4 - God/world: distinction and connections

Summary

The previous chapter stressed the decentred ‘place’ of our talk about God and, through an exploration of the attribute of simplicity/simpleness and the associated notion of creation, insisted on God's ‘openness’ to the world. Such an approach does, I think, rule out emphases on a ‘suffering God’, the notion of human beings in some form of univocal relation with God and the drive to pattern human relations on the ‘model’ of God's relationality. (The reasoning for this claim emerges in this chapter and the next.)

To deny the ‘availability’ of God as ‘centre’ is of course a response to the charge of God-as-intermediary. It is a way of responding to the charge that the concept of God is ideological if human capacities are interpreted in relation to it. But plainly to deny the ‘availability’ of God is not to deny God's presence to or God's involvement with the world. We saw in the discussion of divine simplicity that, within this conception, is a firm creation perspective.

In this chapter I seek to do two things. First, I explore the notion of God's ‘openness’ a little further, and suggest that it is connected with an emphasis upon human responsibility. Of course, I recognise that in some current theologies these two – ‘openness’ and responsibility – are regarded as, if not antithetical, then at minimum as a pair of terms to be reconciled.