They cover four topics: (1) humans as creatures; (2) health and
creaturely flourishing; (3) disease, suffering, evil, and sin; and (4) practical implications.
According to this solution, being as being or being in general (ens in communi) is limited to the range of
creaturely being, a notion of which we attain through our acquaintance with sensible substances.
This also necessarily involves what he calls "a high premium on
creaturely freedom," and is thus consistent with free-will theisms, but may be very difficult to fit into the mould of classical theisms.
Chapters 5 to 7 take up the issue of
creaturely freedom.
Chapter seven is a general discussion of created intellective substances, treating such questions as the meaning of will, freedom, and immateriality in such creatures; it also includes the most extended metaphysical section of the book, wherein
creaturely composition is parsed out in terms that ultimately culminate in what Kretzmann describes as the substance-being distinction (traditionally known as the essence-esse distinction).
Such interrelational constitution suggests that
creaturely Firstness does not leave behind Secondness or Thirdness.
Behind this philosophy of self-love lurks a hatred of the human condition, which is inseparable from the limitations of
creaturely finitude, language, habits, passions, and embodiment.
At the same time, by maintaining that this primary causality simultaneously guarantees the integrity of
creaturely secondary causes, he can avoid a radical passivism that would present the individual as a mere vessel for spiritual experience (Erleben) or feelings.
Instead, if creation itself is understood as the kenotic "self-bestowal of God," then God both enables and empowers evolutionary emergence and
creaturely autonomy to flourish in and through the chance and lawful processes of the world.
Focusing as it does on the mundane, the constraints, irritations, and pleasures of the ordinariness of things, comedy becomes "a kind of secular sacrament, spontaneously developed and intuitively reached for, virtually a gift from the gods extended perhaps out of compassion and compensation to minister to our derivative,
creaturely condition.
God does not cause evil directly or as an end in itself, but God does cause the existence of the
creaturely agents of evil and, in the case of moral agents, of their evil volitional acts (71).
CREATURELY THEOLOGY: On God, Humans and Other Animals by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough, eds.
