Page History

PDF Version of this Document

On the Works of God Ad Extra

...

God's creative work can be said to be emancipative insofar as God's setting the fundamental limits of natural, or cosmic, order establishes the optimal limits of all creaturely freedom and thus sets all creatures free to create themselves and one another (89 f.). But although God's emancipative work thus extends to all creatures, and all creatures can participate in it insofar as their own creative decisions realize the intention lying behind God's work, this work bears uniquely on human creatures who have the distinctive kind of metaphysical freedom that we call "moral freedom," and who therefore can participate in God's emancipative work in a correspondingly distinctive way. If any being as such is in some way creative, any being as such is in some way emancipative. But where there is the unique emergentlevel emergent level of freedom properly called "moral," there is a unique capacity for creative and therefore emancipative activity (112). Given this capacity, the divine intention in creating and emancipating can be realized intentionally.

...