Creator and Creature

In a brief 2002 essay on “Creator and Creature,” reprinted in Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics, Robert Jenson admits that “we indeed need to move conceptually outside the biblical narrative as such,” but he argues that common ways of conceptualizing the Creator-creature distinction are self-contradictory, incoherent, or depart from the biblical storyline.

“In Scripture itself, the difference between the Creator and his creatures is not laid out conceptually at all, but rather narratively. . . . commented narration remains the fundamental and the only indispensable way of telling the difference between Creator and creature. The story tells what God does, called ‘creating,’ and creatures are what result other than God” (158, emphasis added).

He ventures a solution, relying on the premise that “It is God . . . who distinguishes himself as Creator from all else, which just so is creature. We do not set up the Creator/creature difference by pairing it with or spreading it out on any set of concepts. The difference between Creature and creature is one which God enforces by taking action” (159). 

He gives this a curious anti-Platonic, biblical twist. If God is God, then everything else must be God only by participation, only if God is its origin and final end. But on the premises of post-Plato Platonism, everything that is seeks to melt back into God. This is not the biblical God, and that leads Jenson to this formula: “God establishes Himself as Creator and everything else as creature by actively stopping this sort of return from happening. To say that God is Creator and we are creatures is to say that God takes a certain preventive action” (159). The Creator-creature distinction is God’s great own great No to Proclus and Plotinus.

Jenson goes on to ask what God specifically does to prevent Himself from being the sort of God that Platonism – and, Jenson says, Adam at the tree of knowledge – envisions? Here Jenson turns to the gospel, understood in Cyrillian fashion as the narrative of “one who answers prayer and prays; who interprets the Torah as only its author should do and obeys it as so interpreted; who glorifies others – including his ‘Father’ – and is glorified; who heals, even healing death, and suffers death and more trivial ills; who is born of a woman and sovereignly determines who are his mother and brethren; who knows what is in all hearts and does not know the Hour or the Day” (160).

I take it that Jenson means something like the following: He does not mean (I surmise) that there is some power or impulse within creation that impels them to “melt” back into God, such that God has to actively stop it from happening. Creatures have no powers or impulses other than those God gives. But God also does not simply pre-program creatures against the possibility of melting back in, since those creatures are only because He continuously commanding them to be. He does not leave them to be on their own. He keeps them in being, which means He keeps them in being-unmelted. His active prevention of melting is thus another way of talking about continuous creation. (That brings us back to the main point – that the Creator-creature distinction is narratable rather that conceptual-able.)

It is precisely by insisting that the protagonist of the gospel is one that the Creator-creature distinction is maintained. If we open up a Nestorian gap between the God who acts and the man who suffers, we are left with the need to fill that gap with mediators, and all the apparatus of the ladder of being returns to occupy the “middle realm.” Jenson being Jenson, this line of thought cannot end without yet another prick at the logos asarkos: “God acts to block the possibility of emanation/return by being in his second identity an actor who acts always as Creature and creature, and by just so seeing to it that there is only that one. Theology that describes such an actor, without ifs, ands, or maybes, is the theology that truly guards the difference between Creator and creature” (161). 

My aim here is not to defend Jenson’s description. I do not entirely understand him, especially in his final denial of the logos asarkos. My point is methodological one: As dense as the metaphysics becomes, as sharp as his analytical dissection of the options, the driving force of this whole discussion is to formulate conceptually something that provides at least a “loose fit” to the biblical narrative, which remains the only indispensable account of Creator and creature.

(This is taken from a paper presented at the American Academy of Religion, November 21, 2015.)