The Relational Nature of God and The Creation

This is another excerpt from my final Apologetics paper.

I'm proposing that the Trinity itself offers us an intriguing starting point for discussions. Christianity says that God is not a "monolithic piece of granite in the sky" but a dynamic, ongoing relationship: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And all that we see around us is a relationship: what I call "me" is the product of my social relationships as well as the product of the relationships between my brain, heart, lungs and kidneys. And each one of those organs is itself an "organ in relationship"--made of cells, for example, which also exist by virtue of being in relationship...

The Scriptures teach us that all of creation acts in some way as a pointer or sign to who God is. This is one of the ways that creation does that. The creation mirrors God’s innately relational character by being a creation that is always in relationship. If and when those relationships begin to break down, the creation ceases to exist.

God exists as a relationship. And so he creates a cosmos that is a cosmos in relationship—it is a relationship that exists in and of itself but it is a created thing, a derived thing, and it was intended to exist in relationship with its Creator.

Since our relational nature is borrowed from a larger “life source” in the nature of the Trinity if we were ever to be cut off from that life source, life as we know it would begin to disintegrate. This is what has happened as a result of sin. Sin is broken relationship. We have broken relationship with the God-in-Relationship who created us to exist as derived creatures—creatures who were meant to exist as beings-in-relationship with God.

And so, as the second law of thermodynamics tells us, all things tend towards decay. We die. Our lives are marred by death and broken relationships everywhere—wars, unjust legislation, exploitation, genocide, divorce, lying, manipulation, greed, selfish ambition.

The system of related-ness has broken down. And if nothing is done from the Triune Life Source that stands outside of the system of brokenness then it will simply continue to spiral into decay.

But something has been done to reconcile people to their original relational life-source. God himself has come and entered into our broken relational world and he has offered us a way out. He has come to offer us a life of connected-ness back to the Sustaining Relationship we were intended to feed off of, to live on.

We live on a relationship between the food that we eat and our stomachs that then break down those foods into nutrients and energy that our body needs to survive. Our souls were made to relate to the Triune God in the same way. We were intended to draw life from the Relational Life of the Trinity that then animates our spirits, our imaginations, our minds, our emotions, our wills, our relationships.

And that happens, of course, through the work of Jesus Christ.

[Ed's note: I'm not posting these clips because I think that my paper is so brilliant that everyone should read it. I simply can't think more than one deep thought on any given day]