Participation in God by Andrew Davison

Cambridge University Press

Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics sold out in a couple of months, and was out of print for two months. Happily, it's now available again. @CambridgeUP @CUPBookshop pic.twitter.com/PLihXduWiY

— Andrew Davison (@AP_Davison) December 14, 2019

A review by James Clark at FPR: Imagining Divine Participation

Related:
Church Times review by David Brown.

The CT review has this bit:

In a rare exception, Moltmann’s idea of God’s making space for the world is declared unchristian, whereas from that perspective it is surely Davison, not Moltmann, who radically diminishes the divine nature in not allowing that God could ever create anything radically different from his own nature. Equally, Moltmann would offer a quite different way of thinking about the inexplicable and evil.

What happened to God's being unable to create a square circle not contradicting his omnipotence?

Again, the doctrine of the Trinity is simply assumed throughout, and no attempt is made to engage with why Platonism might have thought its introduction unnecessarily complicating in the conception of everything as derived from one single source.

If course it is assumed, it's a book about Christian doctrine, and Davison would probably acknowledge that it is something that we cannot know or prove by reason alone but a truth that must be revealed to us by God Himself. One wonders about the author of the review...

Of course, Christianity had an answer in insisting on the introduction of the Trinity as revealed doctrine; but, again, except in his introductory section when discussing creation, Davison entirely fails to engage with the way in which our understanding of scripture has changed. St John’s Gospel is repeatedly quoted as though it gave us the historical mind of Jesus, but does it? And, if not, how easily can Aquinas’s account of the incarnate one survive? But what, even, of participation itself? It would seem odd to make the term foundational of all Christian thought if it is not found reflected somewhere in human experience. Yet Davison fails to discuss what might be meant by such experience.

The reviewer sounds like a liberal Protestant. What sort of Christian life is he living if he does not understand that Christians participate in the life of Christ?