Estamos participando con Fiddes

The implications of a kenotic creator are astounding! We’ll talk more later…for now, more Fiddes:

… Moreover, this makes sense of creation itself as an act of kenosis, for in choosing to be a God with the needs of love, God willingly renounces self-sufficiency.

                There are admittedly some logical strains in this solution, that God is entirely what God wills to be. Most evidently it does not seem to square with the common-sense view that there must already be a nature in existence with powers of knowledge and intention in order to make choices….

But any talk about God stretches language, using it in an odd way; the question is what language is most adequate or least inadequate. To speak of God's “choosing to be in need" is certainly odd, but it is a linguistic attempt to divert us away from a view of God as some kind of substance that can be ‘observed’ like other objects in the world, even as an object of perception in the mind. While this is doubtless also the aim of some who adopt [other approaches such as those] sketched above, the advantage of beginning from the dynamic idea of God's 'willing' or 'choosing' is that it immediately speaks of God as an act or event. It therefore prompts us to think in a more 'participational' way, and to use language that reflects the reality of our engagement in God as an event of love.

                That is, we find that we are summoned to be involved in a movement of divine being that is like the movement of a will, as we are summoned to share in movements of love and justice that are like relationships between persons. The model of God as Trinity is not an observational kind of language ("so, that is what God looks like") but a language of participation. When we pray to God as Father, for example, we find ourselves involved in a movement of responding and obeying like that of a son towards a father; this is interwoven with a movement of mission like that of a father sending out a son; and these movements are themselves interfused by a movement of discovery, opening up new depths of relationship, with a momentum like that of a fresh wind blowing, or water streaming or a searing fire burning (to use three biblical images for the Spirit). We are praying to the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. The objection that there must be a nature to make choices is thus akin to the objection of advocates of a social doctrine of the Trinity, that there must be individual persons to "have relationships." If we think in a participatory way about God, we can only talk of being involved in movements of relational love, of choice and desire; the persons, as Augustine proposed, are nothing more or less than relationships. This takes seriously the Johannine insight that "those who dwell in love dwell in God and God dwells in them" (1 John 4:16). Such indwelling, as we shall see, also has important implications for our understanding of the way that a God of love acts in the world.

-p182-183, Paul Fiddes in “Creation Out of Love” from

The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed.  John Polkinghorne