I'd be interested to your reactions to the following by
theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, _Toward a Theology of Nature_, ed. by Ted
Peters (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 34-35:
"Affirmations about the contingency of the world at large and of
all its parts already imply a close connection between creation and
conservation. The world was not simply put into existence once, at the
beginning of all things, in such a way that it would have been left to
its own afterward. Rather, every creature is in need of conservation of
its existence in every moment; and such conservation is, according to
theological tradition, nothing else but a continuous creation. This
means that the act of creation did not take place only in the beginning.
It occurs every moment. Accordingly, in the traditional theological
doctrine of creation the activity of every creature is dependent on
divine cooperation, a _concursus divinus_. There is no activity and no
product of creative activity in the world without divine cooperation.
The divine activity operates without detriment to the contingency
and immediacy of singular actions, which has been identified in the
theological tradition with the idea of divine governance of the world.
It is due to this divine government of creation that the sequence of
contingent events and created forms takes the shape of a continuous
process toward the divine goal of an ultimate completion and
glorification of all creation."
It seems to me that Pannenberg's analysis might help forge a
middle road between those who want to identify God's
God's activity with "special" creative acts only, and those who want to
relegate God's activity in nature only to the initial creative event.
What think ye?
Dennis Durst
Urbana, IL
dldurst@prairienet.org