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But God doesn't have to intervene in this sense in order to be effectively present to the world -- any more than a parent has to make her or his child's decisions for the child in order to be effectively present to the child. The fundamental problem with the whole idea of divine intervention is that it implies that, in principle, God and creatures, God and the world, are in conflict with one another -- God's doing, at least now and then, what creatures can and should do for themselves and one another, or creatures' doing, or at any rate trying to do, what only God could conceivably be in a position to do. On the contrary, God and creatures are not rivals for the same roles -- not, in any event, if one is to make sense of the most fundamental of Christian claims. For in creating the world, and preeminently in creating woman and man, God creates free beings who both are and, in the case of human beings, are called to be cocreators co-creators with God in the ongoing work of creation. Therefore, God's activity as Creator neither does not nor can do what the creatures can and should do for themselves and each other, but, precisely as the activity of pure, unbounded love, devotes itself to establishing and maintaining the necessary conditions of the possibility of their own creative activity. Likewise, in consummating the world and human beings by embracing all things in God's own everlasting life, God does nothing that any creature does or even could do for itself or its fellow creatures. Indeed, the only thing that creatures can possibly do that conflicts with God's activity as the Consummator -- and even this God lovingly suffers -- is the sinful striving of human beings somehow to consummate themselves; and, far from being a proper human activity, such striving is the very thing that keeps our activity from being truly human by so binding us to ourselves and the world that we are not really free to exist and to act for them.

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