6 - Divine author and human hero in dialogical relation

Summary

… if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary.

Authors are somehow both inside and outside their work.

To say “God and world” is to express both a distinction and a relation. God is transcendent (God is holy, set apart from the world) and immanent (God is love, invested in the world). When Christians further describe the world as “creation” they place it in the context of the gospel story of its renewal in Christ through the Spirit; in so doing they posit an absolute distinction (Creator vs. created) within an even greater relation (the covenant of grace). A Christian doctrine of the triune God must provide an intelligible account of this distinction and relation.

Part II set forth just such an understanding, at least in preliminary fashion: God's being is that triune communicative agency by which Father, Son, and Spirit actively present themselves to and do things for one another and the world. This communicative variation on theism has many of the strengths of the voluntary kenotic–perichoretic relational theistic and panentheistic alternatives examined in Part I, but not their defects. In particular, communicative theism describes what it means to partake of the divine nature in a way that does justice to the centrality of Christ as the climax of an extended covenantal history. Part III continues the constructive account by taking up the question of divine action and interaction with the world.