John Webster on Aseity and Creation

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83r17h

Puritan Board Freshman
Two corollaries may be mentioned: First, such is the plenitude of life enjoyed by the Father, Son and Spirit that God does not create out of need, making good some deficiency. The world cannot complete God; creation is not theogony, because created being is derivative not subsistent being. God's perfect triune life is not mere formless abstraction standing in need of realization by positing another as its counterpart. Second God's triune self-sufficiency means that his relation to created being is gratuitous. This marks the radical difference between, on the one hand, the immanent activities of generation and spiration, and, on the other hand, the transitive act of creation. 'While God was always Father, he was not always Creator or Maker.' And there are other ramifications: that creation is an 'ethical' not a 'physical' act, that is, not one in which God's being overflows in a way which undermines God's self-possession; that creation ex nihilo is an unreservedly radical conception; that God's impassibility in relation to creation, far from being indifference, is an affirmation that the world has value in itself not as a necessary counterpart to an otherwise deficient being.

From John Webster, God Without Measure, 91-92.

I really appreciated the insight on impassibility here. That God is impassible means that he is not dependent on creation. The consequence is that he doesn't need creation, and thus he must value it and give it value, if he creates (and sustains) it. So impassibility actually upholds the value of creation as creation - whereas passibility would require God to be dependent on creation, and thus creation would lose its integrity as creation.
 
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