JESUS, HUMANITY AND THE TRINITY perform part of what needs to be done and you perform the rest, to the extent I act, you need not; and the more I act, the less you need to. Even when we co-operate, therefore, our actions involve a kind of competitive either/or of scope and extent. Unlike this co-operation among creatures, relations with God are utterly non-competitive because God, from beyond this plane of created reality, brings about the whole plane of creaturely being and activity in its goodness. The creature's receiving from God does not then require its passivity in the world: God's activity as the giver of ourselves need not come at the expense of our own activity. Instead, the creature receives from God its very activity as a good. With these last remarks I am suggesting a principle of divine transcendence, which I define more precisely in terms of talk about God that avoids either simple identity or contrast with the qualities of creatures. I just gave a very general example of this principle at work: passivity with respect to God is not to be inserted into the usual contrast between passivity and activity that holds for creatures. Passivity before God is not the same as passivity as we understand it in relations among creatures; in relation to creatures, one cannot, as in relations with God, be active in virtue of being passive. Passivity with respect to God does not conform to any simple contrast with activity since one might be passive or active on the plane of created reality, in dependence upon, as the passive recipient of, God's gifts; simple passivity with respect to God tells you nothing either way. Or to make the point a little differently, a simple contrast between activity and passivity will not do for creatures' relations with God because no matter how active one is as a creature, one is never anything other than the recipient of God's active grace - God remains active over all. If the technicalities of all this leave you reeling, just remember that God is not a kind of thing among other kinds of things; only if God is transcendent in that way does it make sense to think that God can be the giver of all kinds of things and manners of existence; and only on that basis, in turn - God as the giver of all gifts - does it make sense to think of a non-competitive relation between God and creatures. What these two principles of non-competitiveness and divine transcendence mean becomes clearer when one sees the very particular JESUS and unexpected form they take in an account of the incarnation and its saving effects. I have expressed these principles in more general and abstract terms now in order to suggest their importance for more than Christology. These principles apply in a variety of ways to the whole range of relationships between God and creatures, not just to the highly distinctive relationship between God and humanity found in Christ, the range of relationships I sketch in the next chapter. They are a frame, then, for the whole God/world relationship. When expressed in a general way, these principles also help make sense of the way some Christians at least have thought it best to talk about Jesus, going back to the Chalcedonian formulas. a manner of speaking that has become less and less intelligible in the modern West. The general understanding of the relation between God and creatures, which these principles adumbrate, provides, in other words, a context of intelligibilty for the incarnation. As Athanasius made the point very early on in the history of Christian thought: 'If then the Word of God is in the universe. . . and has united himself with the whole what is there surprising or absurd if we say that he has united. hat is himself with man also. For if it were absurd for him to be in a body ………, it would be absurd for him... either... to be giving light and movement to all things by his providence." On the Incarnation of the Word,' trans. A. Robertson, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward Hardy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 95-6. Athanasius also affirms, as I do, that the general principles have their clearest exhibition in the incarnation, 97-8. More recently, D. M. Baillie also argues in this way that if one can see the intelligibility of God's working with humans in the matters of providence and grace, one can understand the incarnation; see his God Was in Christ (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948), esp. 111– 18. The same sort of argument is found in Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 34-9: 'the distinction between God and the world serves to permit the other Christian mysteries to be thought of as mysteries and not incoherences' (37). Rahner, in the Foundations of Christian Faith and in articles on Christelogy and creation throughout the Theological Investigations, also suggests a turn to the God/creature relation as a way of understanding a Chalcedonian Christology. See 'On the Theology of the Incarnation,' trans, K. Smyth, Theological Investigations, vol. + (New York: Crossroac, 1982), 117: '[in the incarnation] we can verify... in the most radical and specifically unique way the axiom of all relationship between God and creature.' And his 'Current Problems in Christology,' trans. C Ernst, Theological Investigations, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1982). 162-6: 'If in the Incarnation the Logos enters into relationship with a creature, then it is obvious that the ultimate formal determinations of the Creator-creature relationship must also hole in this particular relationship (163 n. 1). See also Henk Schoot, Christ the 'Name' of God: Thomas Aquinas on Namtag Christ (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 183-5. www. wwwww. This book sketches a systematic theology that centers on Jesus Christ and his meaning for life in the world. In this first chapter I recover strands of an early church account of Christ, which I rework significantly to address modern concerns with human agency and freedom and modern emphases on conflict and process in human history. The second chapter situates this Christology, and the way of being human that it implies, within the broadest cosmo-theological frame. In that way I establish contextually the intelligibility of these accounts of Christ and a graced human life, while laying out some of the many levels of relationship between God and creatures which any full systematic theology would have to engage. In the third chapter, I hazard some ethical and socio-political implications of my treatment of graced human existence; and in a final chapter - appropriately enough I discuss the end of things in Christ. - At the heart of this systematic theology is the sense of God as the giver of all good gifts, their fount, luminous source, fecund treasury and store house. Like an 'overflowing radiance,' God 'sends forth upon all things... the rays of Its undivided Goodness;' 'the divine Goodness. . . maintains . . . and protects [all creation] and feasts them with its good things." In establishing the world in relation- ship to Godself, God's intent is to communicate such gifts to us. The [Pseudo] Dionysius the Arcopagite, "The Divine Names, trans. C. E. Rolt, in The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology (London: SPCK, 1940), 94, 87; see the whole of the influential imagery in chapter 4. history of the world is God's working for the fuller bestowal of such gifts, each stage of this history - creation, covenant, salvation in Christ representing a greater communication of goodness to the creature and the overcoming of any sinful opposition to these gifts' ⚫distribution. Corresponding to such stages of increase in gifts bestowed are changed relations with God. The world is perfected by being brought into closer relations with the God who perfects it. In union with God, in being brought near to God, all the trials and sorrows of life - suffer- ing, loss, moral failing, the oppressive stunting of opportunities and vitality, grief, worry, tribulation and strife are purified, remedied, and reworked through the gifts of God's grace. ✓ In short, God, who is already abundant fullness, freely wishes to replicate to every degree possible this fullness of life, light, and love outward in what is not God; this is possible in its fullness only to the extent the world is united by God to Godself over the course of the world's time. Met by human refusal to receive from God's hands in God's own time, by the creature's efforts to separate itself and others from the life-giving fount of divine beneficence, met by the human refusal to minister God's gift-giving to others, this history or process of God's giving to creatures becomes a struggle, a fight to bring the graced kingdom of God into an arena marked by sin and death. The struggle is won by the same means necessary for increase in gifts of grace: growth in unity with God. The most general or abstract principles underlying this systematic vision are the following: firstly, amon-competitive relation between creatures and God, and secondly, a radical interpretation of divine transcendence. The second principle, as we shall see, is the pre- condition of the first. A non-competitive relation between creatures and God means that the creature-does-not decrease so that God may increase. The glori fication of God does not come at the expense of creatures. The more 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 per- fection of the creature in its difference from God, increases with the perfection of relationship with God: the closer the better. 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 re, so to speak, on different levels of being, and different planes of 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 Gad, en that the more we have the more we should be grateful to God as giver. In Reformation.