In these refl ections I have sought to outline a sketch for a Trinitarian theology of creation and deifying transformation in Christ that has meaning for today.
I am conscious that making these kinds of claims about the triune God ’ s engagement with the natural world immediately raises many issues that I am not dealing with here. One of the most important is the relationship between this view of God and the pain, death and extinction built into evolutionary emergence. Christopher Southgate ’ s work in this volume is important here. 55
55 See also C. Southgate, Th e Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).
I have tried to off er some refl ections on this fundamental theological problem elsewhere. 56
In the creation theology of Athanasius, God continually creates the whole universe of creatures through the eternal Word in the Holy Spirit. Th e divine Source of All, the Father is immediately present, not only to the whole universe, but to each single creature, through the Word and in the Spirit. Th e diverse creatures of our universe give expression to the fruitfulness of the eternal generativity of the life of God – they all exist in and from the eternal generation of the Word and the eternal procession of the Spirit. Th is whole world of creatures exists within the delight of the mutual relations of the dynamic life of the Th ree.
Th e God of love dynamically empowers the emergent universe through the presence of the indwelling Word and Spirit. Earth and its creatures, its insects, birds and animals, its forests and seas, its habitats and bioregions, all exist because the God of love is closer to them than they are to themselves. Th e Trinity of love enables their existence, their interaction and their becoming in the community of creation. Th e relationship of creation is one by which each creature partakes of God through the Word and in the Spirit. Each is loved, each is precious – ‘ not one of them is forgotten in God ’ s sight ’ (Lk. 12.6).
However, the good news of Christianity is that the divine love for the world of creatures involves far more than the triune act of continuous creation. It centres on the radical self-giving of incarnation – a God who enters into matter and fl esh, uniting the world of matter and fl esh radically with God ’ s self, and transforming it from within. In the incarnation, the eternal Word, in the power of the Spirit, is united not only with Jesus ’ creaturely reality, and not only with humanity, but also with the matter of the universe, with the evolutionary processes that constitute biological life on Earth, with all creatures. Th e eternal Word in whom all things are created becomes a creature of fl esh and blood, made of atoms that are produced in stars, shaped by evolutionary history, subject to pain and death, in solidarity with the whole community of life on Earth.
Athanasius tells us that the incarnation is an act of radical revelation of what is in the heart of God – the Wisdom of God already manifest in the diversity
56 D. Edwards, How God Acts: Creation, Redemption and Special Divine Action (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2010).
of creation all around us now comes to us and meets us in our own humanity in the midst of biological life. But the incarnation is not only revelation, but also our forgiveness, healing and transformation. It is the beginning of the end of death. It is our deifi cation and, with us, the deifi cation and fulfi lment of the natural world. God becomes a creature of matter and fl esh in order that human beings and with them the rest of creation might be deifi ed and transformed in God, participating in the life of the Trinity. Th is process has begun in our world through the resurrection of the crucifi ed Christ, the beginning of new creation at work in our world.
Th is incarnational theology culminates in the bodily resurrection of the crucifi ed Jesus. He is transfi gured in glory, the promise and the beginning of the transfi guration of human beings and, with them, of the whole creation.
Th e resurrection and ascension of the crucifi ed Jesus show that matter and fl esh are forever in God. In the incarnation and its culmination in resurrection, God commits God ’ s self to this world, to this Earth and its creatures, and does so eternally. In the risen Christ, part of the biological community of Earth is forever transfi gured in God, the promise and the beginning of the transformation of all things. God has committed God ’ s self to this universe of creatures forever.
In pondering the triptych of creation, incarnation and the resurrection of the crucifi ed Jesus, we come to know that we cannot love God without loving God ’ s beloved creatures. We cannot follow Jesus, the Word made fl esh, without embracing the matter and fl esh embraced in his incarnation. Th e three Christian doctrines form the basis for a Christian commitment to this Earth and its creatures. Conversion to Christ involves love for this Earth and all its creatures, an ecological conversion.
Th omas Torrance, drawing on Athanasius ’ s view of the incarnation, writes:
‘ God has decisively bound himself to the created universe and the created universe to himself, with such an unbreakable bond that the Christian hope of redemption and recreation extends not just to human beings but to the universe as a whole. ’ 57 We may hope that this bilby too ‘ will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God ’ (Rom. 8.22). Th is hope is based on the divine promise given us in
57 T. F. Torrance, Th e Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Th ree Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1996), p. 244.
Christ – in the transformation of death brought about through his death and resurrection.
As Paul says, however, our hope is not for something that we see – ‘ we hope for what we do not see ’ (Rom. 8.25). Karl Rahner long ago pointed out that we have no clear vision of our eschatological future. 58 What we have is the promise of God that we experience in the grace given now – which leads us to hope in the fi nal fulfi lment of ourselves, of bilbies and the global community of life on Earth, and the whole creation in the incomprehensible loving mystery of the divine Trinity. In the meantime, we have the words of Jesus about sparrows and bilbies: ‘ Not one of them is forgotten in God ’ s sight ’ (Lk. 12.6).
58 K. Rahner, ‘ Th e Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions ’ , in Th eological Investigations, Volume
Four (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), pp. 323 – 46.