Can God receive a gift from humanity?
That humanity receives grace and salvation from God is a statement not likely to cause dissensus in most theological circles. The more open question is whether we could say that God receives something as well in a more mutual two-sided relationship. The distinction is not whether God’s free gift of grace comes with an obligation for return, but instead whether God can receive a transformational gift from humanity.
In conversation with Kathryn Tanner’s work on incarnation and the free gift of grace—“incarnate for our salvation to everlasting life”—I will argue that recognizing God as a generous giver of gifts who chooses to enter into relationship with humanity should include the acknowledgement that God opens Godself to vulnerability through Christ in order to also receive from us. Drawing on further insights from disabled perspectives on the Trinity (Tataryn and Truchanan-Tataryn, Discovering Trinity in Disability), and material theories of religion and anthropology with emphasis on economics and climate (Rowe, “Grace in Intra-action: Complementarity and the Noncircular Gift”) systematic perspectives on divine immutability are not challenged, but put into critical conversation with lived experience and contemporary challenges. The possibility for exchange then becomes a quality of “right relationship.” As Mike Higton has demonstrated (Higton, “Kathryn Tanner and the Receptivity of Christ and the Church”), the question of divine reception is an important Christological concern tied up in our understanding of incarnation. This concern requires grappling with our theology of vulnerability as well: it’s necessity, romanticization, and compatibility with immutability.
A model of receptive generosity may help us to theologically reflect on the relationship of humanity and the divine in God’s generosity to humanity as well as vulnerability in Jesus Christ that makes relationship viable across transcendence. God in Christ became human, defying the transcendence that consigned humanity to serve as God’s objects in all their relationships. By becoming the subject of all history in human form Christ empowered the subjectivity of humanity before God. This generous gift from God wove together a relationship of obligation and receptivity enabled by God’s vulnerable willingness to receive from humanity. That is to say, the condition of God receiving a gift from humanity is first God’s gift of a receptive relationship with humanity.
To answer Tanner’s concerns, I argue that the noncompetitive relationship God and humanity are not scrambling for resources, therefore soteriologies of debt and financial transactions are rendered obsolete. The gifts humanity may then offer are not salvific, but a part of their participation in the imago dei that is rooted in God’s gift.
Can God receive a gift from humanity?
That humanity receives grace and salvation from God is a statement not likely to cause dissensus in most theological circles. The more open question is whether we could say that God receives something as well in a more mutual two-sided relationship. The distinction is not whether God’s free gift of grace comes with an obligation for return, but instead whether God can receive a transformational gift from humanity.
In conversation with Kathryn Tanner’s work on incarnation and the free gift of grace—“incarnate for our salvation to everlasting life”—I will argue that recognizing God as a generous giver of gifts who chooses to enter into relationship with humanity should include the acknowledgement that God opens Godself to vulnerability through Christ in order to also receive from us.