God, the Ultimate Jazz Trio

Let's begin with a couple of aphoristical barbs from the nonlocal pen of Petey: 

Every metaphysician knows that God is the supreme cause of all effects. But what's the harm in taking the next step and affirming that he must thereby be the supreme effect of all causes? 

God is person, meaning that Person is the ultimate category and principle. But "Person" and "immutable" are antithetical.

As promised in a comment yesterday, I want to highlight some passages from one of my favorite theologians, W. Norris Clarke, drawn from various sources, including Person and Being, The One and the Many, The Philosophical Approach to God, and Explorations in Metaphysics. 

Some of these are exact quotes, others plagiaphrased or combined. At the conclusion we'll try to bring them all together and figure out what they mean, all the while staying within the traditional guardrails of orthodoxy and orthodox guardrails of tradition.

Where to begin... How about here:

To say that God is "all powerful" does not mean that He alone holds and exercises all power, but only that He is the ultimate source of all power...

And

To say that God is the creator of all things does not mean that He directly creates all the acts of creatures. God creates agents, beings with active natures -- or, if you wish, beings acting, not acts.  

It's one thing to create an inanimate rock or an insentient progressive NPC and be done with it, another thing entirely to create a free and creative being. Then there's no end to the trouble. In any event,

The fact that all creatures are totally dependent on God both in their being and in their actions does not therefore mean that God determines their actions from without.  

We are not Mohammedan occasionalists or scientistic determinists or Calvinist double-determinists. More to the point, we would like to preserve God's innocence of man's stupidity and depravity, which is impossible to do if God is ultimately directly responsible for every stupid and depraved human action. For God on the one hand 

communicates to creatures their own being and their own native power and supports them in its use, so that without Him they could neither exist nor act.  

BUT

since He really has given them a share in His own power, they determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin). This is a free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power.

This resolves so many otherwise insoluble metaphysical problems, that I personally have no hesitation in taking it on board. 

Moreover, this doesn't mean that the Divine Will isn't realized, only that it is necessarily mediated by human nature. As they say, God writes straight with lyin' crooks. 

"The actual carrying out of divine providence," writes Clarke, takes place -- in a manner of speaking -- "by persuasion, by luring to the good -- not by coercion." For God is not an authoritarian leftist. He is, for example, the very basis of free speech, even while knowing full well that our snowflake crybullies will inevitably be triggered by it. 

And the best part is, this is all fits into Orthodoxy, so long as we maintain a little perspective and keep things in their proper place:

All that an orthodox Christian must hold today with respect to predestination is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.  

The following may be a bit ill-sounding, but let's suppose that

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Now that is really speaking my (musical) language, because while there's no harm in seeing the cosmos as a grand symphony composed by the divine mind, I'm much more of a jazz guy, so the following is for me right in the pocket: God

might be said -- in an at first perhaps shocking, but to me illuminating metaphor -- to be the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds.

Not only do I believe this, I can't not believe it, so it's good to know it can easily be harmonized with orthodoxy. Bottom line for today:

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our ongoing now's.

And the ultimate jazz trio must be -- you guessed it -- the Trinity. 

But that last passage also reminds me of Duke Ellington in particular, who not only combined structure and improvisation in his compositions, but specifically wrote to the strengths and weaknesses of his particular musicians, allowing them a degree of freedom to carry out what he had in mind for them. They might even have thought they were totally improvising, unaware that they were actually freely carrying out the composer's intent.