god, necessity, and relationality

Does God need us? In what sense is our existence necessary to or for God? Ultimately, what purpose do humans serve as God's creations? These questions have been percolating in my head since I started here at Fuller. One of the first classes I took, Christian Ethics, spurred these thoughts. During class, my ethics professor claimed, "God does not need you and I." This statement bothers me. If I were to adopt this mentality/philosophy/whatever you want to call it, I think I would be driven to nihilism or a belief that our purpose in this life is futile. I argue that God does need us. However, I need to substantiate "need" or God's necessity for us in order to provide a Biblical account of God's necessity. In doing so, a tension arises between the God of the philosophers and the relational God revealed through Scripture. Elucidating this tension provides insight into God's necessity for us.

If you know anything about the proofs for God's existence, at least the traditional proofs, you know that they do not provide a relational God professed by theists. Rather, the proofs of God's existence generally provide the God of the philosophers or of deism. The God of the philosophers is the highest being, the first cause of all that exists, and the unmoved mover. In other words, God is not necessitated, required to exist, or forced to act based on anything external to God's self. I can agree with many of these conclusions because God is the Alpha and Omega of everything that exists. However, this God is only the God of deism because no relationality comes about through God as the highest being, first cause, and unmoved mover. God is merely the Being that put everything into motion and sits back observing, not interacting with, what God created. Isn't something lacking as shown to us in the Bible? Of course! Throughout the entire Bible, we see God in relation with God's creation. God is a relational God who is actively involved with creation and created humans to be in relation with God's self. 

We see this first in the book of Genesis where Adam and Eve are in close relational contact with their Creator. John Calvin, speaking about natural theology, maintains that knowledge about God could be attained by Adam and Eve simply by observing the nature around them because they, without sin, were in such close proximity to God that they could see the fingerprints of God all around them. This is not a post to discuss natural theology, but I like how Calvin's view emphasizes the intended relational proximity between Creator and created.

Moreover, when we turn to many of the prophets, we see a God who is intimately involved with the lives of "His people, Israel." In Hosea, God announces that He reared Israel like a child, gave it nourishment, and held it in His arms. In Jonah, we learn that Jonah's resistance to God most likely comes from Jonah's knowledge that if the wicked repent from their ways, then God will forgive them and not punish them. This shows that God reacts to the things we do. God is relationally involved in the lives of God's creation.

In the New Testament, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God....All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being....And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father" (John 1:1, 3, 14) Need I say more?

This brings us back to the questions with which this post began: Does God need us? In what sense is our existence necessary to or for God? Ultimately, what purpose do humans serve as God's creations? If we follow the God of the philosophers, then the answer is a definitive, NO! God as the unmoved mover and First cause needs nothing. This god is completely self-sufficient. However, if we follow the God revealed through Scripture, then the answer is, at least for me, a definitive, YES! God entered into a relationship with us when God created us. Thus, God needs us.

To what extent does God need us? Or, in what sense is our existence necessary to or for God? For this, I turn to Anselm of Canterbury. In Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, he lays out his understanding for why it was "fitting" or necessary for God to become human. In other words, why was the incarnation necessary from God's end. I do not want to explain his reasoning—mainly because I already wrote a paper about it, which I will send to you if you would like—but I do want to borrow his explanation of God being necessitated or required to do something. Anselm argues that God is not necessitated by any external force (i.e. from humans, justice, morality, etc.). However, God is internally necessitated by God's self. In the same way, God does not need us to the extent that we force this necessity upon God. Rather, God needs us in an internal sense because God created us and entered into a relationship with us. Therefore, God needs us to participate and interact within this relationship. I could lay out what I think this participation looks like, but I feel like that would be superfluous for a blog post—after all, this post is getting quite long. Moreover, doesn't our participation depend on our context?Thus, I end with a question for you:

What does your participation look like with the relational God who needs us? peace