By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
On the Gift and Demand of God's Love
The gift of God's love is essentially twofold (hence "double gratuity"): that one is at all; and that one's existence has an ultimate meaning or significance. "Creation" designates the gift of existence as such, "consummation," the gift of its ultimate significance -- the first being ordered to the second.
The demand of God's love is also twofold (both "command" and "commandments"): that we each so act as to accept in unreserved trust and unqualified loyalty God's acceptance of us together with all our fellows; and that we each so act as to realize as fully as possible all other creaturely potentialities, our own as well as those of all our fellow creatures, to the ever greater glory of God.
2 May 1979; rev. 31 August 2003
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