There Can Be No End Apart From God

Last updated on: March 21, 2017 at 7:54 am by Henry Karlson

There Can Be No End Apart From God 2017-03-21T07:54:07-05:00 Henry Karlson

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God creating by Michelangelo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In this way, we can even talk about a pure nature for humanity, as a form of convention, to talk about those closed-in-itself nature, with a low-level participation in the goodness of God, that was established in our creation. This could have been our end, so we would not have been able to spiritually evolve, to become greater than what we received in our creation. Pure nature, if the concept is purified from any attempt to divide humanity from God in and with it, certainly provides a convention by which we can discuss humanity and our natural expectations in the world. We can talk about natural goods, created ends in themselves which participate in the goodness of God given to them by God, and so talk about natural laws where all that is proper to its nature is said to be good and without sin. This is why the concept of pure nature strikes a chord, even with those who object to its presentation, because it follows our tendency to try to create conventional essences by which we express the forms found in creation. If we do not overly reify these conventions, if we understand they are derivative constructs established through our discursive thought, they can be useful, but once the spirit of the conventions is lost and the forms are overly substantialized, those abstractions no longer retain their usefulness and we must detach ourselves from such thoughts if we want to engage the world as it really is.

Christianity teaches us that God not only restores humanity to its original, integral nature, but that such nature is not closed-ended: it was made by God to be open-ended, to have no closure in and of itself but to be open to God, to forever be made to grow greater as it opens itself more and more to the goodness of God. This is a part of God’s creative gift to humanity, and so it must not be asserted as if it were established out of anything but God’s gracious love.

Once it is recognized that there is no point in our spiritual growth where we can find ourselves upon stable ground and reached an end to our spiritual journey without finding ourselves closing in on ourselves and turning away from God, then we realize that a closed, essential nature which is unable to grow in potential thanks to grace, would itself be contrary to what our nature itself is about. Natures are not closed-in-on-themselves ontological essences, but rather patterns which are able to grow as grace is given to them, sort of like fractal patterns which develop the more data is given to them; the principle pattern remains the same, and the pattern must be followed for nature to be followed, but the pattern is open-ended and able to add more to itself, constantly developing into something greater, something more glorious. Any end to that growth is an end to our nature’s proper activity and would end with an end to human happiness once that limit was attained. God has made us to be able to be open to him, and to receive him, to eternally grow in and with him so that we attain eternal beatitude. This is why, thanks to the way he made us, the only proper end to our nature is theosis, the perpetual growth in grace as we find ourselves participating in God’s uncreated energies for eternity.

God could have made the pattern differently. There was freedom in how God acted in our creation, but our creation was made in the perfect wisdom of God. He joined together both how he wanted us to start, but also, how he wanted us perpetually grow in grace, as he created us. God’s wisdom created not just our nature, but all natures as patterns capable of eternal growth, and he did so out of love, so that we can receive his love for us and grow in love for him. It is his joy to give us of himself, opening himself to us so we can likewise open ourselves up to him and give ourselves over to him. It was through his loving freedom that he did this. To view the creation of humanity apart from the end God intended for it, an end which includes all that God does in and with creation, and so includes the incarnation which opens up God to creation as God lifts up creation in accordance to the way he empties himself in becoming man, is to try to look at God and understand God within the limits of the temporal perspective (and so would have all the problems that comes out of such a perspective, the problems of a God which is said to change). God acts in one eternal act, and the act of creation and recreation, of establishing our nature and our end, is one act of love made by God. Those who want to suggest that theosis must not be forced upon God are correct, but those who suggest it is something which God does which differs from his act of creation with us is to ignore who and what God is, and how God’s act of creation is one with his act of restoration and grace with us.

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