The Triune Creator of “all there is, visible and invisible,” the “Being of beings” in the unbearable wholeness of eternal goodness, beauty, and truth, gave birth to a contingent potentiality in the freedom of “crucified love,”[1] the logos and telos of the divine expression (Jn 1:1).
Created as an open potentiality of being, creation has room to be itself and explore its built-in potentialities creatively, including the capacity to improvise at the highest level of ingenuity, ruling out predetermined forms.
A creation set free to “become what it will become” yet free to resonate with divine expression involves the risk of contrariness so that only “crucified love” dares to flare forth such a project, thus securing the telos of the creation without predetermining it.
Structurally equipped, at least in principle, to receive the creator's presence, the creation’s modality of being is incarnational from inception (were this not so, the incarnation of God in Christ would be unthinkable).
Traditionally, the Christian view sees creation as the creator's self-revelation. In his omnipresence, the creator invests every part of the creation with theological significance.
The act of creating the “other” included the genius of allowing the universe to explore all potential forms of organisation contained in it through observable randomness at the micro level, as in biological evolution.
Creation presents itself as
o A deeply interconnected, self-organising, internally contingent, and intelligible ‘organism,’ exploring all realisable potentialities toward higher organisation and fullness of being.
o Embodying contradictory yet ruling movements from order to disorder (entropy) and from chaos to higher complexity.
o A finite system that depends on the self-expenditure and recycling of its own substance, like the food chain, for its continuous development.
o Similarly, at the human end, contradictory energies like self-annihilation and hope for human and planetary flourishing.
o With the arrival of the human creation, as a body of awakening to consciousness and love, or—given our theological starting point—to religious consciousness for short.
Since Jesus's human body consisted of the same matter as ours, he embodies all cosmic history, atom by atom, from the Big Bang to the present.
Because of the incarnational modality of God’s self-gift in creation, I suggest that:
The creator manifested himself in all stages of its becoming.
Detectable Christic traces (footprints) worth explicating may be discovered in collaboration with the natural sciences, for instance, as the pattern of dying and redemptive suffering while giving birth to new forms:
At life’s emergence, from inert stardust to metabolism.
In Biology, from caterpillar to butterfly.
In Quantum Mechanics, the oneness of all things.
In classical Thermodynamics, from entropy to complexity.
In cultural Anthropology, from the sacrificial order of archaic religion to the innocent victim of the gospel. And ...
In the words of Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Christ plays in ten thousand places.”[2]
[1] “The Lamb who was slain from before the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8)
[2] Gerard Manly Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”
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