Creation and Redemption |
top page 1. Creation 2. Human Freedom 3. The Fall 4. Redemption 5. The One Story of Creation and Redemption 6. Multiplicity and Extension: Space Time Will 7. Genesis |
1. CreationIn the beginning, God freely created that which he could love and could return his love. This love of God is expressed as creation and redemption.Because God is the Trinity, there was relationship, love, and interaction before creation. Love was acted on and expressed on when nothing but God existed. With the act of creation, this mutual love came outward: the circle of mutual love was broadened to include persons other than the persons of the Trinity. In creating, God thus committed himself to multiplicity. From the creative activity of the unity in trinity of God alone has come the wild multiplicity we have today, which we can picture as beginning with God deciding that there should be someone other than himself (than himself in trinity, that is). Because love already existed, God did not have to create. He chose to create. We can say that love is the reason that God created as long as we understand that love to be God's free choice, not something existing prior to God or outside his free choice. Because of God's freedom in creating, the world could have been otherwise or not come into being at all. God's freedom and love are held together because love is freely chosen.1 If either freedom or love is thought of without the other, then that one thing can become absolutized in our thinking. Divine freedom not understood as expressing love becomes simple caprice or arbitrary exercise of power not open to our understanding.2 Or God's love without his freedom becomes a force or principle outside God that makes God's creating necessary. Our existence is contingent on God's free choice. And since his free choice to create is equivalent to his love, it is not an unexplainable decision.3 God "wills and posits the creature neither out of caprice nor necessity, but because He has loved it from eternity, because He wills to demonstrate His love for it...."4 God's love and sovereignty are both basic to what is. Conscious interaction, response, and love--that which we experience among ourselves--did not begin with us and exists far beyond us. It defines the origin and nature of the universe in which we live. | 1. Some of the language we must use regarding God's freedom, such
as "choice," carries the risk of implying that God is temporal, that he
experiences time and events as we do. This language is only intended to
facilitate expression of the analogy between God's freedom and human
freedom for the sake of our understanding of God's freedom. 2. See Gunton, Triune Creator, 121-25 on Ockham and 76 on Augustine. 3.Again Augustine. 4. Barth, CD III/1, 95. |