At the heart of the Christian message of salvation is the claim that God acts in the world. The Christian God is a God who creates, sustains, and redeems. The first words of the Biblical text proclaim God's activity: in the beginning God created. Act after act, the Bible records God's intervening hand, culminating in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, God incarnate. The Christian theological tradition has construed divine providence in myriad ways. Recently, however, the biblical effusion of divine activity in creation has come to stand in stark contrast to the aversion to such language in contemporary discussions of divine providence. For many, providence is problematic, made even more challenging since the scientific revolution and its reconception of the natural world as independent and causally closed. The Seventh Annual Los Angeles Theology Conference invited theologians across Christian traditions to examine providence in its dogmatic register.

The contributors stepped up to the challenge by helping to retrieve the doctrine of divine providence for today and to consider its place among the traditional theological loci, its history and reception, and the difficulties it raises. Their essays assess the ways the doctrine has been recast in modern theology-by Schleiermacher, Bavinck, or Barth or by particular schools of thought, such as apocalyptic readings of Paul, postliberalism, or analytic theology. The result is a far-reaching and thought-provoking collection of essays guiding readers toward a modern-day theology of divine action and providence. Book jacket.