Necessary for Existence in Creation? Sure. For Being/Existence? Not So Much

Necessary for Existence in Creation? Sure. For Being/Existence? Not So Much.

3/9/2025

The line of thinking that posits that God can only be God if he is necessary is both correct and sorely off the mark.

The First Creation could not exist without God. In this sense, God is necessary for First Creation. First Creation could not exist if God did not create it and help maintain it.

However, the First Creation is not a product of nothing. The Beings that inhabit the First Creation existed in some form before the First Creation. God is necessary for their existence as Beings in the First Creation, but God is not necessary for their existence before the First Creation.

In this sense, God is entirely, fundamentally unnecessary in the strict, core denotion of the word. The Beings that comprise the First Creation would have gone on existing in whatever form or mode they existed without God's intervention.

The pre-First Creation mode of existence was obviously deficient/lacking; thus, God's First Creation is a positive development. However, it is misleading to say that this positive development was absolutely necessary.

The same applies to Jesus and his Second Creation. Although Jesus is necessary for the creation of Heaven, it would be wrong to claim that following Jesus into Heaven is absolutely necessary.

2 Comments

bruce g charlton

3/9/2025 20:24:35

That's how I see it too.

"God is necessary for their existence as Beings in the First Creation"

I was thinking about this today. I think it means that all beings are sustained in creation by the will of God. This means that no Being can be kept alive without God's consent.

(Without God's creative will; death, which is the end of incarnation in the First Creation, would ensue very rapidly - although not "instantaneously", because nothing is instantaneous.)

Therefore, ideas about people being kept alive artificially against God's consent - whether by drugs, intensive care, or some futuristic suspended animation - cannot be true. Even when wrong decisions (as is common) these life-extending actions are only allowed to "work" for God's reasons - usually (I suspect) to allow more time for repentance.

One who is called to die, and who consents to die then and there, is presumably one who has decided for salvation.

What I mean is: One who resists the call to die, is one who is here-and-now refusing salvation - and so he may be allowed to continue in mortal incarnation for some time longer, in hope that he will later repent and choose salvation.

Each individual instance is of course unique, but I would hazard that Most of those who nowadays live hyper-long lives, are probably doing so because they are unrepentant sinners who have refused the first and most timely (and maybe subsequent) calls to salvation.

Francis Berger

3/9/2025 20:52:50

@ Bruce - I find that trad/classical obsession with God's necessity has painted Christianity into a corner. That line of thinking may have worked in an earlier mode of consciousness, but believing that it's either God or nothing (as you have put it) no longer serves.

The longer lives may be ascribed to an unwillingness to repent. It almost certainly has a lot to do with that, but I also suspect it might have something to do with re-evaluating one's Christian assumptions on core matters and perhaps realizing that the "God is Ultimate and there is nothing else" is a partial understanding of the nature and purpose of Creation, to say nothing of Jesus and his offer.

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Necessary for Existence in Creation? Sure. For Being/Existence? Not So Much.

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