God's need of us

This Third Friday of Lent finds us about half-way through this annual season of penance. How is it going for you? Have all your New Year's-like resolutions melted away? I hope so! How American: Lent, a time for self-improvement.

A brief dialogue:

You need God and, in a certain and very real way, God needs you.

God needs me?

Yes.

But God is God. Isn't part of being God being self-sufficient?

No, not necessarily. Is creation a wholly superfluous act on God's part? If God were complete and sufficient, why would God create? Can God do without us?

And so it goes. I have an entire section of my dissertation dedicated to this.

Before starting his essay “Creation Out of Love” with the words “God creates out of love,” Paul Fiddes strikes the right note with his epigraph, taken from William Vanstone’s Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense: “The activity of God in creation must be vulnerable.”¹ To insist that God created the world “out of love,” according to Fiddes, is not only to offer a reason for creation, but to forward a dangerous proposition, the consequences of which we must be prepared to accept

I pick this up a few paragraphs later after a discussion and attempted rebuttal of what Heidegger asserts in his first lecture on metaphysics about how believing in God begs the question of Being:

The dangerous proposition Fiddes forwards, which he rightly observes seems “theologically outrageous” to certain Christians, is that “a God who creates ‘out of love’ has needs to be satisfied.”² This assertion can be explained straightforwardly by means of an analogy. The analog is human love. “A loving God,” Fiddes insists, “needs response from some kind of created world, and especially from personal beings who are outside the internal life of God.”³ The first move Fiddes makes to bolster this audacious claim is to invoke a poem by a seventeenth century English poet, Thomas Traherne:

        Want in God is a treasure to us.
        For had there been no Need He would not hav Created the World,
        not Made us…Wants Satisfied Produce infinit Joys.”³

Fiddes quickly parts ways with Traherne, however, by denying that God’s infinite needs are eternally met because such an assertion once again renders creation superfluous, not even seeing creation as icing on the cake, but perhaps amounting to but a few sprinkles

Anyway, something to think about. I will add that all our talk about God being relational has to have some concrete meaning.

This, I think, helps explain why Lent can never mainly be about me reaching out to God. Rather, by the practice of the three fundamental spiritual disciplines that constitute part of any genuinely Christian spirituality, I clear some space, not for God to work, but to experience God who is always already at work.

Last Sunday morning, driving home from Church after leading a conversation with the Elect of our parish (i.e., adults who will be baptized at Easter) on Salvation, I heard this song by one of my favorite groups, the Welsh band The Alarm. So, "Rescue Me" is our traditio for today.

God not only wants but needs to save you, redeem you, sanctify you, conform you into the image of Christ, which is the full realization of your humanity, which, in turn, is the point of the incarnation.

---

1 Paul Fiddes, “Creation Out of Love,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne, 167.^↩
2 Ibid.^↩
3 "Creation Out of Love," 169.^↩