Particularity, Intelligibility, and the Ground of Teleo-Spaces

Editorial Preface

This post consolidates a line of argument developed across several recent Disputationes essays. It brings into focus a Trinitarian account of intelligibility in which divine love grounds differentiated possibility, the Logos articulates this possibility into teleo-spaces without closure, and the Spirit orders participation normatively without coercion. The aim is not to conclude a system, but to mark a point of clarity that will serve as a foundation for subsequent systematic theological work.

1. The Pressure for Clarification

Philosophical clarification is rarely achieved by stipulation. More often it is forced upon us when a distinction that has done real work begins to reveal a pressure it cannot itself resolve. The present inquiry arises from precisely such a situation.

Much of my recent work has turned on the distinction between the determinable and the determinate. The distinction is familiar, but its metaphysical reach is often misunderstood. Determinables are not indeterminate determinates, nor are they abstractions from completed forms. They are conditions of intelligibility: that in virtue of which determinate articulation is possible without being necessitated. Within the domain of intelligibility, the distinction is exhaustive. Whatever can be meaningfully articulated is either determinable or determinate.

Yet that very exhaustiveness gives rise to a further question that cannot be deferred. If determinables and determinates exhaust what can be articulated as intelligible, what is it that intelligibility takes up? What must be given if there are to be determinables at all rather than a single undifferentiated possibility? Intelligibility, if it is real, cannot be self-grounding. It must have something to take up that is not already intelligible as such.

This question is not semantic, epistemological, or psychological. It is ontological. It cannot be answered by appeal to subjects, language, cultural practices, or interpretive communities without reversing the order of explanation. Nor can it be answered by positing universals or bare particulars without either collapsing particularity into abstraction or halting explanation at brute numerical difference. If intelligibility is irreducible, then the conditions under which it has something to take up must themselves be real and non-brute.

2. Teleo-Spaces and the Limits of Intelligibility

The pressure becomes acute once we attend carefully to the status of teleo-spaces. Teleo-spaces are not objects among objects, nor are they formal structures imposed by cognition. They are not subjective projections, nor are they hidden mechanisms within nature. They name the Logos-grounded openness of the real to intelligible articulation without closure. They are fields of determinability within which orientation, normativity, and judgment are possible.

But precisely for this reason, teleo-spaces cannot be the first ontological given. A teleo-space is already a space of intelligibility. To posit teleo-spaces as created as such is therefore to smuggle intelligibility into creation without explanation. Intelligibility cannot take itself up; nor can it be the product of its own exercise.

If the Logos articulates teleo-spaces rather than inventing them, then something must be given prior to that articulation—something that is not yet intelligible, but that can become intelligible without loss or remainder. The task, then, is to identify what can be ontologically prior to intelligibility without either becoming brute or collapsing into conceptual form.

3. The Question Forced Upon Us

What, then, does God create if teleo-spaces are intelligible only through the Logos? What must be given if intelligibility is to have something to take up rather than floating free as a self-sufficient structure? How can there be plurality without universals, individuation without matter, and differentiation without determination?

These questions are not optional. They arise from the very success of the determinable/determinate distinction and from the refusal to allow intelligibility to become either subjective or self-grounding. Following them where they lead forces a clarification that is metaphysical in scope but transcendental in method. It also forces us to reconsider the role of divine love—not as a devotional overlay, but as a candidate for ontological explanation.

The claim I will develop is that what God creates is not individuals prior to intelligibility, nor determinables awaiting specification, but differentiated possibility: addressable particularity that is not yet articulable. Teleo-space names the Logos-grounded intelligible openness of what is first given to be loved. Love, on this account, is not subsequent to intelligibility but its condition. It grounds particularity without determination, plurality without abstraction, and addressability prior to articulation.

This clarification does not introduce a new metaphysical posit. It names what must already be presupposed if intelligibility is to be real rather than illusory. As with Kant’s reflecting judgment, the claim is not that we have theoretical knowledge of such grounding, but that we are rationally compelled to think it if we are to make sense of what we already do. Philosophy here does not legislate. It acknowledges what sustained reflection has made unavoidable.

4. Individuation Without Determination

The clarification now required turns on a classical problem, though it arises here in a distinctive form: the problem of individuation. If what God creates is not teleo-space as such, nor determinables awaiting specification, then whatever is created prior to Logos-grounded intelligibility must nevertheless be differentiated. Intelligibility does not merely require something to take up; it requires more than one. A single undifferentiated possibility would be indistinguishable from none at all.

Yet this differentiation cannot be explained by appeal to any of the familiar metaphysical strategies. Matter cannot individuate, since what is at issue is prior to all material determination. Universals cannot individuate, since the very motivation for the present account is the rejection of strong realism about universals as explanatorily adequate. Structural relations cannot individuate, since relations presuppose relata already given as distinct. And bare particulars, whatever their heuristic appeal, halt explanation precisely where explanation is demanded: numerical difference becomes brute.

The difficulty can be stated sharply. We require an account of plurality without properties, difference without determination, and individuation without matter or form. Whatever grounds such differentiation must do so without rendering what is differentiated intelligible as such, for intelligibility is precisely what is still at stake. The differentiated items must be distinct enough to be addressable, yet not so structured as to count already as determinables.

This is why it is a mistake to construe the present proposal as introducing a third category alongside the determinable and the determinate. The distinction between determinable and determinate remains exhaustive within intelligibility. What is now in view is ontologically prior to that distinction. The differentiated possibilities at issue are not vague determinables, proto-properties, or incomplete concepts. They are not “thin” beings awaiting enrichment. They are not items within the space of reasons at all.

What, then, keeps these differentiated possibilities from collapsing into one another? What accounts for their non-interchangeability if not properties, relations, or forms? To answer this question by appeal to divine fiat would be to accept brute difference ate the deepest level of explanation, precisely where metaphysics ought to resist it most.

The only viable alternative is that differentiation at this level is grounded not in what these possibilities are, but in how they are addressed. Addressability, unlike describability, does not presuppose intelligible content. One can be addressed without yet being articulable. To be singled out for address is not yet to be brought under a concept, but it is to be distinguished from others in a way that is neither arbitrary nor structural.

This is the point at which the metaphysical inquiry forces a theological answer. Differentiation without determination requires a ground that is neither conceptual nor mechanical, neither abstract nor formal. It requires a ground that can particularize without specifying, that can distinguish without predicating. Only love meets these conditions. Love is inherently particularizing. It does not rest in generalities, nor does it operate through shared properties. Love addresses this rather than that, and in doing so establishes non-interchangeability without appeal to form.

If God is love, then the creation of differentiated possibility is not an opaque metaphysical puzzle but the natural expression of divine agency. God creates not abstractions to be later specified, but addressees to be loved. These addressees are given enough ontological particularity to be non-substitutable, yet not enough structure to count as intelligible. They are neither determinables nor determinates, but the ontological condition under which determinability itself can arise.

In this way, individuation is secured without brute fact and without conceptual anticipation. Love grounds plurality prior to intelligibility. The Logos does not invent what it articulates; it renders intelligible what has already been given to be loved.

5. Differentiated Possibility and the Logos

Once individuation without determination has been secured, the role of the Logos can be stated with greater precision. The Logos does not create what the Father creates, nor does the Logos add intelligible content to an otherwise complete ontological item. The Logos articulates what has already been given as addressable particularity. This articulation does not enrich a deficient being; it renders what is already differentiated intelligible without exhausting it.

This distinction is crucial. If the Logos were to introduce differentiation, then intelligibility would be responsible for individuation, and the earlier problem would simply reappear in a new form. Intelligibility would again be doing work it cannot do without collapsing into brute fact or conceptual imposition. Conversely, if the Logos merely revealed what was already intelligible, then teleo-spaces would be epiphenomenal, and the entire account would reduce to a realism about pre-formed structures. Neither option is acceptable.

The Logos instead grounds teleo-spaces: intelligible fields of determinability within which what has been given to be loved can be articulated without closure. A teleo-space is not a thing, nor a property, nor a relation. It is a mode of intelligible openness—a structured availability to determination that does not itself determine. In this sense, teleo-spaces are constitutively Logos-grounded. They exist only as acts of articulation, yet they do not invent their content.

This allows us to say something precise about the relationship between possibility and intelligibility. The differentiated possibilities created by the Father are not possibilities within intelligibility. They are not modal alternatives waiting to be selected. They are ontological loci that can be taken up into intelligibility but are not yet so taken up. Teleo-space names the transition from addressability to articulability, from what can be loved to what can be understood.

The Logos thus performs a non-competitive constitutive act. Nothing is added to the created order, and nothing is displaced. What changes is not what is, but how what is can count as intelligible. The Logos makes determination possible by grounding the space within which determinables can appear as such. Yet this grounding never necessitates determination. Articulation opens; it does not compel.

This point bears directly on Christology. If the Logos articulates rather than universalizes, then the incarnation does not operate by assuming a general human nature whose properties are then redistributed. It operates by articulating a particular locus of differentiated possibility into maximal intelligibility. What is assumed is not a universal, but a concrete addressable particular. Salvation, on this account, is not participation in an abstract nature but alignment with an articulated life.

Here the inadequacy of strong realism about universals becomes evident. Without universals, it may seem unclear how the work of Christ can reach beyond Christ himself. But that difficulty arises only if one assumes that intelligibility must be mediated through generality. If intelligibility is instead grounded in articulation of particularity, then what Christ accomplishes is not the elevation of a universal, but the opening of teleo-spaces within which other particular lives can be articulated, ordered, and drawn into alignment.

The Logos, then, is not the source of particularity but its intelligible availability. What the Father creates to be loved, the Logos renders articulable. The distinction between pre-determinable possibility and determinable intelligibility is preserved, and with it the integrity of both creation and reason.

6. The Spirit and Normative Weighting within Teleo-Spaces

If the Father grounds differentiated possibility through love, and the Logos articulates that possibility into teleo-spaces as fields of intelligible determinability, then a further question presses with equal force: how are determinations oriented within those fields without being necessitated? Articulation alone does not account for normativity. A teleo-space may render multiple determinations intelligible, yet intelligibility by itself does not explain why some possibilities appear as better, fitting, or worthy of alignment than others.

This is the point at which the role of the Holy Spirit must be clarified—not as an afterthought, and not as a merely subjective supplement, but as a constitutive causal agent operating in a distinct mode. The Spirit does not introduce new intelligible content, nor does the Spirit determine outcomes. Rather, the Spirit weights possibilities within teleo-spaces, ordering them normatively without coercion.

The distinction required here is that between event/event causality and agent/act causality. Teleo-spaces, as Logos-grounded, belong to the former register insofar as they are real features of the created order. They structure what can intelligibly occur. The Spirit’s work, by contrast, is not the production of events but the orientation of agents. The Spirit acts not by causing one determination to occur rather than another, but by rendering certain determinations salient as worthy of pursuit.

This weighting must not be misconstrued as probabilistic pressure or causal bias. The Spirit does not function as a hidden variable in a deterministic process. Nor does the Spirit operate by inserting new information into the teleo-space. Weighting is normative, not mechanical. It concerns how possibilities present themselves to subjective spirits as demanding response, not how events unfold independently of agency.

Here it is helpful—though only analogically—to speak of prehension. Subjective spirits do not invent the normative order of teleo-spaces, but they are capable of taking up that order, feeling its pull, resisting it, or aligning with it. The Spirit communicates not propositions but orientation. What is communicated is not content, but direction: how one might live, act, or speak in faithfulness to the intelligible order already articulated by the Logos.

This preserves a crucial asymmetry. The Spirit’s work is deeply interior to subjectivity, yet not grounded in subjectivity. The Spirit thinks through us without being reducible to our thinking. Normative orientation is experienced personally, but it is not generated personally. Subjects participate in the Spirit’s weighting, but they do not constitute it. This avoids both enthusiasm and moralism. The Spirit neither bypasses reason nor replaces it; the Spirit orders reason from within its own intelligible field.

Equally important, this account preserves freedom. Because weighting is non-necessitating, alignment remains an act rather than an effect. Subjects can refuse the pull of the Spirit without thereby rendering that pull illusory. Indeed, refusal itself presupposes the reality of the normative orientation it resists. Faith, on this account, is not assent to a proposition but alignment with a weighted possibility. It is a lived responsiveness to a teleo-space ordered by the Spirit toward God’s will.

Seen in this light, the Trinitarian structure of the account comes fully into view. The Father creates differentiated possibility to be loved. The Logos renders what is loved intelligible without closure. The Spirit orders intelligible possibility normatively without coercion. No person of the Trinity performs a function that excludes the others, yet no function collapses into another. There is one divine act, irreducibly triune in its modes.

This clarification also allows a final distinction to be maintained with precision. The Spirit does not ground truth; that belongs to the Logos. Nor does the Spirit donate being; that belongs to the Father. The Spirit authorizes, orders, and draws—making alignment possible without making it inevitable. Where this ordering is acknowledged, theological language can be spoken faithfully. Where it is resisted, intelligibility remains, but communion is fractured.

At this point, nothing essential has been left unaccounted for. Intelligibility is grounded without being made brute. Particularity is secured without universals. Normativity is real without determinism. Freedom is preserved without voluntarism. What remains is not a gap in the account, but its horizon: the lived enactment of faith within teleo-spaces weighted by the Spirit and articulated by the Logos, all grounded in the Father’s love for the particular.

6.5. Preliminary Formalization: Ontological Donation and Trinitarian Articulation

The account developed thus far has been intentionally conceptual rather than formal. That choice reflects a methodological judgment: formalization can clarify structure, but it cannot generate ontology or secure intelligibility. Nevertheless, because the present proposal will serve as a foundation for later systematic work, it is appropriate to indicate—at least schematically—how its core distinctions admit of disciplined formal expression.

What follows is therefore not a calculus, nor a completed formal system. It is a typed scaffold designed to make explicit the commitments already in play and to guard against category mistakes as the account is extended.

We begin with a minimal ontological typing.

Let 𝔏 denote the class of pre-determinable loci of possibility. Elements of 𝔏 are not determinables, not determinate entities, not universals, and not semantic contents. They are addressable particulars: numerically distinct loci grounded in divine love and given prior to intelligibility.

Let 𝕋 denote the class of teleo-spaces. Elements of 𝕋 are not objects but intelligible fields of determinability. A teleo-space is that within which determinables can appear as such without being necessitated.

Let 𝔇 denote the class of determinables, and 𝔡 the class of determinates. The determinable/determinate distinction is exhaustive within intelligibility, and only within intelligibility.

The first constitutive relation is that of creative love. This is not a causal function in the event–event sense, but a grounding relation:

$$Loves(F, x) \quad \text{for } x \in \mathfrak{L}.$$

Love grounds non-interchangeability without determination. No predicates, properties, or relations among elements of 𝔏 are presupposed. Numerical distinction is real, but it is grounded personally rather than formally.

The second constitutive relation is Logos-articulation. This may be represented schematically as a partial articulation mapping:

$$\Lambda : \mathfrak{L} \Rightarrow \mathfrak{T}.$$

This notation is intentionally non-functional. The Logos does not map loci to determinate contents, nor does it exhaust what is articulated. Rather, Λ names the act by which addressable particularity is rendered intelligibly open—that is, taken up into teleo-space. No element of 𝔏 thereby becomes a determinable; instead, it becomes articulable within a space of determinability.

Within a given teleo-space $t \in \mathfrak{T}$, there exists a field of determinables $D_t \subseteq \mathfrak{D}$, together with an ordering relation that is teleological rather than algorithmic. This ordering is incomplete, non-total, and non-necessitating.

The third constitutive relation concerns the Holy Spirit’s work of normative weighting. This may be represented as a weighting relation:

$$W : \mathfrak{T} \times \mathfrak{D} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{+}.$$

Weighting orders possibilities within teleo-spaces without causing their realization. It is normative rather than mechanical, orienting agents rather than producing events. No weighting function entails determination; all agentive alignment remains genuinely responsive.

Several prohibitions must be stated explicitly to preserve the integrity of the account. There is no mapping from 𝔏 to 𝔇. There is no closure principle governing teleo-spaces. There is no subject-constitutive relation grounding either teleo-spaces or determinables. And there is no universal instantiation relation doing soteriological work.

Formalization, thus understood, serves a negative as well as a positive role. It marks where explanation must stop if brute fact is to be avoided, and it enforces the Trinitarian distribution of explanatory labor: ontology belongs to the Father, intelligibility to the Logos, and normative authorization to the Spirit. Any later formal development that violates this order will thereby reveal its own category mistake.

In this way, preliminary formalization does not replace metaphysical argument but protects it. It makes visible the logical shape of the account without pretending to capture its ontological depth. As the systematic project develops, this scaffold may be refined, expanded, or partially revised. What it must not do is obscure the fundamental insight that has driven the entire inquiry: intelligibility presupposes addressable particularity, and addressable particularity is grounded in divine love.

7. Trinitarian Unity and the Metaphysical Shape of Faith

The clarification reached in the preceding sections allows the overall shape of the account to come into view. What began as a pressure internal to the determinable/determinate distinction has led, step by step, to a Trinitarian metaphysics in which creation, intelligibility, and normativity are ordered without being partitioned. At no point has an additional metaphysical layer been introduced for its own sake. Each distinction has been forced by the refusal to allow intelligibility to become either self-grounding or subjectively constituted.

The guiding insight can now be stated succinctly. Intelligibility presupposes addressable particularity. Teleo-spaces, as Logos-grounded fields of determinability, are real and irreducible, but they are not ontologically first. They require something to take up—something that is neither a universal nor a determinate, neither a conceptual content nor a brute particular. That requirement cannot be met by formal structure, material individuation, or abstract necessity. It can be met only if creation itself includes differentiated possibility grounded in divine love.

This grounding does not fragment divine agency. On the contrary, it displays its unity. The Father creates by loving into being addressable particularity. The Son articulates what is loved into intelligible openness without closure. The Spirit orders intelligible possibility normatively, drawing agents toward alignment without coercion. These are not separable acts, nor are they successive interventions. They are distinct modes of one divine act, irreducibly triune in its structure.

Seen in this light, faith assumes a metaphysical shape that resists both abstraction and reduction. Faith is not assent to a universal proposition, nor participation in an abstract nature. It is alignment with a particular life articulated within a teleo-space and weighted by the Spirit. Its path is necessarily particular because its ground is particular. God’s preferential option for the that over the what does not bypass reason; it makes reason possible as lived orientation rather than detached description.

This has direct consequences for systematic theology. The collapse of strong realism about universals does not entail the collapse of soteriology or Christology. On the contrary, it forces their re-articulation at the level of particularity. The incarnation is not the elevation of a universal human nature but the maximal articulation of a loved particular into perfect intelligibility and obedience. Redemption, correspondingly, proceeds not by instantiation but by address, articulation, and alignment. What Christ accomplishes is not distributed through a shared essence but made available through teleo-spaces opened by the Logos and ordered by the Spirit.

Methodologically, the argument remains transcendental rather than dogmatic. As with Kant’s reflecting judgment, the claim is not that we possess theoretical knowledge of divine grounding as an object. It is that we are rationally compelled to think such grounding if we are to make sense of intelligibility, normativity, and faith as they are actually lived. The alternative is not a different metaphysics but the quiet abandonment of metaphysical responsibility in favor of either reduction or silence.

This post therefore marks neither a conclusion nor a completed system. It marks a point of clarity—a place where sustained reflection has made certain moves unavoidable. The formal scaffolding sketched above is provisional, but the insight it protects is not. Any future systematic development that hopes to take intelligibility, faith, and particularity seriously will have to reckon with the claim advanced here: that divine love is not merely compatible with metaphysics, but is its deepest explanatory ground.

What remains is to develop this account further—Christologically, pneumatologically, and ecclesially—without surrendering the hard-won distinctions that have brought us this far. That work lies ahead. But the path is now visible.

Find this article at academia.edu: https://ilt.academia.edu/DennisBielfeldt/Foundations%20of%20Theological%20Reasoning%20(2025-26)

Disputatio XLIV: De Contingentia Creationis et Libero Arbitrio Divino

On the Contingency of Creation and Divine Freedom

Quaeritur

Utrum libertas divina consistat non in arbitrio indifferenti sed in plenitudine rationis, qua Deus necessario vult se ipsum et contingenter manifestat se in creatione; et utrum haec contingentia creationis intellegi possit modalis ratione, ita ut creatio sit necessario possibilis in Deo, licet non necessario actualis.

Whether divine freedom consists not in arbitrary indifference but in the fullness of reason, by which God necessarily wills Himself and contingently manifests Himself in creation; and whether this contingency of creation may be understood modally, such that creation is necessarily possible in God, though not necessarily actual.

Thesis

Divine freedom is the rational plenitude of the necessary Good. God’s will is not arbitrary but coincides with divine wisdom: Deus vult se necessario, alia a se contingenter. Creation is not an irrational possibility but the intelligible unfolding of divine necessity in contingent form.

In modal terms:

• God’s existence: □G.

• Creation’s possibility: □(G → ◊C).

• Creation’s actuality: ◊C ∧ ¬□C.

Thus, the necessity of possibility in God grounds the possibility of contingency in creation. The Spirit mediates this order, actualizing the possible through love.

Locus Classicus

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a.3:

Deus necessario vult se, sed non necessario vult alia a se.
“God necessarily wills Himself, but not necessarily the things other than Himself.”

Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée, §173:

La liberté divine consiste dans le choix du meilleur.
“Divine freedom consists in the choice of the best.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952):

God created the universe freely, not because He needed it, but because He is love.

Modal Maxim (S5):

□p → ◊p, and ◊□p → □p.

The theological implication: what is necessarily possible in  God is immutably intelligible even if contingently realized.

Explicatio

From the perspective of modal metaphysics, divine freedom can only be conceived as the perfect coincidence of necessity and rationality. The act of creation does not introduce irrational novelty into God but manifests eternally possible forms (rationes aeternae) through the free act of love.

In S5 logic, the following distinctions hold:

1. Divine Necessity (□G): God’s existence and essence are necessary. There is no world in which God does not exist: ¬◊¬G.

2. Necessary Possibility of Creation (□◊C): Because God is necessary, creation is necessarily possible: □(G → ◊C). This expresses the eternal availability of creaturely being within divine reason.

3. Contingent Actuality of Creation (◊C ∧ ¬□C): Creation is possible but not necessary. Its existence is not required by divine nature but freely willed: G → ◊C, not G → □C.

4. Modal Principle (MT): □G → □(∀p (◊p → ◊(G → p))). If God exists necessarily, then every possibility is necessarily possible through Him.

Hence, divine freedom may be defined as the actualization of one among necessarily possible worlds according to the order of divine wisdom and goodness. Creation is contingent not because it lacks sufficient reason, but because its reason is of the mode of love, not necessity.

The freedom of God is not voluntas indifferens—a will suspended among options without reason—but voluntas sapientiae: the necessary self-diffusion of goodness. God could have willed otherwise (◊¬C), but what He does will, He wills wisely (□(G → R(C))).

The creature’s contingency thus arises from the necessity of possibility, the divine act that grounds modal being itself. The Spiritus Intelligentiae mediates between the eternal intelligibility of possibility in God and its temporal realization in the world.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Spinoza holds that if God necessarily exists and acts according to His nature, then everything He does is necessary. The very notion of contingency implies imperfection or external limitation, both impossible in God.

Ob. II. van Inwagen claims that to preserve divine freedom, one must deny any determining reason for God’s act of creation. If God has a reason to create this world rather than another, His act is no longer free but necessitated.

Ob. III. For Kant, the idea of divine freedom as “choice among possible worlds” is anthropomorphic. The notion of modality applies only within phenomena; we cannot ascribe modal distinctions to noumenal divinity.

Ob. IV. Existentialism argues that freedom entails the capacity to act without ground. If divine freedom has a sufficient reason, it ceases to be freedom.

Ob. V. Theological voluntarism argues that God’s will precedes His reason. To say that God wills according to wisdom subordinates will to intellect and thus compromises divine omnipotence.

Responsiones

Ad I. Spinoza confuses necessity of essence with necessity of act. God necessarily exists and knows Himself, but His creative act proceeds freely from wisdom, not from causal compulsion. Necessity in God does not exclude contingency in effects; it grounds it as rationally possible.

Ad II. Freedom does not require absence of reason but rational self-determination. The act of creation is free because it proceeds from perfect knowledge, not from external constraint. To remove reason from freedom is to render it arbitrary and unintelligible.

Ad III. Kant’s epistemic modesty cannot constrain ontology. If divine reality grounds all possibility, then modal categories originate in the divine intellect, not in human cognition. God is the ens modalitatis—the cause of the possible as such.

Ad IV. Existential freedom, detached from reason, is negation, not creativity. True freedom is fecund: it gives being. God’s freedom is plenitude of intelligibility, not indeterminate spontaneity.

Ad V. Divine will and intellect are one act in God. The will is rational and the intellect volitional. To will otherwise than wisdom dictates would be impotence, not omnipotence.

Nota

The modal order of creation is rooted in the divine act itself. The necessity of possibility (□◊C) safeguards both divine aseity and creaturely contingency. God is the ground of all modal truth: possibility, actuality, and necessity are modes of participation in His being.

Creation’s contingency is thus not a failure of reason but its richest expression. It reveals that divine necessity is not sterile self-enclosure but communicative plenitude. In the contingent, the necessary becomes gracious.

Hence, contingency is the modality of divine generosity. The Logos grounds it; the Spirit enacts it; and love interprets it.

Determinatio

1. God necessarily exists: □G.

2. Creation is necessarily possible through God: □(G → ◊C).

3. Creation is contingently actual: ◊C ∧ ¬□C.

4. Divine freedom is the rational actualization of a necessarily possible world:
   □G ∧ ◊C → (□(G → R(C)) ∧ ¬□C).

5. Contingency is not absence of reason but finite manifestation of infinite rationality.

6. The Spirit mediates between modal being and actual creation, so that what is eternally possible becomes temporally real.

7. Therefore, contingency is intelligibility-in-gift, with the world being the rational outpouring of necessary love.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLV: De Bello inter Necessarium et Contingens in Ratione Finita

Having seen that divine freedom is the plenitude of rational necessity and that creation’s contingency arises from the necessity of possibility, we must now consider how this relation appears within the finite intellect.

For the human mind experiences a conflict: it perceives necessity as threat to freedom and contingency as threat to reason. This interior bellum within ratio finita mirrors, in fractured form, the divine harmony of wisdom and will. It is here that metaphysical participation becomes phenomenological struggle.

We therefore proceed to Disputationem XLV: De Bello inter Necessarium et Contingens in Ratione Finita, where it will be asked how finite reason, torn between the poles of necessity and freedom, may find reconciliation through the Logos crucified—the Wisdom in whom all opposites are made one.

Disputatio XI: De Creatione et Intellegibilitate Mundi

On the Creation and Intelligibility of the World

Quaeritur

Utrum mundus, qui per Verbum Dei creatus est, in se contineat rationem et ordinem intelligibilem non ut proprietatem naturalem aut autonomum logon, sed ut participationem ipsius rationis divinae per quam omnia facta sunt; et utrum Spiritus Sanctus sit causa per quam haec participatio in mundo manet viva et cognoscibilis.

Whether the world, created through the Word of God, contains within itself reason and intelligible order not as a natural property or autonomous logos, but as participation in the very divine reason through which all things were made; and whether the Holy Spirit is the cause by which this participation remains living and knowable within creation.

Thesis

Creation is intelligible because it proceeds from the divine Word. The order present in the world is not an autonomous rational structure nor a self sufficient logos, but a participation in the eternal Logos through whom all things were made. The Holy Spirit preserves this participation as a living relation, sustaining the correspondence between divine wisdom and creaturely understanding.

Locus classicus

Psalm 33:6
בִּדְבַר־יְהוָה שָׁמַיִם נַעֲשׂוּ
וּבְרוּחַ פִּיו כָּל־צְבָאָם

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

John 1:3
πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο
καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν ὃ γέγονεν

All things came to be through him,
and without him not one thing came to be that has come to be.

These texts testify that creation is not merely effected by divine power but articulated by divine reason. Being itself is given through Logos, and life and coherence are sustained through Spirit.

Explicatio

The question of the world’s intelligibility is not secondary to theology but intrinsic to the doctrine of creation itself. To confess that the world is created through the Word is already to confess that it is ordered toward meaning. Creation is not the production of brute material later subjected to rational description. It is the emergence of being through divine intelligibility.

The Logos does not merely precede the world as an efficient cause. He is the intelligible form by which the world is constituted as knowable. To exist as a creature is therefore to stand within a relation of participation. Being and intelligibility are not separable gifts. What comes to be through the Word comes to be as meaningful.

This must be stated with care. The intelligibility of the world is not an intrinsic possession of matter, nor is it an autonomous rational principle embedded within nature. There is no self sufficient logos of the world. The order we discover in nature is derivative. It is a finite participation in divine reason, not a parallel source of intelligibility alongside it.

We may express this formally for clarity, while immediately guarding against misinterpretation.

Let C(x) signify “x is created,” and L(x) signify “x participates in the Logos.”

The claim ∀x[C(x) → L(x)] states that to be created is already to stand within the sphere of divine intelligibility. This does not identify creaturely being with divine being. Participation is not identity. It names a relation of dependence that preserves distinction.

The world is therefore intelligible not because it is divine, but because it is spoken.

This intelligibility is not static. The Logos who brings creation into being does not withdraw once creation stands. If the world is to remain intelligible, the relation of participation must be preserved. Here the role of the Holy Spirit becomes decisive.

The Spirit is not merely the giver of life in a biological sense. He is the living bond by which the rational structure of creation remains ordered toward understanding. The Spirit maintains the correspondence between divine meaning and creaturely apprehension. Without this ongoing mediation, intelligibility would collapse either into abstraction or into opacity.

This pneumatological dimension guards theology from two errors. On the one hand, it resists rationalism, which treats intelligibility as self grounding. On the other hand, it resists voluntarism, which treats order as arbitrary imposition. The Spirit does not impose meaning from without, nor does He leave creation to explain itself. He preserves intelligibility as a living relation.

It is therefore no accident that scientific inquiry presupposes the intelligibility of nature. The success of the sciences depends upon the prior givenness of order, coherence, and lawfulness. These are not conclusions of science but its conditions. Theology does not compete with scientific explanation. It accounts for the possibility of explanation itself.

Nor does the presence of disorder, entropy, or suffering negate creation’s intelligibility. Finitude includes limitation, vulnerability, and decay. Yet even these are intelligible within a teleological horizon shaped by divine wisdom. The cross remains the decisive pattern. What appears as negation or breakdown of order becomes, within divine providence, the site where deeper meaning is disclosed.

Thus creation’s intelligibility is neither naive optimism nor denial of tragedy. It is the confession that nothing stands outside the horizon of meaning established by the Word and sustained by the Spirit.

Objectiones

Ob I. If the intelligibility of the world depends upon participation in the divine Logos, then human reason appears heteronomous. Genuine autonomy in science and philosophy would be undermined.

Ob II. To claim that all intelligibility derives from the Logos risks collapsing Creator and creature into a single ontological order, thereby tending toward pantheism.

Ob III. The presence of apparent randomness, disorder, and suffering in nature contradicts the claim that the world is rationally ordered.

Ob IV. Scientific naturalism explains order through natural laws and mathematical regularities without appeal to divine speech. Theological appeals to Logos are therefore unnecessary.

Ob V. Hermeneutical skepticism holds that meaning arises from interpretation rather than from being itself. To speak of the world as “spoken” is merely metaphorical.

Responsiones

Ad I. Autonomy does not require self origination. Human reason is genuinely free precisely because it participates in divine reason rather than being isolated from it. Participation grounds freedom. It does not annul it.

Ad II. Participation preserves distinction. The Logos is present as cause, not as substance. The world reflects divine wisdom without becoming divine. Transcendence is not compromised by immanence rightly understood.

Ad III. Disorder belongs to finitude, not to meaninglessness. What appears chaotic within a limited horizon may still belong to a wider teleological order. The intelligibility of creation includes mystery, not its elimination.

Ad IV. Scientific explanation presupposes intelligibility it cannot itself generate. Theology does not replace science but accounts for the rational conditions under which science is possible.

Ad V. Meaning is not projected onto the world but received from it because the world is already articulated by divine speech. Interpretation is human, but intelligibility is given.

Nota

The doctrine of creation through the Word entails a theological epistemology. To know the world is to retrace, in finite understanding, the grammar by which God called it into being. Every act of genuine understanding is therefore participatory.

The sciences are not alien to theology. They are disciplined forms of listening. They read the grammar of creation written by the Logos. Their success testifies not to the self sufficiency of reason, but to its vocation.

The Spirit stands as the hermeneutical bond between divine wisdom and creaturely understanding. He is the one by whom the world remains readable and the intellect remains receptive. Without the Spirit, intelligibility would become either inert structure or arbitrary construction.

Creation is therefore not a completed fact but an ongoing act of divine communication. The Logos speaks. The Spirit interprets. The creature understands.

Determinatio

1. Creation is intelligible because it proceeds from the divine Word.

2. The order of the world is participatory, not autonomous.

3. The Holy Spirit preserves intelligibility as a living relation.

4. Human knowledge of creation is itself an act of participation.

5. The intelligibility of the world is the visible trace of divine speech.

Transitus ad Disputationem XII

Having established that divine causality is not a rival to creaturely agency but the very ground of its intelligibility, we must now consider how this causality persists beyond the originary act of creation. For if God is not only the one a quo all things proceed but also the one in quo they subsist, then creation cannot be understood as a completed event left to the autonomy of finite processes. Rather, it must be conceived as a continuous act, sustained at every moment by the same Word through whom all things were made.

This raises a further and more delicate question. How does divine causality operate in the ongoing order of the world without dissolving the reality of secondary causes or rendering creaturely action illusory? If God sustains all things immediately, does this leave any genuine causal efficacy to creatures? And if creatures truly act, how is their action ordered to God without collapsing into either occasionalism or a competitive dualism of causes?

The doctrine of providence thus emerges not as an appendix to creation but as its necessary explication. It concerns the continuation of divine causality through time, the mode by which God preserves, concurs with, and orders finite causes toward their ends, and the manner in which freedom and contingency are upheld within a world wholly dependent upon God. Providence names the grammar by which creation remains creation—neither autonomous nor annihilated, neither divinized nor abandoned.

Accordingly, we advance to Disputatio XII: De Providentia et Continuatione Causalitatis Divinae, where we inquire how the same Word who spoke creation into being also sustains it through every moment of its existence, and how divine causality operates within the order of secondary causes without abolishing their reality, integrity, or freedom.

Cross-Pressuring within the Congregation

Something extraordinary still happens our time, a time characterized by an intellectual and cultural horizon that seems inimical to its occurrence. All throughout North America, people still draw together into communities to worship a god who putatively creates and sustains the entire universe. This gathering together does not happen in the numbers it did in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still does occur. On any given Sunday morning millions of people are in worship.  

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial A Secular Age, adroitly interprets the cultural and intellectual horizon of our time with its attendant social imaginaries. His major question in the book is this: How is it that in the sixteenth century not believing in God was generally unthinkable, while believing today is very difficult, even for those professing such belief? What has happened? 

His answer to this is actually quite complicated, and I won't summarize it here, except to say that Taylor is no fan of subtraction theories, a view that conceives humans as being largely able to know the world in which they live and how to act within that world. Subtraction theory claims that human beings have largely not achieved their potential as responsible epistemic and moral agents because they have inter alia lost themselves in religion and have, accordingly, not developed the potential that they have had all along. According to subtraction theory, secularization is a good thing because as religion wanes, human beings are increasingly fulfilling the dream of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere ("dare to know").  It is a captivating view: we humans can finally turn away from the superstitions of the past and attain genuine positive knowledge of things.  

Taylor claims that in the North Atlantic countries (North America and Europe), secularization tends to bring with it either a closed "take" or "spin" on the universe and our place within it. A spin or take is closed when it accepts a naturalism that excludes traditional views of the transcendent; when it holds that there is nothing that "goes beyond" the immanence of this world. He distinguishes a closed "spin" from a closed "take", pointing out that while people adopting a closed take hold that rejection of traditional transcendence might be reasonable, but that it is not wholly irrational to hold otherwise, those in a closed spin assert that holding to traditional transcendence is completely irrational, and thus one's rejection of a closed view is either due to the mendacity or the irrationality of the one doing the rejecting. 

Much of the intelligentsia, argues Taylor, simply assumes a closed spin on things. Scientific theory gives us the best causal map of the universe and such theory makes no appeal to supernatural forces of gods. In the cities, the young often understand their human sojourn in this way: 

• Human beings are the products of a long evolutionary process beginning with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.  
• The universe came into being in an explosion from a infinitely dense point that had no magnitude. 
• The subsequent history of the universe is due to natural events and processes developing as they did out of earlier conditions of the universe. There is no supernatural agency involved in the origin and development of the universe. 
• Explanations why there was an infinitely dense point at the beginning that subsequently exploded are mostly not something that science can rightfully provide, although theories of quantum cosmology recently sketched suggest the prior existence of a multi-verse of which the particular development of our universe is one possible actualized trajectory. There is yet not a theory of why there was at the beginning a multi-verse. 
• Why deterministic processes propel the universe forward into concrete actualization, there are throughout these processes the presence of "far from equilibrium" situations that allow for the introduction of novelty. Thus, the history of the universe, while basically deterministic, has some elements of chance within it. 
• Since human life is a natural product of the natural life of the universe, it must be understood naturalistically. 
• Understanding human life naturalistically means that complicated features of human life, e.g., intentionality, reason, etc., must be understood in natural ways: What are the natural processes that drive forward the development of our species? 
• Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has wide acceptance as providing some explanation for why our species developed as it did: Genetic features are passed down from generation to generation, and the natural characteristics of the environment in which genetic mutation happens limits or excludes the development of some genetic variations while helping the development of other genetic variations.
• Accordingly, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no appeal to purpose or teleology, for the particular genetic variations that survive for later genetic variation are clearly caused by natural features of the environment. There is thus no pull (final causality) in neo-Darwinian genetic theory, only pushes (efficient causality). 
• Since human beings are natural products of natural processes, understanding them profoundly requires the casting of natural scientific theories, e.g., human characteristics like reason, love, empathy, etc., must be explained naturalistically.  
• To understand humans naturalistically, is to understand them in ways quite different from traditional great chain of being understandings. According to the great chain of being, human beings are created lower than the angels and higher than the beasts, and thus to understand what it is to be human is to look both above and below us: What are those features of human existence that clearly fall under the category of the imago dei, and what features are due to the fall into nature and flesh of those beings initially created in the imago dei?  
• Since human beings are fully natural beings developing as they have through natural processes since the beginning of the universe, the true key to understanding their existence is found by looking below ourselves and not above ourselves, e.g., what can the sexuality of orangutans teach us about our own sexuality? 
• Trying to look above ourselves for clues to our nature is the practice of idealism, and proceeding in this way is find putative answers in our own projections. While natural science can give us insight into our causal natures, traditional religion and philosophy obviates this causal nature by appeal to non-natural or supernatural processes and entities. In the words of Feuerbach, God did not create human beings, human beings created God. 
• Since we are natural beings, our sexuality should be understood along the lines of other natural beings, and our reason and communication should be understood in the way of other natural beings. Human beings do have a capacity to reason, communicate, and form sexual alliances, but these are not causa sui. Rather, it is a matter of degree, and not ultimate of kind, that separates our experience from that of the other higher primates. 
• The young living in vast urban areas who understand themselves naturalistically have, accordingly, very little motivation to either adopt religion or be open to it. Religious belief, they think rather confidently, does not track with our actual knowledge of the natural world in which we believe. It is thus a backward-looking movement motivated by wish and not knowledge. Religious people, they think, need a crutch to live in this naturalist world that is all around us. Thus, they think, religious people project views of the gods and pray their wishes to their gods. 
• The religious person is thus maladapted to the actual existing world. They don't have the courage to live in the actual world, and thus project upon the actual world a religious worldview that makes living easier. Religious people are thus more cowardly than those understanding themselves naturalistically, but also more dangerous, because in ignoring the causalities of the natural world and embracing superstition, those who could have been helped by the knowledge of natural processes are now not treated properly. Death that might have been avoided, now befalls the befuddled religious believer or those unlucky enough to take their advice and counsel. 
• Given that there is no God who cares or no ultimate metaphysics in which meaning and purpose are ingredient, human beings must simply create their own meaning in the limited days they have to live. 
• Since there are no objective structures corresponding to the good, the beautiful, and the true, human beings are free to develop in the ways that they might find pleasurable and useful. This does not mean that they act irrationally, but rather that they must assume the mantle of having to be their own law-givers. Reality does not come with moral structures. They must be sown and cultivated by human beings, and harvested only if the present situation is illuminated by them. 

I could continue with a description of what seems plausible to the urban young. It is important to see all of this under the category of a closed spin. To many of our urban youth, what I have sketched above is simply settled. Just as it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, so is it true that human beings are natural beings who must develop their science, societies and families ultimately without appeal to heavenly beings. To give up on what I have articulated is, for them, to descend into irrationality. There simply is no other option for them not to believe this. There is a new social imaginary at work, a communal way of seeing that can imagine a fulfilling life without gods, prayers, divine laws, or even transcendence itself. While earlier generations hoped for life out beyond our physical deaths, this new way of imagining existence is one where death is not a problem. In fact, death is part of the circle of life, and this circle of life can be understood naturalistically. 

people participating in congregational life in the North Atlantic countries today are sons and daughters of their age. While they may be attending Christian congregations, their intellectual and cultural ethos is likely one wherein naturalism makes sense. They have learned from their teachers about the difference between facts and values, and they believe that natural science somehow is concerned with the facts, while perhaps their religion deals with the values of those whom are at some level aware of these facts. People in Christian congregations today in the North Atlantic countries are thus decidedly cross-pressured. They participate in Christian life, even though their deepest understanding of the world provides little rational justification for that participation. 

Preaching to men and women today must take into account the cross-pressuring felt by those in the pews. While their participation in congregational life probably points to them not holding a closed spin, such a participation is entirely congruent with them assuming a closed take. While it seems like materialism or physicalism is true, there are some features of our experience that does not fit a closed spin on the universe. Perhaps it is because of these features that certain people become congregational members. Maybe they sense that the naturalism that they ought to believe is inadequate to their experience in its totality. 

Most of the time we leading Christian congregations underestimate, I think, the cross-pressuring that our members are likely experiencing. Yes, clearly many are waiting to hear the saving Word proclaimed in the sermon and celebrated in the sacrament. But in their desire to hear that Word, they remain deeply conflicted. As twenty-first century men and women, they cannot easily affirm the views of their sixteenth century ancestors. The naturalism everywhere regnant today was not known to Luther and his contemporaries. Luther had the advantage of having a metaphysical view of things that was consonant with his theological accents and innovations. 

But this is not the case today. Contemporary Lutherans who wish to retain Luther's theology must now do so in a culture whose dominant social imaginaries reject the metaphysical underpinnings Luther simply presupposed. So how does Lutheran theology play now in congregations whose members have little understanding of how God could truly be possible and relevant? It is to this question that we shall turn in the next post.