By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
He that made us without ourselves, will not save us without ourselves.
-- Augustine
The most obvious truth in this saying is that God's consummative/redemptive action makes our salvation, not actual, but only really possible. Its becoming actual requires our own faithful acceptance of God's action.
The contrast Augustine draws between salvation and creation, however, is misleading, insofar as God's creative/emancipative action likewise makes our creation only really possible, not actual. Its becoming actual likewise requires our own self-creative action.
Even so, Augustine is right that God makes us without ourselves to the extent that God's role in creative/emancipative action is unsurpassable and dependent upon no one and no thing. That there is some world for us and our fellow creatures to exist and to act in is no more our own doing, individually or collectively, than that there is always a certain relatively fixed and stable order to the world that allows for the possibility of more good than evil being realized through our own creative/emancipative action. All this is from God, in no way anything that either we or any other creature could even possibly do.
17 September 2005
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