Co-Creation Does Not Diminish God

1/30/2022

Co-creation presents a major sticking point for many Christians. The core of the difficulty can be summed up thus: If co-creation is possible, then God is not truly God with a capital “G”, but at best a lesser, small “g” god, or, worse, a mere Being among other beings. These possibilities immediately bring the whole nature of Divine Creation into question.

This sticking point arises primarily from what Christians believe God to be – and most Christians believe God to be OmniGod or Supergod -- an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator who created everything from nothing and is the originator of everything but Himself.

Within this conceptualization, man is a creature whose capacity for creation is limited to subcreation – more specifically, the rearrangement and modification of God’s Creation. Man and all of God’s creatures are limited to subcreation by the simple fact that everything in Creation is of God. Unlike God, man is incapable of creating something out of nothing, which entails that man – and all other creatures – can never really create anything original or add to Creation in any way beyond the limits of modification and rearrangement.

This understanding of Creation is heavily steeped in Classical rationalism and Medieval Scholasticism, and Christians who adhere to this understanding of Creation declare it as evidence of God’s unquestionable glory, power, and supreme reign over Creation – a supreme reign that does not require nor desire co-creation – not only because it is impossible, but because it would be superfluous.

Within this conceptualization of Creation, God neither yearns for nor desires any real creativity or origination from his creatures because such creativity or origination would pose a direct challenge to his own status as prime and sole creator.

The idea here is simple – original creative activity is limited to God and God alone. If it were not, God would not truly be God, but something less-than-God.

Any sharing or expansion of original creative activity – were it possible – would not only shake the very foundations of Creation, but would also immediately diminish the stature of God.

Thus, instead of a God who actively yearns to share original creativity, rational theology arrives at a conceptualization of a God who contains all original creativity within Himself and is, ergo, perfectly content to engage in what amounts to a game with Himself.

However, if the conceptualization of God as OmniGod who created everything from nothing is set aside, it becomes possible to conceive of Creation as constantly evolving, developing, and expanding rather than as something complete. Within this continuously evolving, developing, and expanding Creation, co-creation not only becomes possible, but desirable as the ultimate purpose of divine Creation, which becomes voluntaristic rather than intellectualistic in nature.

Rather than being an originator of everything from nothing, God becomes the primary creator of a Creation consisting of pre-existing beings that voluntarily agree to be a part of His Creation so that they can participate in the opportunity to align with God’s will by choosing good over evil, creation over destruction, and, ultimately, divinity over death.

A big part of choosing divinity over death entails the motivation to become divine, which implies that God does not view divinity as something static, as something only He is capable of possessing, but as something that He can share with and expand to others. The motivation to become divine lies in the essence of co-creativity, which is a higher spiritual achievement than subcreation. Co-creativity increases the divine within man without the expense of any diminished divinity in God.

On the contrary, any increase in the divinity of man adds to and ennobles the divinity of God because man can only approach divinity by freely aligning himself with God’s Will. Rather than elevate man at the expense of God, co-creativity – as a divine-human operation – elevates both man and God.

Co-creativity not only represents a higher spiritual pursuit than subcreation, but it is also a higher expression of freedom and love. God proves his love for man by freely offering and sharing the potential for original creativity within Creation, which is based in freedom and love.

Man proves his love for God by answering God's call and helping to add something original to Creation that God could not have added alone. This not only adds to evolution and expansion of Creation, but it also adds to evolution and expansion of divinity via the evolution and expansion of freedom and love.

Note: Freedom presents difficulties to the Classical rationalistic/Medieval Scholastic definitions of God as an omni-everything. If God created freedom and freedom is wholly within God, then the freedom we experience is not really freedom, but a sort of partial freedom or psuedo-freedom. One possible solution to this dilemma is to posit that freedom is uncreated. If freedom is uncreated, it is outside God, which raises the possibility that God does not and cannot control freedom. If this is the case, the Classical rationalist/Medieval Scholastic conceptualization of God as omni-everything becomes riddled with inconsistencies. Freedom as the primordial foundation of being is another idea I've come across. This idea appears mostly in sources written by Christian mystics.

6 Comments

Tom

1/30/2022 22:56:10

It seems to me in this formulation Dickens and Shakespeare are unoriginal and uncreative since they did not invent the English language itself.

Just dull modifications and rearrangement. They added nothing of note to English liturature.

In this conceptualization of creativity how is this not true?

Francis Berger

1/31/2022 13:44:51

@ Tom - I've heard many argue that Shakespeare did indeed invent the English language, and that we are merely using it, but that's beside the point.

Speaking of point, I think you're missing it when it comes to subcreation and co-creation.

Subcreation is a form of creativity and it is a true form of creativity, but it is qualitatively different and "lower" than co-creation.

Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is to focus on the prefixes.

Sub means under, which means the sum of man's creativity happens in Creation "under" God. God provides everything needed for creativity and man supplies his individual creativity, which he then employs to rearrange or construct more complex forms from the "stuff" God has provided.

Some of what man can create in the mode of subcreation adds to and furthers Creation, particularly if it is aligned with the Divine. By the same token, some of what man creates in subcreation can be in complete opposition to the Divine and Creation.

You may argue that the works of anonymous artists and craftsmen of the Middle Ages, or Shakespeare, or Bach, or whomever were partly or fully aligned with the Divine, and that these works of subcreation did indeed further and add to Creation.

But what about a porn film? How about a pathogenic bioweapon designed to kill billions? These endeavors also employ creativity within subcreation -- they also rearrange the elements of Creation into different or more complex forms, but I would be hard pressed to label these as acts that glorify God. Moreover, they cannot be acts of co-creation because God would not choose to co-operate in such pursuits.

Subcreation may or may not actively involve God beyond the utilization of the elements of Creation. As such, it is of a lower spiritual quality. This is not to say it cannot be spiritually beneficial, but the spiritual benefits it supplies are of a lower quality. Conversely, subcreation can also be spiritually harmful, both to the individual and to God and Divine Creation.

Co means with -- thus, co-creativity entails a shared and active creativity with God - a divine form of active co-operation between God and the divine in man.

Thus, co-creation can only be spiritually beneficial and can never be spiritually harmful -- and this applies to both man and God. Co-creation implies that man has a divine and generative nature and that God "created" Creation in order to make co-operation between His Divine nature and man's divine nature possible and desirable.

Co-creation requires the acknowledgement of a primary creator - God - and it also requires the acknowledgement of the latent spiritual creativity and divinity of man. If man can use his freedom to align with God, God can use His freedom to align with what is divine in man and elevate man toward divinity.

In subcreation, God provides man the "stuff" needed for creative expression, to which man has the potential to apply his spirit and individuality.

In co-creation, man's spirit and individuality becomes the very "stuff" creative activity -- there is something(s) he can contribute to Creation that not only adds to Creation, but does not originate from existent Creation; therefore, something God alone could not have contributed.

Also, subcreation is largely limited to this world. Co-creation can happen in this world, but it also transcends it. Most co-creation occurs after mortal life, but the potential for it can be nurtured in this world.

2/1/2022 23:56:07

I do enjoy a well defined discussion, and appreciate the effort you put in defining terms.

It seems 'co creation'is creation ex nihilo for non God beings?

Let's set one thing aside briefly: the destruction of the wicked is to the glory of God. When people use the image of God within them to create evil that always leads to their destruction, it spiritually harms the evildoers. It doesn't spiritually harm God or creation, or those redeemed by God.

To the main point: what if Shakespeare had invented the English language?

No one would have understood anything he wrote, that's what.

It could be explained in the context of another language, by taking the persistent elements of that language to explain Shakespeare's new one. Without that context it would be unintelligible nonsense, and arguably not creative at all.

Such is the way with creation. What God created is a context for interaction between entities in the great chain of being. To make something outside of that is to make something wholly unintelligible and unrelatable. The only way it could be brought into any kind of sense would be to bring it into the context of God's own Creation. And at that point it becomes a type of 'subcreation' anyway.

When people invent languages they do it in the context of existing languages. Esperanto and Lojban are even more derivative than ordinary languages, they're not more unique, they're less. Such would be the case with your idea of co-creation, it would have to be more dependent on the context of creation, and less original, not more.

The genious of Shakespeare is not that he invented the English language, but that he understood so well the pre-existing tools he had to work with that he was able to assemble them in brilliant new ways. So even the combinations no one had heard before his plays, like upstairs, were immediately intelligible.

Lewis Caroll makes this point boldly. The moment someone draws a Jabberwok, or explains what they mean by a vorpal sword, or invents an anatomy of a bamdersnach, that very moment they have lost the alien element of the poem and made it ordinary.

It seems to me the problem with co-creation as you describe it is the problem C.S. Lewis had with sci-fi, anything you can imagine is a composition of what you've already experienced. So we are not capable of imagining anything absolutely original in the sense you seem to be describing. We can't actually imagine anything truely alien.

jorgen

1/31/2022 02:32:03

While I disagree with the Augustinian-Calvinist notion of God as omni-everything, and believe what they call "Open Theism" (i.e. God cannot exhaustively know the future because it doesn't exist yet, so predestination is false) makes way more sense than God knowing the future exhaustively, I still don't get what you or Bruce Charleton means by "Co-creativity" and/or "Co-creation." To me sub-creation is co-creation. Even having more Platonic/NeoPlatonic and mystical notions of God, (and even having contemplated the Samkhya-like notion of God as Maha-purusha over a bunch of purushas who all just exist just because and he is God becauae he's the coolest one of them or something like that), I still just don't get what you guys are trying to say. I also think souls as either creations of God or emanations from him makes more sense than the Samkhyan notion that he is just the biggest and best of an infinite number of pre-existing spirits. But setting that aside and even teying to be fully Samkhyan for the moment....well I guess if I go fully Samkhyan I can see it, because in their context you have a pre-Darwinian notion of evolution, of guided evolution, guided by all those pre-existing purushas (at least this is my intetpretation from reading the Samkhya Karika!), so that together we all evolved all the animal and human forms seen in the world, by desiring to reincarnate as some new form, and hence we evolved pakriti (nature) to produce all these forms. That's what I think they are saying anyway. But that kind of co-creation is probably not what you mean.

1/31/2022 13:48:25

@ jorgen - I'm afraid I don't know much about Samkhyan. Check my response to Tom above. It *may* help clarify things.

2/2/2022 21:39:43

@ Tom - Thanks. I appreciate the points you have made.

Nevertheless, it all comes down to metaphysical assumptions. Yours differ from mine in many key ways.

That is fine, but it makes describing the essence of something like co-creation incredibly difficult. Your assumed definition of God and Creation instantly renders co-creation incoherent no matter which way you slice it.

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Co-Creation Does Not Diminish God

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