There is no doubt that Peckham is a gifted writer, and his intentions motivating his work are noble. He seeks to provide an account of the divine attributes that is biblically faithful and theologically coherent in hopes that readers will be drawn to worship and praise for God. Unfortunately, Peckham’s unique formulation of the doctrine of God has far too many deficiencies to overcome. Rather than pointing readers to the God of Scripture, Peckham has breached the Creator/creature distinction and created a God made in the image of man.

Following up on his introductory work, The Doctrine of God: Introducing the Big Questions (2019), Adventist theologian John C. Peckham has published Divine Attributes: Knowing the Covenantal God of Scripture. In this work, Peckham aims to give an account of the divine attributes that are thoroughly biblically grounded over and against models of classical theism which he believes undervalue the plain meaning of Scripture in favor of Greek philosophical presuppositions. As Peckham writes in his introduction, his goal is to “offer a careful theological analysis of divine attributes” that would uphold the “unique normativity of Scripture, in dialogue with core issues in the contemporary discussion of classical theism” (17). Following the introduction, each chapter focuses on a particular attribute in order to show that the covenantal God is one who is dynamic in His relationships and experiences genuine movement and emotions.

Overview

Following the introduction, chapter one surveys various models of theism, including that which Peckham identifies as strict classical theism, process theology, moderate classical theism, and a small section on the God of Greek philosophy. Readers of this review may be most interested to see how he defines and contrasts the strict and moderate conceptions of classical theism. Strict classical theism holds that God must possess the attributes of “divine perfection, necessity, pure aseity, utter self-sufficiency, strict simplicity, timeless eternity, strict immutability, strict impassability, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence” (20-21). Moderate classical theists, however, differ by understanding that God, “engages in genuine relationships with creatures that make a difference to God” (23). According to Peckham’s view, each model surveyed in the first chapter falls short of doing justice to the God of Scripture.

For a model of God to be biblical and true, it must account for the dynamic back-and-forth relationship in which God engages with creatures. Thus, Peckham offers covenantal theism, which “affirms God’s aseity and self-sufficiency, qualified immutability and passibility, everlasting eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence and sovereign providence, covenantal action, omnibenevolence, and relational triunity” (37). Chapter one closes with an overview of Peckham’s view of canonical theology, which is tied to the belief that Scripture is a “unified corpus of writings that God has commissioned as the uniquely normative rule of faith and practice and the final form of theological interpretation, to be understood in subjection to guidance by the Holy Spirit” (29).

Chapters two through six address various attributes of God, such as aseity, qualified passibility, and others. Each attribute defined by Peckham is rooted in the belief that Scripture is to be exegeted on its own terms without any external metaphysical presuppositions. In other words, Scripture alone provides the necessary metaphysics to understand and account for the divine attributes.

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