Fiddes on “Creation Out of Love”

There are many juicy goodies to poke around on in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed.  John Polkinghorne. I’ll post a couple nuggets from Paul Fiddes’ chapter.

This piece is from his grappling with “The Risks of Love,” and I’m taking the liberty of breaking his prose into poetry—just like it struck me on the first read:

If "God creates out of love," then the manner of God's action in the world is characteristic of love. That is, it cannot be coercive or manipulative but only persuasive, seeking to create response. Action through persuasion is necessarily hidden rather than obtrusive,  and respects the considerable amount of self-creativity that created things possess. This is not the place to work out fully the implications of this for the nature of the cosmos, but I suggest that we can only make sense theologically of organic processes with their own inner capacity for evolution and self-development if we have a vision of the whole of nature, at every level, capable of response in its own manner to the desire of God.

Beneath the surface of life,

the cosmos

at all levels

is either responding to God's-purpose for community,

or drifting away

so that things are out of joint.

Attempts to describe this relationship are necessary

myths to portray a reality,

whether they be the biblical poetry

of the trees of the field clapping their hands before the Lord,

the floods roaring his praise

and the universe groaning in the pains of childbirth,

or whether they be the process philosophy

of a mental pole in subatomic particles,

reaching towards satisfaction.    

                                             -(p.185)