One does not need to be a ‘believer’, a ‘person of faith’, or even a ‘spiritual’ person to sense that there is universally something profoundly, perhaps ‘structurally’, wrong about our lived worlds. The obviousness of that ‘wrongness’ is evident in the sheer abundance of cliches expressing that opinion: ‘The world’s a mess’; ‘The system is rigged’; ‘Life isn‘t fair’; ‘Nobody is perfect’; etc. These are cliches precisely because the ‘wrongness’ is un-nuanced and self-evident in several different ways.
It has been conventional to sort out the differences by distinguishing wrongness caused by intentional or unintentional human action (commonly called ‘moral evils’) from wrongness caused by non-human agents (commonly called ‘natural evils’, e.g., earthquakes, fires, floods, plagues, etc.). The distinction is very rough. The two are often interwoven, especially in events that Marilyn McCord Adams has dubbed ‘horrendous evils’ (e.g., the AIDS epidemic; events of massive starvation), and a society’s long-standing unjust socially constructed systemic arrangements of social, economic and political power.Footnote 1 It may also be useful to distinguish between the ‘subjective’ wrongness of intense suffering (in deep clinical depression, overwhelming anxiety, terror before threatening violence) and the ‘objective’ wrongness of both the manifest excess of intense pain from disease (beyond any ‘danger signal of illness’ role that pain can serve in animals) and the compounded, damaging consequences of systemically unjust social structures and systems to generations of human lives.
However, if one does experience, perceive and conceptualise that ‘wrongness’ theocentrically in ways shaped by Christian tradition, it is theologically important to complexify those distinctions by adding another distinction that cuts across all of them, namely a distinction between two broad theological senses of the ‘wrongness’. Here, a (admittedly arbitrary) stipulation may be useful: a) looked at one way, the ‘wrongnesses’ consists of ‘evils’ against fellow creatures of God, that is, excessive, unfair, unjust violations of creatures’ well-being; b) looked at another way, they are ‘sins’ against God and the goods to which God’s relating to creatures are ordered.
Christians have traditionally emphasised how abysmal the ‘wrongness’ of our lived worlds is. They stressed its profundity precisely because they perceived their lived worlds to be the realities fundamentally related to the Triune God in ways ordered to their good by a God who is unqualifiedly good.
Absent God-relating-to-our-lived-worlds, the ‘wrongness’ of those worlds is a fact but not a quandary. In that context, ‘wrongness’ is certainly something we dislike and from which we suffer. We may lament it and protest it as an undesirable truth about our worlds. It invites efforts to identify its root causes and then take what steps we can to ameliorate or even eliminate it. But there are no grounds for claiming – our inconvenience and suffering aside – that it simply ought not to be. It is just a fact: ‘the way it is’, alongside all the other truths we have learned about our worlds (at least until we succeed in righting the wrongs).
However, given God-relating-to-our-lived-worlds, that wrongness is both an existential predicament and a conceptual aporia.Footnote 2 It is an existential predicament because the root of the ‘wrongness’ is not a particular sort of ‘evil agent’ that ‘causes’ the wrongness of our lived worlds, but a thoroughgoing distortion of the dynamics that just are the reality of the beings that comprise our lived worlds, including ourselves, who are intricately knit into the fabric of those worlds. We, complicit in those distortions, cannot un-distortingly completely undistort our worlds’ distortions without generating newer and unforeseen distortions.
Such ‘wrongness’ is a conceptual aporia because, given that we live in and as integral parts of worlds to which God ongoingly relates, it is intrinsically inexplicable. More exactly, it is inexplicable when certain qualities, and certain ways of relating to all that is not God (see below), are ascribed to God. In light of those ascriptions, the wrongness is heightened from an unpleasant ‘fact’ to a profound distortion of goods God intends for our lived worlds. Given God, such distortions morally and ontologically ought not to obtain. Nonetheless, their reality must be firmly affirmed. Karen Kilby has forcefully argued that the inexplicability of the aporia of evil in God’s good creation is a limit inherent in Christian theological reflection.Footnote 3 Further, as Kilby has also been reminding us, the cost of denying or minimising the profundity of the wrongness is a trivialisation of qualities ascribed to God.Footnote 4 Those qualities of God are the very qualities that warrant the claim that our lived worlds – including ourselves as integral parts of them – are indeed in some senses ‘good’, even as we also claim that they are shot through with horrific evils that ought not to obtain, and in many of which we are, in various ways, complicit and, in some cases, personally responsible. I take these generalisations about the internal ‘grammar’ of a broad consensus in Christian theology to be largely non-controversial (such that, against the conceptual background of that consensus, Christian theologians have the conceptual equipment by which to frame deep disagreements with one another about many other topics).
God relating to all that is not God
The sense(s) in which our lived worlds are ‘good’ is a function of the ways the Triune God relates to them, even in their distortions. Christians have traditionally held that what warrants theological claims about how the Triune God goes about relating to all else are canonical scriptural narratives of God’s ways of relating to all else and the goods to which those ways of relating are ordered. On that basis, they have claimed that God relates to all-that-is-not-God in three basic ways: to create all-that-is-not God; to draw all-that-is-not-God to an eschatological consummation; to reconcile all-that-is-not-God to God when it is estranged from God.
Those narratives of three ways in which God relates to all else are irreducibly different from and asymmetrically related to one another. They are irreducibly different from one another in two ways: a) Each has a different narrative logic. Consequently, no two of them can be conflated with the third in a comprehensive and intelligible, i.e. ‘followable’, theological narrative as though they were different episodes of that third narrative according to its narrative logic, without distorting the narrative logics of the other two. b) Each way in which God relates to all else is ordered to a different sort of good: As scripturally narrated, God’s relating creatively is ordered to the goods of creature’s existence and flourishing in their kinds for as long as they last; God’s relating to draw creatures into eschatological consummation is ordered to the goods that constitute the ‘new creation’ and its ‘resurrection life’; God relating to reconcile estranged creatures is ordered to the goods that come with liberation from bondage to the social and personal consequences to creatures of their self-estrangements from God, one another, and themselves.
The three ways in which the Triune God relates to all else are asymmetrically related to one another. On the one hand, God relating to create is presupposed by both of the other two ways in which God relates (absent God relating to create, there is nothing either to consummate eschatologically or to reconcile if estranged). God relating to create ex nihilo, on the other hand, presupposes precisely nothing other than God. It is logically and ontologically prior or prevenient. On one traditional reading, canonical Scripture’s account of God relating to consummate creatures eschatologically begins with a promise, a divine self-commitment, that is coeval with God relating creatively but is not conceptually entailed by it. It presupposes God relating creatively. It is conceptually and ontologically contingent on (but not logically entailed by) God relating creatively. It does not presuppose creatures’ estrangement from God. For their part, scriptural narratives of how God relates to reconcile do presuppose creatures’ estrangement. They also presuppose the way by which God goes about relating to draw creatures into eschatological consummation (viz., by way of incarnation). They are conceptually and ontologically contingent on both (but not logically entailed by) God relating to create and God relating to bless eschatologically.
The Triune God that relates in those three ways is intrinsically good and is the ground of the goodness of all that is not God. The good God’s active relating to all else ought to be thought of as always ordered to their good. God’s active relating is freely prior to the activity of that which is not God. Therefore, as Kathryn Tanner has argued, descriptions of how God goes about relating in all three of those ways need to avoid suggesting that God’s actively powerful relating is in any way competitive with or is in possible conflict with the actions of creatures.Footnote 5 To that end, they ought not to involve descriptions that contrast God to creatures. So they should avoid descriptions that presuppose that God’s ‘being’, on one hand, and the ‘being’ in their kinds of all that is not God, on the other, are located at different points on a single continuum of degrees of ‘being’. Furthermore, God’s interactions with that which is not God ought not to be thought of as taking place on a common plane or within a common space in which their interactions would necessarily have a zero-sum, possibly conflictual character. Rather, in relating to that-which-is not-God, God is correlatively at once radically ‘other’ than they and radically ‘closer’ to them than they can be to themselves. In each of the three general ways in which God relates to what is not God, God is concurrently, as it were, on ‘both sides’ of the relation. So too, the senses in which God is ‘good’ and everything that is not God is ‘good’ ought not to be thought of as though located at different points on a single spectrum of ‘the good’ that admits of degrees.
Together, the differences between the three ways in which the Triune God relates to all else, and the asymmetrical pattern of relations among them, require us to sort out different senses in which our lived worlds are ‘good’ in virtue of each way in which God relates to them. In each case, we have to sort out a) what about them is good, b) for whom or for what our worlds are good, and c) what a) and b) have to do with the particular ways in which God goes about relating to them.
Our lived worlds are ‘good’ in that God draws them to eschatological consummation
It is clear that the Triune God relating creatively to all-that-is-not-God is ontologically fundamental to the other two ways in which God relates to all else. God relates to already concretely actual creatures to draw them to an eschatological blessing of them as creatures in their kinds. Such a blessing expresses God’s valuing of creatures. It is a valuing such that God does not turn them into something other than creatures and does not violate the integrity of the kind of creature each is. Eschatological blessing neither nullifies creative blessing nor reveals that creative blessing is in some way insufficient and requires a coda to bring it to full realisation.Footnote 6 God’s valuing creatures may fairly be characterised as one way in which God freely loves them.
Arguably, as narrated in Christian canonical Scriptures, the Triune God’s ‘intention’ to eschatologically bless all that is not God is coeval with God’s creating ex nihilo (as expressed in the way Genesis 2: 1-3 characterises how God ‘finishes’ creating in a seventh day marked by ‘rest from all the work [God] had done in creation’); is explicitly promised to the patriarchs (e.g., Gen. 12:3, to Abram: ‘in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’); a promise early Christians understood God began to keep in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., Paul’s characterisation of Jesus’ own resurrection as the ‘first fruits’ of the eschatological general resurrection in 1 Cor. 15:20), and therewith the concrete inauguration of God’s process of fully actualising eschatological ‘new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17); a process by which creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and ‘will obtain “the freedom of the glory of the children of God”’ (Rom. 8:21); a process during which the Holy Spirit works transformative ‘fruits of the Spirit’ within and between us (Rom. 5:23); including transformation of oppressive structural features of our lived worlds (their ‘elemental spirits’, in the language of Gal. 4: 4-5).
Hence what is good about our lived worlds as related to by God in eschatological blessing is what is going on within them, and within us as integral parts of them. ‘What is good’ just is the ongoing blessing of creatures being drawn into eschatological consummation. As is commonly said, God’s eschatological blessing is both ‘“already” concretely inaugurated now’ (in Jesus’ resurrection) and ‘not yet fully actualised’. God’s movement toward full actualisation of God’s promise brings moments of qualities of communal eschatological life now that – lived in the power of the eschatological Spirit – are compatible with, but are not among the goods comprised by, qualities of flourishing creaturely life. Eschatologically indexed goods are a different order of goods.
Admittedly, our ability to describe eschatologically indexed goods is severely limited. What we have to go on is mainly a scriptural rhetoric that is at once resonant with deep human longing and quite vague. Those goods are characterised overall as the goods of a ‘new creation’ that is a transformation of the ‘old’ creation, ex vetere rather than ex nihilo. Human creatures enter into it through their resurrection into a new mode of life. Resurrected life is immortal. The ‘goods’ of resurrected life are still goods for creatures. The rhetoric skews toward the subjective (the experience of peace, joy, love, beatitude). That subjectivity is described as unbrokenly focused on God in wonder, love and praise. The rhetoric stresses the communal character of that subjectivity (a communion of saints; a universally embracing beloved community). The rhetoric also stresses that these are the goods of a new creation that is only fully actualised in a context in which all past moral evils have been disclosed, acknowledged, judged, and set right. Much of the rhetoric’s imagery is negative. It describes life not marked by loss, suffering, death, grief, marriage and predation. This suggests that in the new creation, resurrected human creatures, while remaining creatures, are no longer physically bodied. As the Apostle Paul’s confusing discussion shows (1 Cor. 15:39-44), it is a major conceptual challenge to explain what sort of ‘life’ that would be. The particulars of eschatologically indexed goods are correspondingly elusive.
Such an eschatological blessing is good for the creatures who receive it. By itself, that affirmation does not imply that there is something ‘less than good’ about flourishing creaturely life. There is no transcendental hierarchically graduated spectrum of ‘goods’ on which the goods of creative blessing and the goods of eschatological blessing are located in different places and contrasted to one another in terms of their ‘desirability’.
But it goes too far to say that the ‘good’ of creatures’ eschatological blessing is what they were created for, the good to which God’s relating to them creatively is ordered. That it ‘goes too far’ follows from a difference between the two ways in which God is scripturally said to go about relating to all else. Both creative and eschatological blessings are ongoing, steady-state ways in which God relates, as opposed to punctiliar instances of some general type of relating. But whereas God’s creative relating ‘begins’ without a context (i.e., ex nihilo), God’s concrete inauguration of eschatological relating begins within a punctiliar event among creatures (viz., the particular creaturely context of the incarnation), whose creaturely reality (the life of Jesus of Nazareth in first century Galilee under Roman rule, etc.) presupposes God’s creative relating ordered to properly creaturely goods, whether or not God also relates (as in fact God does) in eschatological blessing. The latter are not ontologically or logically necessitated by the former. God gives them freely in love. They are grace upon grace in different but analogous senses of ‘grace.’
However, it is also the case that our lived worlds, the creaturely context within which the gift of the goods of God’s relating to creatures in eschatological blessing are given, are also profoundly distorted in a multitude of ways. That also must be vigorously affirmed theologically.
Studied in ways that systematically abstract our lived worlds from God’s relating to them, as the social and physical sciences rightly must do, it is far from clear that the changes in our lived worlds across long periods of time move along any identifiable arc, much less one that moves toward justice. Moreover, even when studied theologically in ways that are conceptually shaped by the claims that a) God relates creatively to our lived worlds and b) the claim that somehow our creaturely lived worlds are deeply distorted in their basic dynamics, but all the same studied in ways c) not shaped by the claim that God relates to them in eschatological blessing, it is difficult to see grounds for affirming that history moves along an arc toward justice, much less toward a universally embracing beloved community of reconciled enemies. The sense in which our lived worlds are ‘good’ in virtue of God’s relating in eschatological blessing is not that they are ‘on the whole more good than not’, or are as ‘creaturely’ inherently ‘developing toward becoming more good than not’. They are neither. They are continuously profoundly ambiguous: at once distorted by powerfully dynamic social, economic, and political injustices and many types of horrific suffering, and at the same time the site of God’s concrete inauguration (in Jesus’ resurrection) of God’s keeping God’s promise of eschatological blessing and the site of God’s ongoing movement in God’s own way toward full actualisation of what God inaugurated. The appropriate human response to that ambiguity is a certain sort of hope that is neither the ‘absence of pessimism’ nor ‘optimism’.
Our lived worlds are ‘good’ in that God relates to reconcile them to God when they are estranged from God
To repeat, it is clear that the Triune God’s relating creatively to all that is not God is ontologically fundamental to the other two ways in which God relates to all else. God relates to already concretely actual creatures to reconcile them to God when they are estranged from God. Reconciling them to God does not turn them into something other than creatures, or into different kinds of creatures.
As narrated in different ways by the canonical Gospels and commented on in different respects by canonical ‘Epistles’, the way in which the Triune God goes about relating to reconcile is God’s incarnation in the life trajectory of Jesus of Nazareth. In that respect, God relating to reconcile presupposes and depends on God’s concrete way of relating to bless eschatologically.
New Testament texts locate both their narratives of Jesus and their reflections on its reconciling significance as the climax of a larger Hebrew Bible narrative of God’s successive episodic deeds of deliverance of the Israelites. As the climax of the Hebrew Bible narrative, the New Testament narrative does not imply that God’s relating to reconcile supersedes the covenant relation that God had formed with Abraham’s descendants. Rather, it presupposes the latter as it tells of God keeping the promises God made to Abraham’s descendants in a way that also draws Gentiles into that relation.
The way God goes about relating to reconcile (viz., incarnation) presupposes that creatures are estranged from God and that, in consequence, their lived worlds are profoundly and systemically distorted. Where neither God’s relating to bless creatively nor to bless eschatologically presupposes the ‘wrongness’, God’s relating to reconcile does presuppose it. More particularly it presupposes two things: a) that the ‘wrongness’ is a function of creatures’ self-estrangement from God that leads to creatures’ estrangement from one another and from themselves; and b) that the ‘wrongness’ binds creatures in diminished creaturely life from which they need to be ‘redeemed’, ‘ransomed’, ‘liberated’ into forms of life in which their freedom as God-relating creatures flourishes. God the Son does this by living in creatures’ distorted lived worlds as one among them, undergoing the full consequences to them of their self-estrangement from God so as to draw them, just as they are in their estrangement from God, into his own relation to God. By way of incarnation, the Son of God exchanges his right relationship with the ‘Father’ for the creatures’ estranged and distorted lived worlds that move inexorably toward nothingness; and, paradoxically, he relocates creatures – still estranged from God – into his right relationship with God. They are set right with God. This has come about by way of a punctiliar event of liberation by God, namely the life-trajectory of Jesus of Nazareth. That event is an ‘objective’ fact about the ultimate context of creatures’ lives. By that event, creatures are set free of bondage to the consequences to them of their estrangement from God, one another, and themselves. They are freed to flourish in lives that respond appropriately to this aspect of the ultimate context of their lived worlds.
So what is good about creatures’ lived worlds, as related to by God to reconcile them to God in their estrangement, is twofold. On one hand, it is the goods to which God’s relating is ordered: the restoration to creatures that are self-estranged from God of the freedom to work out for themselves in the concrete particularities of their lived worlds, how to live in ways that respond appropriately to the ways God relates to them. Only as lived in that freedom can their lives flourish. The goods indexed to God’s relating to reconcile centre around both creatures’ reconciliation with one another, above all with their enemies, and their reconciliation with themselves. On the other hand, a condition of the possibility of living into those goods is a certain goodness of their lived worlds, their proximate contexts. They are distorted worlds that God patiently loves while they are still distorted, worlds in which God has already enacted God’s intention to set them into right relation with God (cf. Rom. 5:6-17; 6:9-11). This way of relating is God’s grace at its most radical. Given that their lived worlds are loved unconditionally by God in all their profound ambiguity, how can they be declared ‘un-loveable’ and therefore ‘not good’?
At the same time, God’s love in relating to reconcile estranged creatures and their lived worlds by way of incarnation brings into focus yet another sort of anomalous ‘wrongness’ in creatures’ lived worlds. God’s way of relating to reconcile estranged creatures (pick your metaphor) ‘breaks the chains’ that bind them to the distortions that follow from their self-estrangement from God, or ‘breaks open the doors’ that imprison them, constricting their creaturely freedom to act in ways that are appropriate responses to God’s ways of relating to them. It leaves them free to work out how to live in ways that are responsive to God’s relating to them or to continue to live in ways that resist or ignore God’s relating to them. The ‘chains are broken’ and the ‘doors thrown open’, but it is manifest that very often (usually?) human creatures do not exercise the freedom to move out of living deaths into flourishing life. Surely, if in eschatological life (not yet fully actualised!) God will grace creatures to have lives of appropriate response to the ways God relates to them that are wholeheartedly free, God could also here and now grace all estranged creatures who have been reconciled to God by God with the same freedom? Isn’t there a profound wrongness about the evident absence of such Godly graciousness, an aporia at the heart of God’s way of relating to reconcile? Doctrines of foreordination (whether ‘single’ or ‘double’) seem only to bring that aporia into sharper focus rather than show that it is not really an aporia.
Our lived worlds are good in that God relates to them creatively
The Triune God relating to create ex nihilo is not only fundamental to (i.e., ontologically and conceptually, though not chronologically, prior to) God’s relating in eschatological blessing and God’s relating to reconcile. It also defines the basic distinction between all-that-is-not-God and God. The way that distinction is defined shapes, in turn, the sense in which it is said that our God-created worlds are ‘good’ precisely as concretely actual lived worlds.
Christian doctrines of creation have traditionally been warranted primarily by canonical scriptural accounts of God relating creatively to all else. There are two sorts of such accounts, each of which has a very different literary context: Proverbs 8:22-31 and Genesis 1:1:2:4.
Proverbs 8:22-31 makes explicit the creation theology that is the implicit underlying theme of canonical Wisdom literature. Canonical biblical Wisdom literature makes no reference to God’s covenant promises to Abraham and his descendants, to God’s acts for their ‘deliverance’ or liberation, to Torah, or to Temple ritual. In Proverbs’ account, God’s creative relating is ordered solely to the goods that comprise the well-being of creatures in their kinds, and especially the goods that comprise the well-being of humankind. Proverbs explicitly stresses that God ‘delights’ (vv. 30-31) in creating and in creatures for their own sakes. But this account is almost entirely ignored by traditional doctrines of creation.
Instead, traditional doctrines of creation have been warranted by appeal to Genesis 1:1-2:4, which is read as a literary unit that tells of the first event in a linear series of episodic events that make up the Pentateuch’s long account of ‘salvation history’. The opening creation event establishes the conditions of the possibility and actuality of all the subsequent events in ‘salvation history’. Read that way, Genesis 1:1-2:4 is construed as a cosmogony, a causal explanation of the beginning of the existence of what is not God, the ‘event’ of the creation of the world in the past (as though it were the biblical parallel to modern physics’ singular ‘Big-Bang’ theory). It is read as an answer to the question, ‘How come there is a world?’, framed in terms of the act’s ultimate end: deliverance of those in bondage. Read from that perspective, the narrative logic of Proverbs’ account of God relating creatively is ‘bent’ to conform to the narrative logic of accounts of God relating to ‘save/liberate/reconcile’. Accordingly, the goods to which God’s creative relating are ordered become principally the goods of God’s relating to ‘save/liberate/reconcile’ rather than the well-being of creatures in their kinds for their own sakes as, precisely, creatures.
Read in that way, Genesis 1:1-2:4’s repeated affirmation that God finds what is created to be ‘good’ (and at the conclusion of the story ‘very good’) is ambiguous: Does it mean that the abstract possibility of free creaturely life in which creatures’ well-being could be actualised is ‘good’, but in fact has never yet been actualised (or almost never, assuming Eden has any factual credibility)? Does it mean that only the state of affairs before the ‘fall’ (in Genesis 3) was ‘good’, and thereafter creation is not ‘good’? Does it mean that nothing is good until God’s promise to liberate creation from its bondage to evil is fully actualised? In that case, does it mean that the distortions that are creatures’ horrific evils are themselves somehow nonetheless ‘good’ in that they are a necessary part of the conditions-of-the-possibility of God acting to ‘save/liberate/reconcile’ (cf. doctrines of ‘the fortunate fall’)? Clearly, exegetical decisions are theologically decisive at this point.
Without supporting exegetical arguments here on my part, consider an alternative reading of Genesis 1:1-2:4 that comports more easily with Proverbs 8.Footnote 7 Literary-critical analysis suggests that Genesis 1-11 is a literary unit. It serves as the preface to the entire Pentateuch’s extended narrative of episodes of God’s relating to liberate certain human creatures from bondage. Together, the eleven chapters describe the sort of lived worlds in which God’s liberative acts take place. What it sketches is more a cosmology than a cosmogony, and it proceeds by way of two kinds of writing: a) genealogies, and b) three sorts of stories about, respectively, human achievements, human crimes and punishment, and God’s creative relating. The genealogies and the stories together simultaneously stress that God’s creative relating is a blessing of creatures and nuance that ‘blessing’. Each of the three sorts of stories identifies a general feature of all reality other than God, all lived worlds, including ourselves as integral parts of them: creaturely powers, creativity, and beauty; creaturely horrific evil; creaturely radical contingency – all creatures’ dependency for their own continuousness-through-changes on God’s ongoing creative relating to them.
In the genealogies in Genesis 1-12 – including Genesis 1:1-2:4 read as a ‘genealogy’ without a pregnancy or a birthing (cf. Gen. 2:4) – God’s relating to all else creatively is ordered to the ‘good’ of life and its well-being, and to the good of human life in particular. At the same time, they underscore that creatures are not God. That is, the fundamental difference between creature and God is marked by the distinction between ‘creature’ and ‘Creator’. The (‘Priestly’?) editors, drawing on more ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian creation myths and genealogies, eliminated all descriptions of God’s creativity as God’s begetting semi-divine kings whose offspring became human beings in an increasingly diminished divine lineage. In the Genesis account, creatureliness is entirely desacralised. Furthermore, the creation stories are edited in ways that bring out God’s radical priority in relating creatively. As described in Genesis, God’s creation is not contingent in any way on anything else. Conversely, creatures’ concrete actuality in their kinds is radically contingent on God’s ongoing relating to them.
Together, the genealogies and Genesis 1:1-2:4 also underscore that creatures have temporal continuity only through change. What God creates are concretely actual (as opposed to abstract) creatures that are continuous through constant changes for as long as they last. The genealogies are highly condensed narratives of human social continuity (perhaps of clans) across successive generations. God’s constant relating in creative blessing in Genesis 1:1-2:4 similarly imbues all creatures with a ‘forward thrusting, ever-present power of becoming’.Footnote 8 God’s creative relating is not analogous to a one-off episodic event but is rather ongoing. That is why ‘blessing’ is the apt characterisation of it.
That ‘on-goingness’ has several implications that nuance ‘blessing’. On the one hand, it means that for creatures, inasmuch as time is the measure of change, one universal feature of creatures is temporality. Absent the temporality of ‘creatureliness’, God’s relating to it could neither need to be nor in fact be ‘ongoing’. On the other hand, the ‘ongoingness’ of God’s creative blessing means that, inasmuch as change entails loss, loss of many sorts is inherent in creatureliness itself: no concrete creaturely actuality without change and no change without temporality and loss. Those are features of ‘creatureliness’ as such. So, too, it means that, insofar as creatures are physical, they are integral wholes made up of ‘parts’, assemblages that are constantly vulnerable to disintegration through changes across time. They are therefore inherently fragile, vulnerable to damage by fellow creatures that compromises their creaturely integrity in their kind and leads to their eventual annihilation. These are features of the ‘nature’, of what is constituted by God’s blessing in God’s relating to all else creatively.
At the same time, God’s creativity has the ‘ongoingness’ of a blessing, which means that it is ordered to the well-being of creatures. That is the point of calling it a ‘blessing’. God’s injunction to living creatures in Genesis to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1:22, 28) testifies to that, as do the genealogies. God’s relating to create is ordered to creatures’ well-being in their kinds through their continuities-through-change, which necessarily entails losses – and not, as it were, in spite of, against, or by working around losses. God’s ways of relating to all else are not ordered to undoing their creatureliness.
This, in turn, underscores creatures’ finitude or limitedness vis-a-vis other creatures of all kinds. They are not self-sufficient. Beyond their dependence on God for creaturely actuality, their well-being is contingent on their interactions, transactions, and inter-dependencies with fellow creatures, which can be competitive and conflictual. Inevitably, they involve some losses. For example, all animals fuel their lives by consuming other creatures. Creatures’ well-being is also contingent on resources of energy, intelligence, imagination, and accumulated experiences that are interior to them. And they, too, are limited. They die. God blesses them creatively for as long as they last. On these points, Genesis 1:1-2:4, read in this way, comports with Proverbs 8.
Genesis 1:1-2:4 is also explicit about God’s disposition toward creatures. Having declared that what was created in each of the six stages (‘days’) of creating (except the second) to be ‘good’, at the end of the sixth stage, God declares it all ‘very good’ just as it is in all its finitude. God’s creative relating is a blessing and not a curse. Here, the approbation ‘good’ probably means something like ‘just what I intended’. The creatures are ‘good’ for their own sakes, as ends in themselves whose well-being is to be valued. That judgement comports with Proverbs’ account of God’s delight with creatures for their own sakes. It is an approbation of an active relating in which God is described as engaging freely. The editors eliminated from the ancient creation myths from which they borrowed all descriptions of creation as a struggle, more or less violent, against another deity or with recalcitrant matter. That free relating is traditionally signalled by the qualifier ex nihilo,
A freely given good may fairly be called a gift of love. The blessing God gives in love is God’s ongoing creative relating that constitutes creatures’ concrete actuality in its finitude and radical contingency on just that ongoing relating. God’s creating ex nihilo has a beginning, and the changes through which creatures continue since then can be measured (i.e., are temporal), but God’s creating is not an episodic event in the past. It is always everywhere a continuous creating.
This radical freedom distinguishes God’s creative blessing from God’s providential care of that which God creates. God’s creative relating sustains creatures’ continuity-through-change ex nihilo (i.e., without restraint). God’s relating to provide for concretely actual creatures in their kinds and in their individual particularities, on the other hand, is constrained. It is constrained by God’s self-commitment to relate to them in ways that honour their goodness for their own sakes by not violating their particular creaturely integrities as defined by their kinds and by their individual histories of continuity-through-changes.
In virtue of the continuous character of God’s creative relating, being related to by God is a universal feature of the concrete actuality of each and every creature. Hence, for as long as any creature continues to exist, God relates to it creatively in such a way that God is concurrently prior to the creature in being and thus radically free of the creature (i.e., God does not have to relate to it or any other creature to be God; God is ontologically ‘other’) and so interior to the creature as to be nearer to it than it can be to itself. Thus, in multiple ways, God’s relating creatively to all that is not God is good for temporal, ever-changing, inter-dependent, physical creatures’ well-being in their kinds for as long as they last.
God’s relating in creative blessing may be good for creatures, and for humankind in particular, in ways sketched above. But in what sense is ‘creatureliness’ as such good? What is the ‘good’, not for, but of concretely finite creatureliness in all its vulnerability to damage and loss? After all, precisely because God’s creative blessing is the condition of the possibility of the goods to which it is ordered, it is also the condition of the possibility of the distortions of creaturely dynamics that subject creatures to horrendous evils.
Here, the way the distinction between Creator and creature defines the basic distinction between God and all that is not God is critical. Rather than framing the distinction between God and all that is not God in terms of where each is located on a postulated continuum of ‘being’ or ‘the good’, the Creator/creature distinction frames it in terms of an ongoing relation that God, who is good, freely enters into. That relation is in some ways analogous to relations constituted by certain human intentional actions. The massive disanalogy is that, while human intentional actions presuppose the actuality of that to which they relate, God’s creative relating constitutes that creaturely actuality. God constitutes it in such a way that the creature’s continuous being-related-to-by-God is, we may say, ‘essential’ to being a finite creature. A human creature may deny that radical dependency, but it cannot escape it. A good God does not create what is evil in its own right. Indeed, the good God who relates creatively also relates in love of creatures for their own sakes to bless creatures eschatologically and, when they are estranged from God, relates in love for their own sakes to reconcile them. Therefore, it cannot be correct to say that creatureliness as such is somehow intrinsically not good.
The Creator/creature distinction rules out several conceptual strategies for resolving this aporia.
a) It rules out the proposal that creaturely experience of evil is an illusion because creatures are intrinsically ‘divine’, but at a lesser degree of being and goodness than God. On this view, creatures of different kinds are located at various points on a continuum of degrees of being and goodness, and at lower degrees of being and goodness than God, the supreme degree of being and goodness. Inasmuch as God is the supreme degree of being, the entire continuum of being – including the points further down the scale – is ‘divine’ and varying degrees and, correlatively, ‘good.’ That the Creator creates ex nihilo rules that out.
b) It rules out proposals that acknowledge, but minimise, the importance of experience of evil. They argue that its importance depends on perspective. Viewed immediately, it may look horrific; however, because historical changes have not ended, our grasp of what is going on is limited. Viewed eschatologically, or from God’s eternal perspective, the entire spectrum of history will exhibit a pattern that will make positive sense of what is experienced now as ‘evils’ by showing their necessary role in God’s providence ordered to creatures’ good. The proposal trades on the notion of a distinction between God’s willing evil events and God’s permitting them. But the distinction rests on problematic concepts of ‘God’s plan’ and ‘God’s power as in principle absolute’.
c) The Creator/creature distinction rules out dualist proposals that some of what is not God are indeed good creatures and others are intrinsically evil beings. The distinction holds that God alone creates that which is not God ex nihilo, including that which becomes profoundly distorted. That is what makes the profundity of our lived worlds’ ‘wrongness’ so basic a theological aporia.
d) It also rules out the proposal that what we observe and experience as evils in our lived worlds, while certainly profound, correlate with the fact that God’s creative relating is a project still in process and incomplete until the full actualisation of creation at the eschaton in the ‘new creation’. The Creator/creature distinction implies a picture of our lived worlds here and now as truly and fully actualised ‘creatureliness’ that is good in its own right for its own sake and not because its profound distortions are a necessary developmental stage in God’s creative process.
e) Finally, it rules out the anti-Christian theology proposal that precisely because creatureliness characterises all that is not God, who is perfectly good, it is therefore also not good simply by virtue of not being God. As though ‘all that is not God’ were ‘not-God’ in the sense of ‘the “other” that defines what it is by negating what it “others”’. In that case, ‘not-God’ implies ‘anti-God’. To the contrary, according to the Creator/creature distinction, in relating creatively, God is ongoingly closer to creatures than they can be to themselves.
The Creator/creature distinction does not provide a way to ‘solve’ or mitigate conceptually the aporia created by the clear reality of profound ‘wrongness’ distorting our lived worlds. It only intensifies it. But it does suggest a way of conceptualising that wrongness, that is, the relation of both ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ to creatureliness as such, that is an alternative to the conceptual strategies listed above. It suggests the broadly Augustinian tradition’s theme that evil is a privatio boni, a privation of the intrinsic good of creatures’ concrete actuality as ‘creaturely’. The variation on that theme proposed here has been formulated in terms of evil as ‘distortion’ of the various sorts of dynamics that move the constant changes through which finite creatures in their kinds are continuous for as long as they last. As sin against God and evil done to and undergone by creatures, such distortions are not a kind of creature in their own right. They are parasitic on concrete creaturely actualities. That creaturely dynamics are distorted means that the way those dynamics make for the creature’s well-being is diminished (privatio boni). That diminishment is not just subjective, that is, just a matter either of the violated creature’s or observer’s feelings and perceptions. It is an objective change in the concretely actual dynamics of the lives of both the creatures diminished by evils and those who are agents of evils. Such distortion does not necessarily mean that the creature’s power in interactions with other creatures is diminished. Distortion of creaturely dynamics does not necessarily mean their weakening. They may, in fact, be enhanced. ‘Evil’ can be very powerful. Nor does it mean that the intrinsic ‘good’ of finite creaturely actuality for its own sake has been diminished.
The ‘good’ of creaturely actuality as such is not behavioural. It is not ‘moral’ goodness that can change over time as a person’s character and characteristic behaviour change. It is the ‘good’ of an intrinsic value that demands respect for its own sake and not for what it may turn into, how it might be reformed, how it is useful, its potential for contributing to other creatures’ well-being, or even what it does for God. It rests solely on creatures’ being related to by God, who is good and loves them. That value is precisely not the creatures’ potential to become God. Nor is it a value that is undercut even when creatures distort their creaturely dynamics in lives that strive, however anonymously, to be God. And such a position is consistent with the fact that Christians have traditionally held that it is precisely in their finitude that creatures are in their own way the glory of God.
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