Divine determinacy and indeterminacy
June 2001

1. The divine is a given of which persons are a part. Persons are innovative participants in the divine, and co-create with the divine their accounts of the divine. Their enactions of the divine are relative to human creative uniqueness and to the idiosyncratic context of human embodiment in language, culture, nature and history. People’s enactions are variegated perspectives which shape, and are co-creatively grounded in, what is universal in the divine, both determinate and indeterminate.

2. The divine is determinate, in part, in terms of divine cosmos-making, divine manifestation in all its modes. Persons participate in intrinsically-featured cosmos-making divine speech and, in communion with it, translate it and shape it into their own autonomous human speech. What they say is not true by virtue of its correspondence with objective divine determinacy. It is true by virtue of its dynamic congruence, its ‘intersubjective’ resonant attunement, with the ongoing divine speech in which they co-creatively participate (with the whole of their being, not only conceptually and verbally). And this truth can and will include varied human perspectives on divine determinacy, including new ways of construing it. If you will, all the intrinsic features of divine manifestation in all its diverse modes are malleable, and their degree of malleability may vary among the diverse modes (e.g. subtle realms may be more malleable to enaction than physical realms).

3. Divine determinacy, with its malleability, is one factor that enables universal dialogue between varied and innovative plural enactions of its intrinsic features.

4. The divine is indeterminate with respect (a) to its intrinsic non-manifest nature, (b) to its potential for innovation in divine becoming, either in terms of radically modifying or removing determinate features of divine cosmos-making and states of being, or (c) in terms of generating entirely new features. Both (b) and (c) can include human-divine versions, as well as purely divine versions. In other words, human-divine co-creations can either radically modify determinate features of divine cosmos-making and states of being, or can generate entirely new features. The divine is also indeterminate with respect (d) to the varied and innovative human enactions of divine determinate cosmos-making, mentioned in 2 and 3 above. And (d) is already on the threshold of (b), since an innovative account, just as such, of intrinsic features, will to some varying degree (depending on the mode of manifestation) dynamically reshape them.

5. Divine indeterminacy is an even more basic factor that enables universal dialogue between a diversity of plural enactions of both divine determinacy and indeterminacy. It is an inexhaustible generative womb of creative dialogue. It is the shared ocean of mystery that keeps our ears open to each other.