A God Who Repairs and Communes
A Review of
God Draws Near: A Biblical Theology of Mission
Collin Cornell
Paperback: Baker Academic, 2025
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Reviewed by Emily Cash
Collin Cornell’s new book, God Draws Near: A Biblical Theology of Mission, is a must-read for everyone who strives to emulate and participate in God’s work in the world. That may be a sweeping claim, but this book and its implications are similarly sweeping: Cornell tackles the familiar narrative that God’s mission is centered on redemption (or, to use the language of the book, ‘repair’) and argues instead that the heart of God’s mission is communion with creation. God Draws Near not only equips readers to re-examine scripture in light of God’s desire for relationship; it can also revivify their vocations with a fresh longing for God’s intimacy, generosity, and blessing.
The book is written for an academic audience and is a demanding read. But wrestling with Cornell’s argument is worth the intellectual and spiritual investment – readers will never be able to unsee what this book exposes and explores. In the introduction, Cornell asks readers to surrender their “both/and” thinking, to loosen their grip on God’s reparative work – not to deny or discard it, but to enrich and contextualize it. And, by the end of the book, Cornell returns “both/and” thinking to the reader … but returns it transformed. Yes, God both repairs and communes: but God’s reparative work is merely instrumental to and nested within God’s more ultimate will-to-commune.
Cornell achieves this theological reorientation with an argument that unfolds in two primary modes.
The first mode is critical: Cornell dismantles what he designates as the “dramatic paradigm.” This narrative describes the Bible as a single, linear story in which God’s mission to “repair” (heal, restore, redeem) creation is the response to the fall and its fallout. In his criticism of this paradigm, Cornell recounts its recent genesis, explains its current ubiquity in mission theology and beyond, and details its interpretive presumptions and procedures. But, most importantly, he exposes its problematic theological implications, especially as it relates to Israel and the incarnation. He argues that a mission of repair has obsolescence built into it: when the work of repair is completed, the means by which God accomplished that repair become disposable, or at least no longer have any discernible value.
The second mode is constructive: Cornell then reimagines the Bible’s coherence, and the meaning of Israel and the Incarnation, in light of God’s desire to bless creation. He delightfully reinterprets biblical texts – including the Tabernacle texts and Song of Songs – to orient readers toward divine communion and offers novel images and metaphors for thinking about how repair intersects with, and ultimately serves, communion. In this constructive mode, Cornell’s argument soars: the reader is gifted with interpretive gems, including new ways of thinking about God’s blessing of Abraham, the timeline(s) of creation, and the unique role of the Spirit in God’s mission. Overall, it becomes clear that God doesn’t perceive humans (and non-human creation, for that matter) as problems to be solved or tools to be used, but as cherished objects of divine desire and goodwill.
Readers who get bogged down in the early critical chapters of the book, especially Cornell’s parsing of three particular theologians who exemplify the ‘dramatic paradigm,’ might find that skipping ahead to the constructive chapters puts some theological wind in their sails. But the early chapters should be returned to: it is essential to understand that the dramatic paradigm was made and therefore can (and should) be unmade.
Cornell makes a bold argument, so there are inevitably nuances that get flattened in his theological course-correction. And, even as he highlights problematic dualities within the dramatic paradigm (problem/answer, universal/particular, etc.), there are points in the book where he seems to similarly function in polarities. For example, he describes divine instrumentalization (i.e., God’s using of human agents) as fundamentally at odds with divine blessing, a differentiation that strikes me as misguided.
But God Draws Near is an immense theological mosaic, and therefore disagreement with any single piece of the argument doesn’t detract from the larger picture that Cornell has fashioned: a breathtaking, three-dimensional image of Emmanuel, the God who has always, and will eternally, draw near.
Emily Cash
Emily Cash serves as a pastor at Valley Springs Fellowship in Warsaw, Indiana. She cohosts the podcast Holy Writ, a conversation at the intersection of literature and scripture, and authors the Substack newsletter: Driftwood Prayers. Her scholarly work and ministry explore how biblical interpretation, spiritual formation, and practices of dialogical connection converge in the life of the church.
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