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What is meant by "an act of God"?

By "an act of God" is meant either: (1) something immediately and directly done by God, whether as Creator-Emancipator of all things or as Consummator-Redeemer thereof; or (2) something mediately and indirectly done by God through, or in cooperation with, one or more creatures, whereby either the intention of God's immediate and direct act as Creator-Emancipator and/or Consummator-Redeemer is carried out by the corresponding act of a creature or else one creature is so experienced by yet another understanding creature as to re-present represent God's immediate and direct act as gift and demand to that other creature.

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1. As Creator-Emancipator of all things, God immediately and directly acts to establish the fundamental rules or "laws" of natural order, in the sense of the optimal limits of creaturely action. This means that an essential prior decision in the past of every creaturely choice is the immediate past decision of God whereby the optimal limits of all creaturely choice are reestablished. This implies, of course, that the creature's creation, involving, as it does, its own choice, is, in part, self-creation. Even so, God's part as the Other in the selfcreation self-creation of every creature is decisive and is God's act alone; for that there is always some world, and that this world always has an order in which the ratio of opportunities for good to risks of evil through creaturely choices is always favorable, is due utterly and completely to the creative-emancipative act of God. On the other hand, as Consummator-Redeemer of all things, God immediately and directly acts to include all other action in God's own selfcreation self-creation as God. Thus all that comes to be through creaturely choice is a prior decision to which God responds in God's present consummative-redemptive choice to create Godself.

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4. Obviously, it is this last way in which God acts mediately and indirectly that is most significant for christology, although not only for christology. The point of reference so far as the christological assertion is concerned is not a creaturely act corresponding to God's act either as Creator-Emancipator or as Consummator-Redeemer, i.e., as the actualization either of good or of faith, or even as the re-presentation of the possibility of faith, but rather an understanding experience on the part of one creature for which another creature is experienced as the decisive re-presentation of God's gift and demand. In other words, the Jesus who is the subject term of the christological assertion is not "the so-called historical Jesus," viewed in some way or other in terms of his actualization of good or of faith or his representation of the possibility thereof, but rather "the historic, biblical [sc. apostolic] Christ," viewed in terms of our actualization of faith and our representation re-presentation of it as a possibility through him. For whatever reasons, the earliest Christians so experienced Jesus that through him they experienced the real presence, the gift and demand, of God Godself. But this is sufficient to explain, then, why this last way in which God acts mediately or indirectly is also significant for ecclesiology and sacramentology and for the doctrine of the means of salvation generally. Experiencing an act as a sacrament -- whether or not it is intentionally performed as such -- is a matter of one creature so experiencing another as thereby to experience the gift and demand of God as Creator-Emancipator and Consummator-Redeemer.

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