understanding creation

is God other?

If God is other, will there always be people we relate to as other? is that bad? can there be healthy relationships between the self and the other? is the relationship to God a model for that? is dysfunction in the relationship to God the foundation for the dysfunction in the relationship with the other?

but what if God is not other? if God is us, if we are part of God, the concept of the other does not exist at all. Is that the solution ? Or does that negate the reality of God?

our model for creation, our understanding theologically of how we got here, maps out how we relate to God, and by extension each other. there are people who land on all parts of this spectrum. i find myself most concerned with the function of the relationship. No matter what else, I can buy into God's act of creation as a originally loving and gracious act. this determined the relationship, set it up, brought us into the movement of God, the movement of the trinity.

the public discussions of creation are incredibly shallow. it does not matter whether we lived with the dinosaurs or not, or if creation happened in seven days or millions of years. i think that misses the point. when we talk about creation, we talk about the very values that set up the rest of our theology, or the rest of our theology determines how we talk about creation. when we discuss it without this level of analysis, we miss the point. we miss the chance to understand our relationship to God more deeply, to be vulnerable to someone else's understanding of their relationship to God.

if indeed God made God's self vulnerable in order to create us, can't we make ourselves vulnerable to each other to better understand God?