Post Edited (One Love) : 4/11/2010 7:56:03 PM (GMT-5)

Similtude: Right, but why does the continuance of creation have to be volitional? Once there's something created to relate TO, why can't God's benevolent/relational nature just take over to necessitate the continuance of that relationship?

Tom: God’s nature take over God’s willing? But God’s willing is according to nature. Not following.

I think it’s like D says…

D: Once God decided to create, there was no looking back for God...and God knew that before creating.

Tom: So it sounds like Jeff and D are saying the same thing. God’s nature is such that God’s goodness and love do not require or necessitate creation though he nature permits and grounds the possibility of creation. But once God creates, as Jeff puts it, God’s nature takes over to necessitate the continuance of creation. I wouldn’t use ‘necessitate’ to express this because that sounds a bit like you’re ascribing a ‘logical’ necessity to God’s creating, and you’ve agreed there is no such necessity. But we DO want to say that once God creates, he consistently loves creation naturally and his deciding to not love creation isn’t possible given his nature, though his not creating was possible given his nature.

Covenant is just a word we use to describe God’s relationship to a world he didn’t have to create but which he cannot naturally give up on now that it exists. A covenant is an agreement, a commitment, to a initiate and maintain relationship under given circumstances.

D: THAT'S why Jesus was the Lamb slain BEFORE THE FOUNDATIONS OF CREATION...

Tom: The verdict might still be out on just what’s being described here by Peter, but yeah…

D: …and, via his resurrection, shows us that God has always intended the ETERNALITY of this covenant...and Creation.

Tom: God’s “always” intended that creation continue…i.e., following the choice to create, you mean, not that he eternally intended creation (though the Orthodox would say God eternally wills creation). I think what Jeff wants to say is that the continuance of creation doesn’t have to be as freely volitional (or free in the same sense) as the choice to create in the first place. So while it’s meaningful or appropriate to say God is free from creation in the sense that God is free from willing to bring creation into being, it may not be appropriate to say God is as free from willing creation’s continued existence as he was to create in the first place. Creation is not held in existence on a moment by moment basis by ever successive equally free choices to grant the world its being. God is not capable of annihilating the entire project or letting it entirely pass into nothingness, not he was capable of refraining from calling it into being in the first place.

Jeff’s saying that the continuance of creation is a given…i.e., given the nature of God. I agree. God doesn’t continually will the existence of the world in the same sense that he first willed it into being. That would mean having to concede that creation was not an irrevocable commitment (or ‘covenant’). I’d say God continues to will the world’s existence because THAT (viz., the world’s continued existence into eternity) JUST IS what the first choice to create was. So the will to create in the first place is the will to forever will that creation be alongside God, an irrevocable kenosis, and the irrevocability of the free choice is grounded, as Jeff says, in God’s nature, though it's mediated, as D says, via God’s will.

Clear as mud.

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/11/2010 11:28:46 PM (GMT-5)