Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Nature - Theo-logy of Nature
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Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Nature
Theo-logy of Nature
The heavens proclaim his righteousness,
and all the peoples see his glory. — Psalm 97:6
In the previous Chapter, it was shown that Edwards’ typological method could be applied all the way down into the basal mechanisms of atoms and molecules. Each intricate step in the ionization mechanism of salt contributed typological meaning analogically toward spiritual truths. In this way, examining the hypothesis of consonance between the messages “instressed” in nature and in Scripture suggests that a unified message of divine truth may be found in all of nature. We now have the tools in hand to correlate Edwards’ notion that all three persons of the Trinity are imminently involved in the creation. Since this postulate appears late in Edwards’ writings, he did not expound further in any additional writings regarding the possible individual contributions of each divine Person of the Godhead in an ontology of nature. This leaves the possibility open for a new rendering of nature, picking up where Edwards left off. Such a construct must offer a Trinitarian “groundedness,” in the dispositions, structures, and forces constituting physical reality. In Edwards’ End of Creation it is the explicit intent of sharing God’s intra-Trinitarian love and fullness with the creature that motivated God to create. We have thus far taken Edwards’ metaphysics farther, by putting forward that in accomplishing that end, the Creator wills divine ideas into existence by communicating or emanating knowledge and glory of the divine Trinitarian Self into the creation in the form of analogical onto-types which are “made real” to the creature in a continuous act of revealing. It is good for us to note here that willing, communicating/emanating, and revealing are all divine acts.
Thus, construing all of nature in this way may provide a framework for a constructive Trinitarian Theology of Nature highlighting the divine action role of each person of the Godhead, while remaining in perfect Trinitarian unity. In terms of divine action, typically all divine acts are simply attributed to “God” with little attention given to how God may be acting within the divine capabilities of each person of the Godhead. Thus, I propose the following to extend and expand Edwards’ idea of God’s Trinitarian action in nature: The act of the Creator God willing eternally real ideas into existence, can be explained by a Theo-logy of Nature. Understanding emanating/communicating the knowledge and glory of God in onto-types by and through Christ Jesus may be construed in a Christology of Nature. Finally, revealing those real-ized ideas in the structures of nature to created minds is a work of the Holy Spirit and can be formulated into a Pneumatology of Nature. Here, the workings of each person of the godhead is proposed, then put together in a constructive, appropriated Trinitarian Theology of Nature. In this chapter we will begin with a Theo-logy of Nature, followed by a Christology of Nature and a Pneumatology of Nature in the next two chapters
Creation Exists out of the Ultimate Agape of God
Scripture echoes a central theme: everything in the universe belongs to God and is created with full intention and will according to God’s plan. It is upon this “ownership” of the creation, and sovereignty over all that the first aspect of a unified and integrated Trinitarian Theology of Nature might be presented in what I will call a “Theo-logy of Nature.”
Use of the term theo-logy here holds some significance for our discussion. An all-important distinction is made between the terms theology, theo-logy and theo-logy by David Tracy, in his Forward to Jean-Luc Marion’s book, God without Being. Tracy states,“The need for all serious theology to be what Marion nicely names theo-logy, not theo-logy . . . makes an all-important distinction between Christian revelation as God’s disclosure of God’s reality as radically, excessively Agape beyond Being.” It is the nature of the term theo-logy that places a strong emphasis on theological discourse that upholds as central God as Loving Being, rather than the term theo-logy which could in some cases lead to the danger of making God an object of study. A Theo-logy of Nature distinguishes the Creator God, as the Everlasting Father, or in patristic language, the the fons divinitatus. Edwards makes reference to the “fountain of the Godhead” out of which all love, power, and compassion flow. The Creator God is the Love that created. For this discourse, then, using the term theo-logy places an intentional emphasis on God as fullness of Agape having the disposition of externalizing his intra-Trinitarian love ad extra. As the fullness of Agape, God had an end in mind when creating the world, an Original Ultimate End. This end was to emanate the supreme knowledge and glory of God’s intra-Trinitarian love into the creation, precisely and intentionally, for the creatures whom He loves. This is stated succinctly in Pope John Paul II’s treatise, “Creation is the Work of the Trinity.” He underscores the Roman Catholic understanding of vestiges of the Trinity in this way,
Creation is the work of the Triune God. The world “created” in the Word-Son, is “restored” together with the Son to the Father, through that Uncreated Gift, the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with both. In this way the world is created in that Love, which is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. This universe embraced by eternal Love begins to exist in the instant chosen by the Trinity as the beginning of time. In this way the creation of the world is the work of Love. A created gift, the universe springs from the Uncreated Gift, from the reciprocal Love of the Father and Son, from the Most Holy Trinity.
The Pope’s exposition, harkening again to Augustine’s vestiges of the Trinity, supports the idea that the Theo-logy of Nature, (and perhaps as we shall see, even the entire Trinitarian Theology of Nature as a whole) can start in no other place than in God’s great love and his plan for the world.
Therefore, a Theo-logy of Nature concerns God’s ideas of everything God intended to create before creating, out of the fullness of absolute love. The ideas that constitute all possibilities for the actual world encompass every subordinate and consequential end that are necessary in God’s Original Ultimate End. These would then represent exemplars in God’s mind. I use the term “exemplar” in a slightly broader sense than its medieval usage. I use it as a simple synonym for any kind of model, pattern, or plan for creation—for types of things and for individuals (both universals and particulars). I use the term ‘actual world’ to denote God’s overall plan for creation or history of the universe. The actual world is only one such history in the entire range of possibilities which together constitute God’s awareness of his abilities ad extra. God is willing this creation into existence according to the eternal exemplars in God’s mind which together constitute his plans and purposes in Christ—this is the actual world.
However, not all ideas in God’s mind are exemplars, as initially proposed by medieval scholastics such as Thomas and Bonaventure. In the Thomistic metaphysic, exemplars represent creative ideas in the divine mind that will become what is created. As Thomas states in the Summa, “As an exemplar, therefore, it has respect to everything made by God in any period of time; whereas as a principle of knowledge it has respect to all things known by God, even though they never come to be in time; and to all things that He knows.”
Exemplars are part of everything God knows, but represent the ideas that God intends to create in some period of created time. Thomas compares this in an analogous way to the mind of an artist in which ideas act as exemplars for the things she creates. Likewise, by analogy, in the mind of the “divine artisan” there must be such exemplar ideas. However, unlike that of the human artist, ideas in the Divine mind are “superior to and exceed that which they exemplify.” In the Thomistic view, exemplars are principles of truth for human knowledge, since the truth of our judgments must ultimately be in accordance with them.
Thomas reserves the term exemplar to refer to ideas of individual things that are actually created at some point in time. In this way, he departs from the Platonic tradition. As Doolan describes, “Here, then, we see one of Thomas’s significant departure from the Platonic tradition: according to the strict sense that he has outlined, divine ideas are not properly of universals but of individually existing things.”
In keeping with the construct of exemplars in God’s mind as ideas of individual things that God intends to create, we may infer that all possibilities in the natural world might entail a) what the structures are, such as the mass of an electron, the elliptical orbit of Mars, etc., and more importantly for our discussion, b) how they are what they are—God’s divine action willing them into existence moment-by-moment according to his plans and purposes in Christ. The possibility would hold that exemplars are real-ized by God’s existence-conferring action according to his plans and purposes.
These real-ized exemplars would represent not only ideas regarding physical systems, described by loop quantum gravity and the wave function, biochemical and molecular pathways, ecosystems, solar systems, galaxies and so forth. These are the discoveries science gives us in terms of descriptions. However, what science has not been able to give us (and what contemporary physicists and natural scientists indicate is the elusive aspect of the natural world) is contained in this postulate: Within these systems—including their structures, operative laws, and intrinsic mechanisms—there exists embedded information regarding the eternal excellencies of the spirit realm which serves as a medium of communication (or emanation) of knowledge of the Divine.
This designates an essential idea in terms of the ontological essence of nature originating in the mind of God as co-eternal exemplars. Exemplars eternally exist in the body of knowledge that we call “God’s knowledge” which includes God’s direct awareness of God’s ability ad extra, in the form of representations of all God is capable of doing and communicating. As such, exemplars are the primordial origination of all possibilities, which as a whole is a mereological structure. In this structure of possibilities are the range of all possible sub-structures, laws, and mechanisms, and a plan for how they will communicate of the divine Being. In this way, structures, laws, and mechanisms encompass dimensions of information and knowledge. These dimensions include information of structures, laws, and mechanisms encompassing what they are (i.e. the spin of an electron, redox reactions of the electron transport chain, the mating patterns of sea urchins, etc.) but also, and simultaneously, carry information of how they are so. By this I mean that structures, laws, and mechanisms in the natural world are discovered by science to tell us what they are, but not how they are so. How they are so is a matter of the willing, communicating, and revealing of God’s eternal attributes, and as such are God’s acting. Exemplars in that complex construct are God’s knowledge of the structures themselves, for what purpose they will serve in the ordered domain of the creation, and the communication of shadows of divine things they represent. These exist as ideas in God’s mind, and are real-ized into being by God’s existence-conferring action. Thus, all of the natural world is divine Trinitarian act-result.
This initiates a movement of thought whose end-point brings us back to Edwards’ concept of emanation/communication within his construction of non-Berkleian idealism. All such knowledge, including the exemplars that are eternal and real in God’s mind, are emanated into the creation. In this way, it is not God’s Being that is emanated into the creation, but the knowledge and glory of God, in the fullness of love and all God’s eternal attributes, that is emanated/communicated (Edwards’ terms) into the fabric and framework of the creation at every level. The creature’s conscious perception of the physical world also consists in ideas. Edwards would contend, and I concur with this view, that reality is not dependent upon the created mind’s perception, but rather, it is dependent upon God causing the created mind to perceive it. In this way, the created world is represented by a form of idealism known as res-idealism. H. Darren Hibbs writes regarding res-idealism, “extra-mental material objects exist, but they are ontologically dependent upon a nonmaterial source.” Theological (as opposed to platonic) res-idealism will hold that material objects are real, but they depend entirely on God’s willing them to be perceived to the creature as real. The creature’s perception of objective reality as such lies solely in God’s power and will.
A Theo-logy of Nature thus motivated would view exemplar causation from the vantage point of God’s acting, while also it is God’s action that raises God’s own ideas (the real-ized exemplars) in created minds so that they can be perceived as actual objects. In that way, the vast existence of the material world as ideas in God’s mind, communicated to the creatures in a form they can receive it is itself a mode of divine action. Thus, we can infer then that the ontological status of material objects in the physical world is real in relation to human minds because God raises or appropriates the created mind to encounter it as such. This would imply that creaturely perception of an “actual reality” composed of matter and energy, structures and systems, perceived and understood with the intellect and all the senses, is a subordinate end, in the line of succession of ends leading to God’s Original Ultimate End. As we have seen earlier, then, a consequential end of this subordinate end, and one that is inherently valued by God, is the praise, glory, and honor that will come from such knowledge of the physical world, and the knowledge and glory of God’s supreme love and excellencies embedded therein. This is, in Edwards’ view, the accomplishment of the end for which God created the world.
It has been proposed here that the first aspect of a constructive Trinitarian Theology of Nature would involve a Theo-logy of Nature. This term entails a starting point of God’s supreme love that motivated an end for creating the world. In accomplishing this end, God has ideas in God’s mind, exemplars, that God intends to create involving both the physical structures of the world and the accompanying knowledge and glory of the intra-Trinitarian essence of God intentionally embedded therein. God real-izes these ideas into existence by raising his own ideas to created minds fashioned to receive this knowledge. Continuing along this line of thought, we shall next address the emanation/communication of the knowledge and glory of God into the creation by Christ, in Christ, through Christ, and for Christ, in a constructive Christology of Nature.
. Psalms 24:1; 121:2; Isaiah 44:24, and others.
. Psalm 22:28; Proverbs 19:21; Isaiah 45:6–7; Romans 8:28, and many others.
. Tracy, in Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, xv.
. For the use of fons divinitatus and other symbols in Latin and Greek patristics see, Hainthaler, “God the Father in the Symbols of Toledo.” She says on p. 125, “The symbols of Toledo in the 7th century are known for their clarity and precision. Toledo VI, XI, and XVI say that God as the Father is the source and origin of the whole divinity.”
. Edwards, Writings on the Trinity, Grace, and Faith, 135.
. Marion says in God without Being, xx, “God is love, then God loves before being, he is only as he embodies himself—in order to love more closely that which and those who themselves have to be.” He is referring here to 1 John 4:8, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” The idea here is not only that God gives love, which God does, nor that God is dispositionally a loving being, which God most certainly is. The text, “God is Love” can be read as a mathematical equation which reads G=L. The two terms are interchangeable. So, the essence/substance of God must be the full and complete essence/substance of love. Love is God, and God is love. It follows that Love created the world and the entire universe.
. Pope John Paul, II, “Creation Is the Work of the Trinity”; italics mine.
. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 15, art. 3.
. Doolan, Aquinas, 3. It is of interest to note here that the Thomistic notion stating that exemplars are superior to and exceed that which they exemplify harkens to Edwards and his understanding of “shadows of divine things.” Edwards believed that God made the “inferior” things of this world to represent “superior” heavenly things. We shall come back to this discussion in the following chapter describing the Christology of Nature in terms of onto-types and their corresponding antitypes. In this constructive theology, exemplars are represented by the ontological antitype prefigured by the created type. They are superior to the type as they represent ultimate reality which is only found in God—that is, the uncreated—but are conveyed to the creature in a form that can be understood by the creature as analogical onto-types embedded in the created realm precisely for the creature to know God.
. Doolan, Aquinas, xiv–xv.
. Doolan, Aquinas, 144.
. By “mereological structure,” I refer to the “parthood” of relations, understanding the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/. In this context, the whole is God’s Original Ultimate End in creating. There are many parts that relate to each other, and all parts relate to the whole of God’s plan for the actual world in Christ which include exemplars, all dispositions, structures, forces, onto-types, and antitypes. They are not separate parts since every aspect of the physical creation in terms of actual structures and God’s communication of himself are all parts of one unified whole.
. I direct the reader to the Introduction where the limits of a scientific ontology was proposed, and to Chapter 1 where the solution to this quandary was introduced in a Trinitarian Theology of Nature. We are exploring a possible solution here in a constructive manner.
. This will be taken up in the next chapter. The emanation/communication of the knowledge and glory of God into the creation encompasses the Christology of Nature involving the second person of the Trinity.
. Hibbs, “Who’s an ‘Idealist?” This view is contrasted with mens-idealism which closely approximates Berkleian idealism in that nothing exists independently outside of created minds.