THIS is a meditative reflection, in four short chapters, on the nature of God, the divine purpose, and the nature of providence, in a world beset by suffering and evil. Its heart is a conception of God as self-giving love in a world of free and partly self-shaping persons destined eventually to share in the divine love, rather than as an all-determining and harshly judgemental power.

Each chapter is enriched by generous and insightful quotations from other writers, and marked by a charitable and compassionate spirit. The author suggests that the purpose of human life is not just happiness, though that is part of it. It is a process of learning self-giving love and true wisdom, a process that has become tragically disordered in our world, but which can be re-oriented to its true goal in God, by grace.

Shortt defends the rationality of the cosmological argument that creation of the material universe out of nothing demands a spiritual explanation. The moral argument is an important part of this explanation, which roots the demand to love in the nature of things, not in mere human preferences. And consideration of the imaginative and intuitive “right brain” capacities of the mind opens our thinking to spiritual dimensions of experience.

In discussing divine action, particularly prayer, he insists that prayer is not just asking for things, but is an attempt to become transparent to the divine will to “repair the world”. Miracle, too, is a breaking-through of a spiritual presence that is never absent from the world, and which, on a Christian view, will ultimately renew all of creation — this he calls “hopeful universalism”.

The final chapter, on atonement and providence, emphasises atonement as a positive uniting with God, not just the remission of a penal sentence. The suggestion is that suffering is necessarily involved in the creation of a world in which evolving persons like us can exist, but that God is immediately present to this world, and will ultimately bring all things to their proper fulfilment. We can see the necessity of things, and the purpose of things, only when we see the whole picture, and when we see God as not an unmoved spectator, but as fully involved in our experiences — and that is the point of incarnation.

This is an immensely attractive exposition of Christian faith, accessible to a wide readership, and ideal for discussion groups on these topics.

Canon Keith Ward is Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.

The Hardest Problem: God, evil and suffering
Rupert Shortt
Hodder & Stoughton £14.99
(978-1-3998-0271-0)
Church Times Bookshop £11.99