What do you believe about calling God “creator”?
Elohim as creator is the agent who lets into creative and collaborative motion a world that is non-anthropocentric. God like the creator of an open source software is the enabler of an ongoing system wherein the creation as an open source system, takes part in the ongoing “open-ended interaction” (Keller 53) between the material world and divine mystery. Yet both of them are part of each other, the latter is the motherly procreative source and the former an extension of the latter. The genesis collective, to use Keller’s phrase, is set in motion thanks to Elohim. God as a maker, creator and innovator has set the collaborative process in motion with the material world, in the ecology, in the water bodies, in darkness and in everything that encompasses the cosmos to create beauty and invites the creation itself to take part in this never-ending collaborative process. God the creator creates from the phenomenon that is hidden in the primal waters, where God like the jazz pianist is constantly improvising and allows her fellow drummer, saxophonist and bassist through collaboration to create a wholesomely aural beauty out of and through chaos. If God is the jazz arranger, the creation takes part in the collaboration as the flautist and the cellist. The created order continues to take part in this “theopoetics” (Keller 56) that God has set in motion.
Reading Keller alongside the Christian understanding of creation’s status as an utterly gracious gift of God, as McFarland mentions makes sense. It is a fact that creation is a gift and that the receivers of the gift are invited to take part in the benefits of the gift and to multiply the gift in their own creative ways. McFarland’s idea of Nothing But God says God creates the world from nothing that affirms the notion of nothing but God. In reference to John Chapter 1, McFarland states, “The fact that creation has no presupposition other than God does not mean that it comes from nowhere.” (McFarland 89) At stake here for me is the ongoing process of the creator attributing value to time and process, from a point of origin and thereby this origin is to be treated as something for the creator’s creative process and not as nothing, where in nothing cannot be a phenomenon of negation in terms of value. Creator for me means value-creator as they (Elohim) attribute value to that specific time and space and not some other time. God’s intention to begin creation in certain time is clear which I need to treat with caution and care and treat Nothing But God as the origin of value. This is broadly an idea I find resonance in Anselm’s notion, “in God even that which has not yet been created is not nothing.” (McFarland 91) Nothing But God also means to me the creator as the first gift-giver, of creation passed on to the created beings wherein my value and the value of entire creation is in nothing else but God. This is a creative-Nothing and not a negative-nothing, a fact because of God’s mutuality, in relation to the world. God as a creator in this process is intimate and personal as it is revealed to my senses through the word that is God and the Creator who is the word. Nothing Apart From God is to say that in creation nothing exists apart from God, like music that cannot exist apart from the instrument or the vocal cords, its source. Creator in this process of nothingness is the one who comes alive as relational and not as abstraction and detachment. This is also to argue for “God’s own being as relationship.” (McFarland 94) The third aspect of McFarland’s argument about Creation From Nothing i.e of Nothing Limits God might seem to be a totalitarian fantasy of control but it is about God ensuring creation’s flourishing where in the creator makes the life of a creature to be God’s own.
At stake for me in McFarland and Keller is thus the relational nature and acts of the Creator. The Creator does exist apart from creation but disrupts the abstractness of a top-down relationship by entering into a jazz-like ensemble arrangement and improvisation where the creator is not a controller but a collaborator in charge of the creative process providing agency for the creation as well. Thus, the creator is a person who is interested in the life of her creation and takes part in that painful process that risks God to enter into human, animal, ecological and cosmic history. First as the invisible collaborator and later as an embodied creator-cum-creation, in time and space.