As far as recent systematic theologies go, Graham Ward's How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I is surely one of the most fascinating and ambitious. Now, given that no one any longer writes systematic theologies, the fascination and ambition bar is admittedly low. In this theological day and age, undertaking the task of a multi-volume systematics as Ward begins here, and as Sarah Coakley began in God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’, is itself fascinating and ambitious. Fascinating because people, for whatever reason, stopped reading systematics some decades ago, and ambitious because given theological conditions (those reasons people stopped reading the stuff) these new attempts will prove successful only insofar as their form and content are able to make the genre matter again. And like Coakley's, Ward's efforts prove remarkably successful.

By fancying his work a systematic theology Ward, who is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, simultaneously expands what is included in any theological system and shows ‘systematic theology’ to be too crude a term (too narrow, too wooden, too mechanical, too self-conscious) to quite capture what speaking of God entails, how much it involves, what it does and what it should hope to do. If systematics of the older dustier type took its task as filling standard traditional categories like revelation, Trinity, christology, ecclesiology and so on, and then relating those categories to one another, then what Ward does is expand that task far beyond what we thought any systematics should include. While revelation, Trinity, christology, ecclesiology and the like are certainly at play in How the Light Gets In, they are situated in a conceptual universe occupied by additional things like neurology, evolutionary biology, sociology, literature and, as to not put too fine a point on it, the popular horror film The Blair Witch Project. The rationale for the additions is not simply the exemplification of traditional loci (say, some novel filling out a point about Cappadocian christology); there is something much more, well, fascinating and ambitious going on, where Ward's additions stand in not for traditional concepts but for something like God. More than examples, Ward's additions serve as sacraments. Let me explain.

For Ward, the heavens declare the glory of God, and so do right brain cognitive processes and the particulars of animal DNA, and he takes it as his goal to show how this is so and why it matters so much. Presuming and only intermittently detailing an analogical framework (of the sort offered up in Erich Przywara's reading of Aquinas, analogy where proportional predication relativises attributive predication), Ward envisages everything in our world, including those things we Christians for long stretches of history didn't think mattered (if we noticed them at all), participating in the life of God, where participation entails a panentheistic expressivity on the one hand and panentheistic deepening on the other. Everything declaring the glory of God then isn't a throwaway phrase, but intends something rigorous, something similar to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty meant phenomenologically when he wrote about human language: ‘The predominance of vowels in one language, or of consonants in another, and constructional and syntactical systems, do not represent so many arbitrary conventions for the expression of one and the same idea, but several ways for the human body to sing the world's praises and in the last resort to live it.’ To understand How the Light Gets In, simply substitute ‘the trinitarian God’ for ‘the world’ in that quote. In the same way that for Merleau-Ponty human conventions are, far from arbitrary, natural and fitting occurrences of humanness, so then is human right brain activity and animal DNA of divinity (one thinks often of Augustine's highly speculative De Trinitate when reading How the Light Gets In). And so for everything Christian tradition thinks about revelation, Trinity, christology and so on. Hence, the book starts off with three involved chapters on patristic, medieval and reformed theology that respectively exemplify what the rest of the book goes on to help us understand about the ‘lived’ and ‘engaged’ production of theological knowledge, setting up, as many promissory notes tell us, future volumes’ engagements with revelation, Trinity, christology, etc. While Merleau-Ponty is given only short attention in the book (Hegel, as the subtitle ‘Ethical Life’ suggests, is its primary inspiration), Ward is surely working out of a phenomenological imagination where the God for whom and through whom everything exists saturates everything about everything as related to everything (Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology but, ultimately, a specification of Hegel's). Singing and living out the praises of God is the vocation of all creatures. And this vocation largely looks like cultivating capacities for wonder that the world is just so. Ward writes:

It is appropriate that How the Light Gets In ends with a reflection on Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life, and not just because of Ward's oft used forest metaphors. Malick's movie and its deep resonances with the affecting philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Stanley Cavell does cinematically what Ward does rhetorically: portray the universe as top to bottom theo-logical. There are of course risks in taking on such endeavours. While many found The Tree of Life a revelation in film-making, others found it pretentious and nonsensical, with reports of patrons walking out and demanding refunds. For risking all that, How the Light Gets In proves not only remarkably successful in its endeavours (readable, learned, sharp) but also quite courageous.