Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

If, as Christians believe, love is indeed the most important "thing"; that, in some sense, creation is "made-from" love - then I can imagine the first stage as God's love of the (already-existing) Beings of reality.A state in which these Beings are only-as very-slightly self-aware as babies or infants, and they inhabit something-like a warm ocean of parental love. Each Being "bobs-around" in this warm ocean of God's love; which (like good and loving parents with a baby) brings to the Being what it needs, and takes away what it does not. This primal love is mutual (as love must be) - that is, parents and babies love each other (and must do, for the relationship to "work" as it ought). But from the babies' point of view, they "have no option" but to love the parents - because babies can conceive of no alternative.
From God's perspective; this primal situation "works", and every-Being is happy, with a barely-aware bliss in the present moment. But happy only because every Being is passive; and passive because un-self-conscious and therefore unable to conceive of anything other than the present moment. I think we need to understand that God yearns for love of a kind that such spiritual-infants do not provide: the love of an ideal marriage, or the ideal love between parents and their grown-up children, or the love between ideal adult friends.   
What God desires, and what is the basis of creation in the first place, is that as many as possible of these beloved divine babies become mutually-loving divine friends. This entails that spiritual babies grow up to spiritual adults; adults who each choose, from a condition of self-awareness and freedom, to develop a mutually-loving relationship with God.This requires that the love that makes creation needs to change, to move-from the immersive and passive love between parents and infants; and move-to the voluntary love between self-aware adults.   
Unless we understand this yearning of God (and traditional Christianity does Not understand this) - then we cannot understand why God was not content to leave creation in its primal, passive, unaware stage. We cannot understand why the risk was taken to make Men self-conscious and free. We cannot understand why Jesus Christ was necessary. 
And if we ourselves, that is God's children, do not ourselves yearn for something more than to be barely-conscious beings - passively bobbing-around in the ocean of God's love; then we will not want what Jesus Christ made possible. (We will instead desire something like "Nirvana": to return to the primal infant spiritual state of a blissful passive awareness only of the present.)What Jesus Christ made possible is for each of us fully and permanently to grow-up into adult Beings; adult Beings who can eventually enter into an adult and relationship with God: a relationship of freely-chosen mutual love.