Response to James Watkins Creativity as Sacrifice

Jeremy S. Begbie

I am very flattered that a book of mine that is almost twenty-five years old
should still be studied, and even more flattered that James Watkins, in his careful
reading of Voicing Creations Praise, should be so generous about its significance,
and so gracious about what he perceives to be its strengths.
As it happens, though I would now nuance some things differently and express
a number of points otherwise, I still hold to the basic shape and drive of the argument.
And in many respects James understands this well, especially my wish to bring
participation and vocation together (though I would want to say that both are well
represented in the Reformed tradition), and my concern to think Christologically and
trinitarianly throughout. I am always a little anxious when reviewers write things like:
the artist as priest of creation is the central feature of his theology of art.
Identifying the central feature of someones theology of art is likely to be a risky
business. I would prefer to call this a central feature. But in any case, I am grateful
that James has not picked over details and instead concentrated on a major theme.
(Most of the reviewers have not been so wise.)
However, it seems that we are working with divergent theological ontologies.
We could have extended conversations about the differences, but to keep things
manageable let me go straight to one passage in James review.
Begbies non-competitive relation exclude eros from Gods loving creativity
because God does not desire the return of the creature. Instead, exchange is
thus integral to Gods gift in Christ, before any response of ours. Begbie
stands within a long tradition of understanding the motivation behind Gods
redemption as deriving only from Gods own nature and not from any value in
creation.
To be honest, I gulped a little at this, and had to read it two or three times to make
sure it said what I thought it said. Let me respond and clarify my position by making
three points. First, I would hold that the primordial motivation for both creation and
redemption is the love of God, and that this love is internal to who God is by virtue of
the character of Gods triune life. The divine life is an internally differentiated
communion of loving exchange. This precedes creation and redemption. It is this
which has already been concretely played out for us in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ
before any response of ours. Christ offers a human response which, because he is
the incarnate Son of the Father, can instantiate both Gods desire for us and our
desire for God. Second, I hold that redemption is not necessitated by any reality
outside of God and in this sense, Gods redemption is not motivated by the
created world. However, this does not preclude holding that God freely responds to
the God-given value and needs of his created world, as long as this response is seen
as proceeding from Gods own fullness, not from a need to be needed. The value of
creation is not the origin or cause of Gods desire to redeem, but Gods own triune
life. A third point: I do not in fact exclude eros from Gods loving creativity, and I
would be suspicious of any attempt to drive agape and eros apart. In an essay of
seven years ago, I wrote:

Just as the triune God lives as an endless movement of attraction and delight,
so God does not make himself available as an object for dispassionate scrutiny
but in an overture of enticement, through which by the Spirits agency we are
made to long for Gods presence, indeed, thirst for him. God attracts our
attention by the outgoing Spirit, enabling us to respond, catching us up into
the divine life. Indeed, can we not say that to experience the allure of God is
nothing other than to experience the Spirit reconciling us to the Father through
the Son and thus reordering our desires? No wedge need be driven between
agape and eros provided the latter is not allowed to introduce notions of
subsuming the other under manipulative restraint; indeed, as David Bentley
Hart puts it, Gods love, and hence the love with which we come to love God,
is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of
otherness.1
Despite what James claims, then, I believe strongly that God desires the return of the
creature. But this is not a desire born of need or lack; it is an outpouring, an overflow
of the plenitude of desire which constitutes divine life. My concern about the (very
fashionable) theologies of desire emerging today is not their wish to take eros
seriously that is all to the good, and follows a venerable tradition. My concern is
that desire is not being understood and defined first and foremost out of Gods own
triune life. There is a tendency for discussions of divine desire to jump too quickly to
talking about the God-world relation (often understood univocally from creaturely
patterns of relation including artistic ones), thus short-circuiting any consideration
of what is distinctive about the eros of Gods triune life.
Above all, I suspect the key differences between us derive from our attitude to
the kenotic tradition, and the vision of the Creator-creature relation this stream of
thought tends to presume and encourage. James is far more optimistic about this
pattern of thought than I am. I think we need to be extremely careful in ascribing
certain notions of risk to Gods ways with the world (whether or not they are
derived from a theory of artistic creativity), or, indeed, to Gods own life. My
wariness of this way of speaking runs along the same lines as many critiques of
kenoticism. I find that many of the theological constructs built out of the language of
Philippians 2 are not only excessive, but actually distort what Paul is assuming and
saying. The basic metaphysical move in Vanstone and others in this tradition, of
course, is to speak of a retreat (to be fair, a voluntary retreat) of God which gives
sufficient scope for the agency of the creature. Even the act of creation is sometimes
folded into this scheme. Although all this can be formulated in highly qualified, subtle
and nuanced ways, the question is bound to arise: to what extent are we still driven by
the assumption that God and the creature (human or non-human) are inherently vying
for the same space, as quasi-finite entities on the same (creaturely?) level of being
and causality, counterpoised in a zero-sum scenario (the less of God, the more of the
world)? The heavy dependence on visual-spatial models (retraction, withdrawal,
making room, etc.) seems to suggest some such scheme, whatever intentions there
might be to the contrary. Once again, as I have tried to show elsewhere, only if we are
prepared to think out of a centre in Gods triune life opened out to us in Christ in
which self-giving is a fundamentally matter of overflowing fullness, not self-retreat
will these unfortunate (and unnecessary) habits of mind be overcome.
1

Begbie, J.S., Created Beauty: The Witness of J. S. Bach, in Resonant Witness: Conversations
Between Music and Theology, ed. J. S. Begbie and S. R. Guthrie, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011, p.
31.

James is right to point out that a host of questions need addressing in relation
to these vast topics. I am grateful to him for raising some of them so succinctly.