A response to Jordan Ballor’s review of my Creator, which was published at Acton.org on August 12.

1. Ballor says that, to avoid pantheism or panentheism, God’s identity as creator must be “relative, secondary, or conditional.” He rightly says that I argue the opposite: “God is Creator” is the first and most fundamental identification of the living God revealed in Scripture.

Ballor holds to his classical theist framework because it avoids making creation “metaphysically necessary,” but I spend most of one chapter arguing that this isn’t so. Quite the contrary. Classical theism as Ballor describes it runs aground on the doctrine of creation, making creation either necessary or impossible. As I put it in the book, a propos of Aquinas:

“Either God must create because he is his eternal act of creating, in which case Thomas undermines God’s freedom to create or not and his freedom to create otherwise. Or God cannot create because creation requires the actualization of some potency, and the simple God is always already fully actualized, whether or not creation exists.”

My claim that “God is Creator” is the fundamental grammar of theology isn’t a mere assertion. It’s offered as a corrective to the impasses of classical theism.

2. Ballor misses the point of my critique of Thomas and the Trinity. For starters, he states my argument in terms of a simplistic opposition of oneness and threeness - the first a Hellenized theology, the second truly biblical. I say nothing of the kind, because I don’t believe there is any “oneness” in God that isn’t also threeness, nor any “threeness” that isn’t also absolute and infinite unity.

My objection thus isn’t that Thomas “starts with God’s oneness and unity.” Rather: Thomas begins the Summa with an account of divine being that doesn’t account for the Trinity. In that context, he deals with the features of classical theism. When he directs his attention to the Trinity, the divine metaphysics changes. For example, he rightly introduces an idea of “receptive” being into the being of God; he rightly affirms that “procession” is a reality in divine life. The problem is, he’s already presented a theology that excludes receptivity and procession within God. There’s not merely a tension but an outright contradiction between the classical theist opening and the Trinitarian metaphysics that comes later. Part of my project is to remove that contradiction, which enables me to affirm certain classical theist claims, albeit in a modified, Trinitarian form.

4. Ballor thinks I’ve “perhaps” failed to avoid panentheism. As evidence, he quotes this from my book:

“Within [God’s] life there is a whence and a whither, and so he can and does enclose created time, making it his time with us. He is in creation, even as creation exists in him.”

Rather than affirm or deny the label, let me pick apart the quotation. “Whence” and “whither” is a Jensonian way of describing the processions of the Triune Persons. The Father is the “from whom” of the Son, the Son the “to what” of the Father. Following Jenson, I take that to mean there is in God’s uncreated life an archetype of created temporality. Events that begin, proceed, and end thus aren’t alien to the life of God, since in Him is, as the church fathers all said, a paternal Source, a filial Actor, a Spiritual completion. The Triune God can initiate, accompany, and complete created events without denying Himself. Because His life is a kind of eternal temporality, He can enter our time to make it His.

The final sentence is self-evidently biblical. The Spirit hovers over the waters from the beginning, the Son enters the world as man, the Spirit dwells in and among us, groaning in labor to bring about the redemption of the sons of God. At the same time, creation exists in Him: As Paul says, “in Him we live, move, and exist.” The relation of God to the world, like the relation of Persons to one another, is perichoretic.

5. A series of lesser issues.

Ballor’s claim that I’m “not entirely dismissive of Augustine and Aquinas” is highly misleading, as if I were mostly dismissive. On the contrary, I revere both, which is one reason why they’re among my chief interlocutors. 

Ballor thinks he detects an inconsistency in the structure of Creator - a book that insists we start at the very beginning doesn’t. But the opening chapters provide necessary ground-clearing; need to shovel the debris out of the stables before we can clearly recognize what the Bible says. And of course I devote attention to texts like Plato’s Timeaus because of the role they’ve played in the development of the Christian theology of creation.

Ballor thinks my insistence that “nothing exists apart from the ongoing an active will of God” (his words) subverts the reality or creation and time. That’s only true if one assumes the zero-sum theology Ballor rejects at the outset of his review.

Finally, Ballor to the contrary, I don’t have “antipathy” for philosophy. What I have antipathy for is philosophy that ignores the reality of the incarnation, the revelation of God, the Spirit. A philosophy that ignores these basic realities of the world is bound to go awry.

Philosophy that takes everything into account will, of course, look a lot like theology, but that is, to my mind, all to the good.