In “the opening chapters of Genesis, . . . it is made clear that creation is of beings in relationship, and in three distinct but related senses. First, the world is what it is by virtue of its createdness, which means a calling into otherness to and relation with its creator. The denial of that is the underlying reason why the misconstruals of human and worldly being that were charted in the first four chapters take the form that they do. In attempting to see the creation apart from the creator, they fail in important ways to see it at all. Second, the human creation is what it is as a being in relationship. That we have our true being in communion, and especially in the communion-in-otherness that is male and female, is the message of Genesis on both its positive and negative sides. Positively, humankind is social kind. Adam can find no true fellow creature among the animals, none that will enable him truly to be himself. It is only when he can rejoice in the fellowship of one who is a true other-in-relation that he is able to transcend the merely individual state that is a denial of human fullness. Negatively, the Fall leads to ever more disastrous breaches of communion, culminating in murder, the most serious sin against the image of God. The centrality of the two dimensions of communion is symbolized especially by Babel, according to which breach of communion with God leads to the depotentiation of that most central means of communion and communication, language. With the Fall, language divides rather than relates, and it is no accident that in the Acts of the Apostles one of the first actions of the Holy Spirit, the giver of communion, is symbolically to reverse Babel by restoring communication and so communion between the divided nations of the earth.
“Third, and this is the conception with which we are chiefly concerned in this chapter, the world is what it is by virtue of its relation to those who bear the image of God. The shape that the world takes is in large part determined by what we, the human creation, make of it. Again, we can say that many disasters of all eras, but especially of modernity, derive from a misconstruction of that relation. The image has been understood individualistically, rather than in terms of a being in relation, so that patterns of alienation in relation to other human beings, of domination over rather than dominion of the rest of the creation, have eventuated. Yet despite the distortions, we must maintain a point that will recur, that the created world is not truly itself without us, its most problematic inhabitants. Without us, there is suffering and death but not pollution and moral evil; without us there is no science and art, none of the essentially moral action which enables the world to be itself. In summary, it can be said that the created world, as that which is what it distinctively is by virtue of its createdness, reflects in different ways the being of God in communion. The human creation, made in the image of God, reflects most directly the divine being in communion. But by virtue of its relation to both God and man, the rest of the created order, too, is brought into the relation of one and many that all this entails.”
— Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
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