Divine dialogues - part 5

It is my contention that the counter-testimony, the conversation with God in which one can complain, praise, bewail, approve, lament and love, emerges in the New Testament and particularly, as we have seen, in John’s Gospel as the revelation and relationship into which God wants to lead us. In order to support this contention I want to end this chapter by examining the way in which conversation as counter-testimony emerges in the Old Testament in preparation for the revelation of God that is Jesus. To do that I want to consider the creation stories found in Genesis and the giving of the Law in Exodus.

The story of Adam naming the creatures (Genesis 2. 18–25) paints a picture of the way in which God intended our relationship with him to be. In this story both God and the creatures have a voice to which Adam must listen in order that he can understand the essence of each creature and create a name that reflects that essence. Yet it is the human being that is given the responsibility of naming the creatures and whose creativity is trusted by God, as the names stand. However, this exercise in identifying and naming the possibilities inherent in creation is also an exercise in developing greater self-awareness in Adam. As he listens to the voice of creation, identifying and naming possibilities, Adam is also thinking about his own need of a helper and identifying that none of these creatures meets his needs. Through this joint activity which God and Adam share together, they reach the conclusion that no suitable helper for Adam is to be found among the creatures. Then, because of Adam’s increased self-understanding, when the God creates woman from Adam’s rib, Adam is immediately able to recognise and name her as the helper for which they have been seeking.

The creation stories, as a whole, seem to depict a relational God creating a relational world with which he interacts. Within this, humanity is created in his relational image to develop the relational possibilities inherent within creation.[1] The creation is seen as both actuality and possibility and humanity has the responsibility of actualising the possible. This understanding of the creation stories sees humanity as partners or collaborators with God in the development of creation.

Nicholas Mosley’s novel The Hesperides Tree is a fictional exploration of this possibility. His central character, while delving in a library, comes across the writings of the ninth-century monk John Scotus Eriugena who “said that it was in this life that one could if one chose have an experience of God; of God and humans going hand in hand, creating what happened hand in hand”. His understanding of Scotus is that:

“In this world God was dependent on humans for what He and they did, to them He had handed over freedom: He remained that by which their freedom could operate, so of course they were dependent on Him too. But what could be learned, practised, of freedom except through exposure, risk – through trying things out by casting oneself on the waters as it were and discovering what the outcome would be after many days. But John Scotus’s way of seeing things had for a thousand years been largely ignored, and freedom had been taken into custody by Church and State.”[2]

The experience of creating hand in hand with God is one that has been particularly apparent to artists generally, not solely to novelists. The great architect Antoni Gaudí, for example, described the conversation between God, the creation and humanity in these terms:

“Creation works ceaselessly through man. But man does not create, he discovers. Those who seek out the laws of Nature as support for their new work collaborate with the Creator. Those who copy are not collaborators. For this reason originality consists in returning to the origin.”[3]

Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh have suggested that this experience and work begins in listening:

“[I]n this covenantal worldview, all of creation is subjective, all of creation speaks. The task of human knowing, in all of its forms, is to translate that creational glossolalia into human terms … An epistomology intent on listening to our covenantal partners (God and the rest of creation) will decidely not silence the voice of the other … In response to the gift of creation, we are called as stewards to a knowing that opens up the creation in all of its integrity and enhances its disclosure. Rather than engaging the real world as masters, we are invited to be image-bearing rulers. Our knowing does not create or integrate reality. Rather we respond to a created and integrated reality in a way that either honors and promotes that integration or dishonors it. We are called to reciprocate the Creator’s love in our epistomological stewardship of this gift. Wright describes such an epistomology of love beautifully when he says, “The lover affirms the reality and the otherness of the beloved. Love does not seek to collapse the beloved in terms of itself.” In a relational and stewardly epistemology, “ ‘love’ will mean ‘attention’: the readiness to let the other be the other, the willingness to grow and change in relation to the other.””[4]

[1] This suggestion links back to my original suggestion in this series, that we are invited by God to participate in the conversation or communion within the Godhead. I suggest that this could involve developing the practical implications of relationality, perichoresis and substantiality through sociality and creativity.
Colin Gunton uses his theology of creation to identify three concepts that he calls (drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge) ‘open transcendentals’. That is, “possibilities for thought which are universal in scope yet open in their application” (C. E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p.223). Gunton’s three open transcendentals are: relationality (“[a]ll things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation”, p. 229); perichoresis (“all things are what they are in relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things”, p. 178); and substantiality (all things are “substantial beings, having their own distinct and particular existence, by virtue of and not in the face of their relationality to the other”, p. 194). Sociality is a description of the social relation of personal beings, “their free relation-in-otherness” (Gunton, p. 229.). Gunton notes that, outside of God and humanity, “the rest of the creation … does not have the marks of love and freedom which are among the marks of the personal” and so cannot be said to be characterised by sociality[1]. Within the creation stories, sociality is seen in the joint working in which God and Adam shared to find a helper for Adam (Genesis 2: 15 - 25) and the conversation between God, Adam and Eve in Genesis 3: 8 - 19. Dorothy Sayers remarked on the fact that the one thing we know for sure about God at the point that he makes humanity in his own image is that he is creative [D. L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1941)]. She argues that it is therefore logical to suppose that creativity is a significant aspect of humanity’s being made in the image of God. Within the creation stories human creativity is seen in: God’s blessing of humanity which included the tasks of increasing in number, filling and subduing the earth and, ruling over living creatures (Genesis 1: 28); Adam’s working and taking care of the garden (Genesis 2: 15); and, Adam’s naming of the living creatures (Genesis 2: 20). Albert Wolters brings both sociality and creativity together when he comments that: “Adam and Eve, as the first married couple, represent the beginnings of societal life; their task of tending the garden, the primary task of agriculture, represents the beginnings of cultural life" [A. M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1996), p. 37].
Among those who have developed practical proposals for the implementation of relationality, perichoresis and substantiality through sociality and creativity are:
· Christian Schumacher with his system of work structuring outlined in God in Work: Discovering the divine pattern for work in the new millennium (Oxford, Lion Publishing plc, 1998);
· David Lee and Michael Schluter with the dimensions of relational proximity which they outline in The R Factor (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993).
Schumacher draws on Sayers and Distributionism to create a Trinitarian model while Lee and Schluter draw on the work of Christopher Wright who argues that the Israelite society of the Old Testament provides a paradigm for contemporary Christian lifestyle.
[2] N. Mosley, The Hesperides Tree (London: Vintage, 2002), pp. 118 & 119.
[3] Antoni Gaudí cited in G. van Hensbergen, Gaudí, London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2002, p. 138.
[4] J. R. Middleton and B. J. Walsh, truth is stranger than it used to be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age, London: SPCK, 1997, pp. 168 & 169, citing N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, London: SPCK, 1997, p. 64.

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Victoria Williams - Century Plant and Crazy Mary.