Creatio Ex Nihilo: A FieldOriented Approach

Abstract

Abstract: Process-oriented thinkers complain that the classical understanding of the God-world relationship is inherently dualistic. Instead they propose a model of the God-world relationship based on the soul-body analogy. Yet this seems to compromise the freedom of God vis-à-vis creation and the notion of God as Trinity. The author suggests a new approach to the God-world relationship based on a modified understanding of “societies” within the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: namely, “societies” as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions. The three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in this way first co-constitute an unbounded field of activity or “space” for their own dynamic interrelation within the divine being. Then within this “space” by their conjoint free decision the persons of the Trinity gradually bring into existence the entire world of creation understood as a hierarchically ordered set of subfields corresponding to individual entities (inanimate and animate) and the “systems”(environments, communities) into which they are aggregated. Since fields can be thus interlayered and yet remain basically independent of one another in their ongoing existence and activity, God is not thereby identified with the world nor the world collapsed into God. But the divine persons and all their creatures still share in different ways one and the same communitarian life.