In a 2002 Theological Studies article, Elizabeth Groppe defends the late Catherine LaCugna against the common charge that her replacement of “economic and ontological” with ” oikonomia and theologia ” blurs the Creator-creature distinction and compromises God’s freedom.

On the first, Groppe writes, “LaCugna’s relational ontology maintains this fundamental ontological distinction between God and creature. At the same time, this distinction takes different expression than the same distinction as articulated within a metaphysics of substance, given that the very form of any ontological distinction is contingent on the ontological system within which that distinction is made.  Within a metaphysics of substance, God in se is distinguished from the creature in se. Within LaCugna’s ontology of person and relation, in contrast, God and creature are distinguished not as two qualitatively different kinds of being-in-itself but as two qualitatively different persons-in-relation. The very category of relation that is so central to LaCugna’s theology is, notably, a term of both communion and distinction. God and creature are not identical but rather related.”

And this relation is not reciprocal: “This relation between God and creature, furthermore, is not strictly reciprocal, for God’s relation to us is of a qualitatively different character than our relation to God. God, LaCugna explained, “belongs to the sphere of infinite relatedness, infinite capacity for relationship, infinite actuality of relationship, both to past, present, and future reality.”(n85) Human persons, in contrast, relate to others in a manner limited by our embodiment and our historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions.  ’In God alone,’ LaCugna continued, ‘is there full correspondence between personhood and being, between hypostasis and ousia.’ In human persons, in contrast, personhood and relationality are imperfectly realized. Above all, LaCugna emphasized, God alone is the Unoriginate Origin, the source (arche) of the begetting of the Son, the breathing forth of the Holy Spirit, and the gracious acts of creation and redemption. ‘God does not have to be loved in order to love. This is not the situation of the creature who learns to love in response to being loved. God is Love itself and the origin of Love, that is to say, God is the origin of existence.’ We, in turn, are the awed recipients of the love of God, ‘destined and appointed to live for the praise of God’s glory.’”

In Groppe’s view, LaCugna does not reduce creation to a necessary emantion: “God is not compelled to create the world and creation is not removed from the domain of God’s will. Indeed, it is precisely because God has freely created and redeemed the world that LaCugna believed that this reality—this mystery—must shape trinitarian theology in a formative way if indeed our theology is to speak as truthfully as possible of the God who has been revealed to us. According to [Robert] Sokolowski, the ontological distinction of God and creation is a ‘distinction between the world understood as possibly not having existed and God understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness.’  LaCugna allows for contemplation of this possibility but, unlike Sokolowski, she does not establish the possible non-existence of creation or the self-sufficiency of God as the ultimate meaning of the God/creature distinction. We can certainly contemplate the possibility that the cosmos might never have been, that God might have been all that there is—an odd form of ‘thought’ that requires negating ourselves and our very thoughts of possible non-existence even as we ‘think’ them. Yet this self-erasing intellectual exercise ends not in negation but rather culminates in awe and wonder with the affirmation that the cosmos in all its multitude of creatures does exist and was created by God. This awe and wonder tell us something about the character of our own existence—specifically, that it is rooted in grace—and also something about the character of God. God is not a deity of self-enclosure nor self-satisfaction but the God of ecstatic love. For LaCugna, God’s creative ecstasy in no way jeopardizes the freely willed character of creation, but it does require a refinement of some ideas about the meaning of freedom that have become commonplace in Western culture where we have become accustomed to think of freedom as autonomy and freedom of choice. ‘Love,’ LaCugna stated quoting John Zizioulas, ‘is identified with ontological freedom.’”

LaCugna herself writes, “To be sure, the reason for creation does not lie in the creature, or in some claim the creature has on God. It would make no sense to say that God ‘needs’ the world in order to be God, if this sets up the creature as a higher or more ultimate principle than God; the creature would have to preexist God so that God could be constituted as God in relation to the creature. This is absurd, since God and the creature simply would have switched places. The reason for creation lies entirely in the unfathomable mystery of God, who is self-originating and self-communicating love. While the world is the gracious result of divine freedom, God’s freedom means necessarily being who and what God is. From this standpoint the world is not created ex nihilo but ex amore , ex condilectione , that is, out of divine love.”

This is not, of course, to endorse all of LaCugna’s proposals.  But Groppe makes a compelling case that LaCugna is not so obviously guilty of the errors often attributed to her.