Music That Eternally Belongs to God

“The image of cosmic music is an especially happy way of describing the analogy of creation to the Trinitarian life. Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.”

[David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 276]

The Windows of Her House Look Outward

“Mightier than Estë is Nienna, sister of the Fëanturi; she dwells alone. She is acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor. So great was her sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope. Her halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad. She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.”

[J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 14, doing a better job with the doctrines of Creation and the Last Things than 99% of all the church’s theologians]

To Be the Theatre of His Glory

“And if we inquire in to the goal of creation, the object of the whole, the object of heaven and earth and all creation, I can only say that it is to be the theatre of His glory. The meaning is that God is being glorified. Doxa, gloria, means quite simply to become manifest. God wills to be visible in the world; and to that extent creation is a significant action of God. ‘Behold, it was very good.’ Whatever objections may be raised against the reality of the world, its goodness incontestably consists in the fact that it may be the theatre of His glory, and man the witness to this glory. We must not desire to know a priori what goodness is, or to grumble if the world does not correspond to it. For the purpose for which God made the world it is also good. ‘The theatre of His glory, theatric gloriae Dei’, says Calvin of it. But man is the witness; he who is allowed to be where God is made glorious, is not a merely passive witness; the witness has to express what he has seen. That is man’s nature, that is what he is able to do, to be a witness of God’s acts. This purpose of God ‘justifies’ Him as the Creator.”

[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 58]

We Are Incapable of Telling

“God is in himself replete, unoriginal love, the reciprocal fellowship and delight of the three and the utter repose and satisfaction of their love. God requires nothing other than himself. Yet his unoriginal love also originates. Why this should be so, we are incapable of telling, for though with much concentration we can begin to grasp that it is fitting that God should so act, created intelligence cannot get behind or reduce any further is the outward movement of God’s love, God’s love under its special aspect of absolute creativity. God’s creative love is not the recognition, alteration or ennoblement of an antecedent object beside itself, but the bringing of an object into being, ex nihilo generosity by which life is given. By divine love, the ‘infinite distance’ which ‘cannot be crossed’ – the distance between being and nothing – has been crossed. The love of God, therefore, has its term primarily in itself but secondarily in the existence of what is other than God, determined by that love for fellowship with him.”

[John Webster, “Trinity and Creation,” IJST 12:1, 2010 (emphasis original)]

He Is Already an Object of Love

“God would be no less God if He had created no world and no man. The existence of the world and our own existence are in no sense vital to God, not even as the object of His love. The eternal generation of the Son by the Father tells us first and supremely that God is not at all lonely without the world and us. His love has its object in Himself… . God could satisfy His love in Himself. For He is already an object to Himself and He is an object truly worthy of His love. … Only when we are clear about this can we estimate what it means that God has actually, though not necessarily, created a world and us, that His love actually, though not necessarily, applies to us, that His Word has actually, though not necessarily, been spoken to us… . We evaluate this purposiveness correctly only if we understand it as the reality of the love of God who does not need us but who does not will to be without us, who has directed His regard specifically on us.”

[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 139-40]

An Embarrassing and Stubborn Discipline?

A Christian doctrine of creation is doubly inhibited: by the ineffability of its object, and by the limits of fallen finite intelligence. The doctrine is chiefly concerned, no so much with causal explanation of what is as with contemplation of the fact that what is might not have been, and of the infinite bliss of God who lies on the other side of that ‘might not have been’. The doctrine’s core, in other words, is not cosmology but theology proper — God’s ‘invisible nature’ (Rom. 1:20), which, even when manifest in the visibilia of created reality, exceeds comprehensive intelligence (a point obscured when teaching about creation is annexed by natural theology). … The rule which governs teaching about the Trinity, and therefore about creation as one of its extensions is: love alone restores knowledge. Love, furthermore, is the end of theological contemplation of the creator and his work.…

What Christian theology says about creation is a function of what it says about God, and what it says about God is a function of what it hears from God. This is why a Christian doctrine of creation is an exercise in dogmatics. Like all dogmatics, it partakes in the movement of created reason as with the illumination of divine revelation it is conducted out of darkness into the light and life of God. Any worth which a dogmatics of creation possesses derives from participation in this movement, above all as dogmatics follows the indications of the prophets and apostles.… In the matter of the triune creator, dogmatics frequently stumbles, and often stands in need of others — especially philosophical theologians — to recall it to its proper matter and task. And yet we ought not to greet this state of affairs with relief as an opportunity to disencumber ourselves of an embarrassing and stubborn discipline.”

[John Webster, “Trinity and Creation,” IJST 12, Jan, 2010]