I remember when Super Mario first came out. Nintendo had this great game design which so many almost immediately loved to play. But Mario didn’t have his own existence. Mario, Luigi, and Princess Toadstool only “existed” because they were designed by Nintendo and actualized by electricity in my living room. Apart from higher beings, there could be no Mario.

Similarly, apart from God there can be no creation. God has been recognized as the timeless Creator who is necessary for creation to exist (see the Kalam Cosmological Argument). Just as Mario only exists because people willed him to exist, all creation exists because the timeless Creator wills it to exist. This relationship between Creator and creation is described as one of participation.

The doctrine of participation basically refers to the reality that God, as the Creator, supplies existence to creation and is in no need of the creation for his perfect existence. Creation, on the other hand, does not exist apart from God and depends on God for everything. God and creation exist in different “planes of existence” although God does pervade all creation without becoming part of creation (contra pantheism, panentheism, paganism, etc.).

God Creates

This doctrine of participation is a quick way of referring to what God has revealed in Scripture. God is timeless and made all things (Jn. 1:1; Gen. 1:1). It is in him that we “live move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God is blessed eternally (Rom. 1:25, 9:5), but creation receives all life and blessings from God (Js. 1:17). Consequently, God’s eternal “inner life” can be said to be unchanging blessedness. God is unchanging (Mal. 3:6; Js. 1:17; etc.). God supplies life to his creation, but his life is continuous joy (Ps. 16:11, “תּֽוֹדִיעֵנִי֮ אֹ֤רַח חַ֫יִּ֥ים שֹׂ֣בַע שְׂ֭מָחוֹת אֶת־פָּנֶ֑יךָ נְעִמ֖וֹת בִּימִינְךָ֣ נֶֽצַח׃”). So, God is “blessed eternally” (“ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, ἀμήν.” Rom. 9:5). Despite anthropomorphic language to the contrary, God’s inner life is “blessed eternally.”[1]

Christian interpreters and theologians have, historically, affirmed both immutability and impassibility. Immutability refers to the totality of the unchanging nature of God (Js. 1:17). Impassibility refers specifically to the unchanging blessed “emotion” of God (Rom. 9:5). Anselm, for example, concluded “For we affirm that the Divine nature is beyond doubt impassible and that God cannot at all be brought down from his exaltation, nor toil in anything which he wishes to effect.”^[2] Neither of these doctrines encountered significant critique by theologians until the 19^th century.

God Supplies

Since God is blessed eternally, he is able to supply comfort. Paul based our comfort on God being the source of comfort in 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 when he said, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” God is the “Father of mercies” and his divine nature is described as “comfort” because he supplies comfort to his people.

Creation Receives

God is not changed by his people and he does not receive from his people. God created and supplies rather than derives his existence from creation. As Paul said, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24–26).

New Ideas of God Shaped By Creation

The distinction between the historic Christian understanding of God and that of some more recent interpreters could not be more stark. Many, like Hegel and Moltmann for example, argued that God is in creation in the sense that he is affected and develops toward his ultimate being by his growth with creation. In this understanding God is in the process of becoming. Culver, describes this divine process of becoming this way:

“Process Theology, as a matter of principle, rejects the impassibility of God. Tracing their theology to the philosophy of Hartshorne and before him of Whitehead, they say that ‘this concept derives from the Greeks’. Since the world is part of God’s ‘constitutive reality’, the future of the world is not foreseen to God. Self-determining acts of free, worldly beings like human beings contribute to His being. Hence ‘These three terms—unchangeable, passionless, and absolute—finally say the same thing, that the world contributes nothing to God and that God’s influence upon the world is in no way conditioned by unforeseen, self-determining activities of us worldly beings. Process Theology denies the existence of this God.’^[3]

If I could briefly oversimplify and summarize this new theology, which is almost completely at odds with historic Christianity, I would say these newer theologians presuppose that for God to be real he must be in a state of becoming (via Hegel) and must suffer (Moltmann).

            In this new framework, creation does not participate in God. Instead God participates with creation. This raises several questions:

1. If God’s existence is dependent upon his creation, can God exist apart from creation?
2. If God cannot exist without creation, is creation in someway divine?
3. If God cannot exist without creation, does creation support God’s existence? Is creation more fundamental than God or equally fundamental with God?
4. If God’s existence is shaped by creation and intertwined with creation, then what is the exterior ground/foundation of this God/creation plane of existence? In other words, historically God has been understood to be the first Cause and Foundation of reality, but if God and creation shape one another what holds that “universe” together? What is the real first Cause and Foundation of reality?
5. If God’s existence is shaped by created reality, then what will God become?
6. If God’s existence is intertwined with creation, dependent upon creation, and shaped by creation, then what distinguishes God from creation and Christianity from paganism?
7. If suffering is essential to existence, did Adam and Eve exist before sin brought suffering into the world?
8. If suffering is essential to existence, why does God promise to take suffering away? What will beings be if there is no suffering to make them be?
9. If change is essential to existence, then to what goal are we striving and what happens when we reach that goal?
10. If change is essential to existence, then is God in an infinite cycle of changes or was there a time when God did not exist?

Perhaps Culver was correct when he said of the current attraction to a mutable and passible God, “It may be that chucking the ancient faith in this regard is a concession to the Zeitgeist, particularly to the subjectivism at all levels in popular thought today.”^[4] Surely, we can find more comfort in our distress by looking to the unmoved Lighthouse, drinking from the eternally blessed Fountain of blessings, and holding to the unchanging Hand who holds us.

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[1] Historically, theologians and commentators have recognized the necessity of interpreting descriptions of God carefully. Since God cannot be known or described fully with our limited capabilities and more limited language, all language describing God in Scripture is to be seen as analogy rather than exact. Aquinas said, “It follows, then, from what has been said that those things which are said of God and other things are predicated neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically, that is according to an order or relation to some one thing” (Sum. Cont. Gent. 1.34).

^[2] Cur Deus Homo 1.8

^[3] Robert Duncan Culver, Systematic Theology: Biblical and Historical (Ross-shire, UK: Mentor, 2005), 223.

^[4] Robert Duncan Culver, Systematic Theology, 224.