Meditations on "Creation Is Incarnation"
The entire meditation was inspired from reading Jordan Daniel Wood's paper Creation Is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor. You can get it here.
Creation is inevitable, yet God freely creates. this is the apparent paradox that would trouble those who want to maintain (their understanding of) the freedom of God. Another way to write this would be:
Because God is free, creation is inevitable.
This statement rules out the (arguably anthropomorphic) idea that God has to make choices to be free. That is, the voluntarist model of freedom. For God, and consequently, for us, to be truly free is to have no choice.
The incarnation shows us the radical nature of this freedom. God is apatheia [1], the eternally active Love that reacts to nothing. All His acts are His from the beginning, not deriving from another, not a reaction. If this is true, the incarnation cannot be a reaction to our sin. That would make God's acts contingent on us, we would determine God, and that cannot be. God is God despite sin, for sin cannot ultimately disrupt His work. As David Bentley Hart said:
Because divine apatheia is the infinite interval of the going forth of the Son from the Father in the light of the Spirit, every interval of estrangement we fabricate between ourselves and God— sin, ignorance, death itself—is always already exceeded in him: God has always gone infinitely further in his own being as the God of self-outpouring charity than we can venture in our attempts to escape him, and our most abysmal sin is as nothing to the abyss of divine love.
The Hidden and the Manifest. Pg. 44-45
The cross doesn't determine the divine nature, it reveals it. Christ is the revelation of our redemption that was accomplished before sin manifested. This is not a mere temporal accomplishment, but an eternal reality. The new creation is the revelation of the eschatological glory of the old. Creation is redemption.
[1] David Bentley Hart defends the doctrine of Divine Impassibility as "apatheia" in his essay No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility