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On the Works of God Ad Extra

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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.

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Actuality as such, we may say, is self-creative response to other self-creativity, which as thus responded to is also creative of others, or other-creative. Relatively, then, to the antecedent self-creativity to which its self-creativity responds, any actuality is consummative and as such, redemptive, just as relatively to the subsequent self-creativity of which it is other-creative, any actuality is creative and, as such, emancipative. But, then, the uniqueness or unsurpassability of God as the Creator, and hence the Emancipator, on the one hand, and the Consummator, and hence the Redeemer, on the other, lies in the universal scope – -- the "modal all-inclusiveness" (Hartshome) – -- of God's self-creative response to all other self-creativity, and all other self-creativity's response to God's self-creativity. Although we both create and consummate, emancipate and redeem, we do so always in a radically fragmentary, non-all-inclusive way with respect to some things only. By an infinite qualitative difference, God both creates and consummates, emancipates and redeems, all things in a radically all-inclusive, nonfragmentary way.

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