In Chapter 4, Southgate develops a trinitarian “theology of creation,” an admittedly speculative enterprise that seeks to shine some light on the relationship between the triune God and an evolutionary process that operates according to Darwinian principles.
Taking up the theme of kenosis, Southgate suggests that God’s self-emptying love is foundational both to intra-trinitarian relationships and to the relationship between God and the world. God the Father pours out his love, the essence of his being, giving rise to (begetting) God the Son, who, in turn, returns all that he is to the Father. And this intra-divine relationship of self-emptying love constitutes God the Holy Spirit.
Southgate suggests that this inherently self-emptying, or kenotic, character of the divine love is the ground of God’s desire to create the genuinely other. And this desire is realized in the creation of the world and in the evolutionary process where God “lets be” a great variety of creatures.
Following Irenaeus, Southgate calls the Son and the Spirit God’s “two hands” in creation. The Son, or Word, provides the intelligible pattern for species, which, in tune with modern biology, Southgate sees not as static essences, but as “points and peaks” on an ever-shifting “fitness landscape.” The Spirit, meanwhile, both provides creatures with their “thisness,” or particularity as unique individuals, and lures them onward toward new possibilities of fulfillment and self-transcendence.
At any given time living creatures are in one of four states:
While God takes delight in fulfilled creatures, there always remains an ambiguous note in creation. As Southgate observes, the divine love may be kenotic, or self-emptying, but Darwinian pressures require organisms to be self-assertive, if not downright aggressive. So, while the creatures praise God simply by flourishing as the type of creatures they are, there is a tension between their self-assertive fulfillment and the kind of selfless love that God is.
This is where the element of self-transcendence comes in: Southgate sees God as luring creation– through the messy, ambiguous, and painful evolutionary process–toward a point where genuine self-giving love becomes possible: love of the other for its own sake. We see traces of this love in some of the higher animals, perhaps, but only in humanity, Southgate maintains, does this kind of love become a permanent possibility (though one that is all too infrequently realized).
As God draws creations forward toward self-giving love, however, God endures the persistent self-assertiveness of creatures. If flourishing as the type of creature it is can be seen as the creature’s “Yes” to God, the “No” is a refusal of God’s invitation to self-transcendence, rather than selfish and preferential behavior:
God suffers not only in the suffering of myriad creatures, each one precious to the Creator, and the extinction of myriad species, each a way of being imagined within the creative Word, but also the continual refusal–beyond creation’s praise–of God’s offer of self-transcendence, the continual refusal, beyond all creation’s flourishing, to live by the acceptance of the divine offer that would draw the creature deeper into the life of the Trinity itself. It will be apparent anew how paradoxical the theology of evolutionary creation must be, given the Christian affirmation that a good God has given rise to a good creation, and yet as we have seen the creation is shot through with ambiguity. The purposes of God are, and are not, realized in the life of any given creature. God delights in creatures in and for themselves, and yet longs for the response of the creature that can become more than itself, whose life can be broken and poured out in love and joy after the divine image. (p. 68)
This creaturely “no” is experienced by God most powerfully on the cross of Jesus. In sketching a theology of the Atonement, Southgate says that the cross is God bearing the brunt of creation’s “no,” and taking responsibility for the pain and suffering etched into the process of life. In becoming incarnate in Jesus, God identified not just with humanity, but with all creaturely suffering, loss, and failure. “The Incarnation is the event by which God takes this presence and solidarity with creaturely existence to its utmost, and thus ‘takes responsibility’ for all the evil in creation–both the humanly wrought evil and the harms to all creatures” (p. 76)
Southgate calls this “deep incarnation”–“the Christ-event takes all creaturely experience into the life of God in a new way.” In dying and rising, God in Jesus inaugurates a new age in which creation will be freed from its travails–humans freed to love selflessly, and non-human animals freed from the ambiguous nature of the evolutionary process in which they are caught up.
Questions and considerations:
Regarding the first point, Southgate acknowledges that, of course, no moral blame attaches to creatures for failing to transcend themselves. However, he says, it still makes sense to speak of a certain “recalcitrance” in nature as it presently exists that resists the shape of the “peaceable kingdom.” This is in keeping with his general emphasis on creation’s “groaning”: of being in process toward something that will be fully transparent to God’s will and is foreshadowed in some of the eschatological passages in the Bible.
In response to the second concern, Southgate says in a footnote that “theology of creation is a different sort of discourse from scientific explanation […], so the two can coexist without there necessarily being conflict between them” (fn. 56, p. 161). This needs to be fleshed out more, however. Does he mean that the two “discourse” are just two ways of describing the same phenomena? In which case, why prefer one or the other? Or does he mean that the theological discourse gets at an aspect of the total process that the scientific discourse leaves out, and is therefore necessary to give a complete account?
Index of posts in this series is here.
A Thinking Reed 