Book Review: The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil

The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. By Christopher Southgate. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. xii + 196 pp. $27.00 (paper).With care and conviction, Christopher Southgate embarks on a task that daunts but beckons. Several acknowledgments launch his project: the Christian affirmation that creation is good as well as the sobering awareness that violence and death are endemic to it. Can such grandeur and be reconciled? Southgate aims to engage creations groaning while yet espousing faith in a God who is creative, redemptive, and all-loving (p. 15).This dilemma has elicited various prior approaches. In the first portion, Southgate rejects many. This list includes the path of creationism/intelligent design, which is insufficiently attuned to modern science. Metaphysical dualism is also jettisoned. There is no rival to God; there is no within God. Southgate also critiques the so-called fall narrative theology of Genesis. This conception attributes all violence and pain in creation to human rebellion against God (Genesis 3). It is an outlook that must be debunked: biological death cannot be regarded as a consequence of any long-past human activity. Support for this indictment draws both from biological science and improved readings of Genesis 1-3.In chapter 3, Thomas Aquinas enters the discussion as Southgate undertakes good-harm analyses as a means for situating evil (that is, that with no human cause) within creations goodness. This mode of reasoning posits that certain creation values can only emerge through a process that involves the disvalues of evolutionary suffering (pp. 41-42). Evolutionary suffering leads to something higher. This perspective, of course, begs certain questions. Accordingly, Southgate invokes the notion of Gods co-suffering with creation, as well as Gods promised eschatological redemption, as an answer to the problem of individual suffering. This lays the groundwork for chapter 4. Here, Southgate speculatively attempts to fuse elements of evolutionary creation with certain core Christian convictions. He ponders anew the objective ramification of the atonement. It is characterized as an event which begins the final phase of creation: the evolutionary process will finally be sublimated to ultimate healing and transformation. Southgate imagines this as redemption for creatures who never knew flourishing because of evolutionary violence. Though suppositional, this rumination is hardly dissonant with the testimony of Colossians 1 and Ephesians 1.On the coattails of this hope, chapter 5 contemplates-in a biblical, creative manner-the eschatological existence of non-human creation. Especially intriguing is an attempt to imagine what non-human eschatological redemption might involve. …