Creation/Redemption

2. Human Freedom

Only free wills can love. Forced or coerced love is not love, or at least is not the love that God wants in return for his love. He wants love, not simple compliance.
     Human love for God was not complete at the first moment of human life: because it requires the exercise of human will, it requires time, change, and risk. If God had not accepted time, change, and risk, he could not have extended the circle of mutual love. This human freedom is not just an abstraction or limited to one choice. None of us is under total compulsion in our decisions. Otherwise we could not love God, because freedom is a prerequisite of love. The freedom we have is analogous to God's freedom. Just as the world could have been otherwise because God is free, so, because of human freedom, much of what I have done I could have done otherwise.¹
     This brings to mind certain aspects of the twentieth-century discussion of the meaning or content of the divine image of God in humankind: the image of God exists not in some component of humanness such as rationality,² but in the whole human being,³ and is best seen in relationality.⁴ Usually this has been identified as referring to human relationality expressed in any plurality of humans, beginning from the basic unit of one man and one woman,⁵ but a term like "the human community" can refer not only generically to such pluralities but also to humanity as a whole, something that has become readily conceivable only within the last three centuries or so but that surely bears the image as much as any smaller community.
     Dominion, image, and community are interconnected in Genesis 1.... The "dominion" over the rest of creation mentioned in Genesis is also an aspect of the image of the sovereign God and is also one such relationship. Relationality, whether loving or not, requires freedom. That which cannot choose cannot have relationships with others; one cannot have dominion without freedom just as one cannot have any other sort of relationship without freedom. So the image also includes that freedom.
     The image has also been identified with creation or creative activity.⁶ Love does express itself in human creative activity, whether procreation, nurturing, or some other creative activity. But "creation" as a theological term is best used only of what God does, not only because only God creates ex nihilo, but also because only God is completely free to create or not create, which we are not. But there is certainly a point to seeing a parallel to God's creation activity in the human image of God. "Laying up treasure" (Matthew 6:19-21) is the human counterpart to God's creating in that it shows what is truly loved and willed and in that it creates a world or writes a story.

Creation and Redemption

2. Human Freedom