For Machuga, it’s a matter of “faith seeking understanding,” and thoughtful believers as well as others interested in the Christian story, and whether it “hangs together,” will perhaps find unexpected (and delightful) answers to some of the most perplexing questions: What is a free will? What is the soul? Who is God? What is Jesus? What is belief? With so much evil in the world, how can God be all-powerful and truly good? Who will be saved?
Though philosophically astute, the book offers a vast variety of everyday examples to make its points, drawn from tennis, biology, the lottery, and an author and the author’s book. In fact, Machuga argues that the best way to understand God is not as a “Supreme Being” (the biggest dude on the block) but rather as a divine author with creation as his “book.”
God is like Shakespeare, and creation like Hamlet. So it’s mistaken to think of God as a Divine Craftsman within the universe, part of the cause-and-effect chain, and better to recognize that God created the universe with time, not within time.
Shakespeare intimately knows Hamlet, but Hamlet, of course, knows nothing of Shakespeare. Similarly, humans know nothing of this unknowable God except that in the Incarnation “God (the father) writes himself (the Son) into our story and then sends the Spirit who teaches us how to read what God wrote.”
In the end Machuga proposes what he calls “trinitarian universalism,” that “this God both can and will choreograph our free choices to bring all creatures to a glorious end…. A Supreme Being can’t ensure that ‘all shall be well’ without violating human freedom.”
Easter hope, then, is a sure and certain promise.
