future’ one hopes that Bracken will continue his important work in this direction and focus more single-mindedly on how this doctrine can be developed to produce an even more satisfying explication of traditional doctrine. Bracken shows a wide knowledge of and familiarity with contemporary thinkers who in any way relate to his field of interest and the discussions of them are not without value. However, what is needed now is a more single-minded focus on the central questions at issue and an attempt to fashion his own view of these matters on his own terms. But in conclusion it must be said that those who take both the tradition of metaphysical theology and contemporary trends seriously will find a rich source for reflection in Bracken’s brave study.