JESUS full the creature is with gifts the more the creature should look in gratitude to the fullness of the gift-giver. The fuller the giver the greater the bounty to others Similarly, connection with God does not take away from the creature's own dignity as the being it is. The greater one's dependence upon God, the more one receives for one's own good. As Karl Rahner makes the point: 'genuine reality and radical dependence [on God] are simply. two sides of one and the same reality, and therefore vary in direct and not in inverse proportion. We and the existents of our world really and truly are and are different from God not in spite of, but because we are established in being by God." The dis- tinctness of the creature is thus the consequence of relationship with God as its creator; here difference is the product of unity, of what brings together, of relationship. The perfection of created life, the fection of the creature in its difference from God, increases with the perfection of relationship with God: the closer the better. / per- This non-competitive relation between creatures and God is possible, it seems, only if God is the fecund provider of all that the creature is in itself; the creature in its giftedness, in its goodness, does not compete with God's gift-fullness and goodness because God is the giver of all that the creature is for the good. This relationship of total giver to total gift is possible, in turn, only if God and creatures are, so to speak, on different levels of being, and different planes off causality-something that God's transcendence implies. God does not give on the same plane of being and activity as creatures, as one among other givers and therefore God is not in potential competition (or co-operation) with them. Non-competitive- ness among creatures their co-operation on the same plane of causality always brings with it the potential for competition: Since I - This kind of non-competitiveness as an affirmation of both God's gift-fullness and our bounty as recipients of God's giving is perhaps given clearest expression in the theology of Thomas Aquinas. John Calvin's theology is also notable for this sense that all we have is from God, so that the more we have the more we should be grateful to God as giver. In Reformation theology, however, this principle takes on a negative cast: worry that creatures will not thank God for all that they are deflates reveling in the gifts themselves. So, for example, Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. McNeil, trans. F. Battles, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Book 3, chapter 15, section 5, 793: 'because all his things are ours and we have all things in him, in us there is nothing." See Tanner, God and Creation, 105-19. Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. W. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 79. 3 M