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be constitutive of the very meaning of our new coming to be, analogously to the way in which God is constitutive of our having come to be at all. So it would be true both that God partly determines what we are and are to be, while we ourselves and our fellow creatures also partly determine it, and that God and the creatures both enact, not the same act, but "the same effect," !lone and the same efficiency," which is to say, the latest state(s) of God's consummative/redemptive activity, which, so far as any particular creature is concerned, is(are) both entirely the act of the creature and entirely the act of God's consummative/redemptive response to the creature.

Wiki Markup4. Yet another possibly relevant insight: Is there really any difference, logically/ontologically, between saying, as Hartshorne does, that it is really God's own being that we give God and saying, with Quenstedt, that it is really God who enacts the acts of the creatures? I incline to answer, There is no difference, if by God's enacting the acts of the creatures one means God's re-acting, or responding, to their acts, thereby constituting their reality as acts in a public, nonsolipsistic sense, and so on. Perhaps another way of saying this is that a statement such as Wood's, that "God is so intimately involved in those \ [_sc._ creaturely\] activities as to _enact_ them simultaneously with the creatures themselves," is true if, but only if, (1) "enact" is used equivocally in both a relatively "active" sense in the case of the creatures' activities and a relatively "passive" sense in the case of God's activity; and (2) by "simultaneously" is understood, simply, that "they ain't nothin' till God calls 'em," i.e., constitutes the very meaning of their "coming to be" by reacting to them as only God does or can do.

30 September 2008