by Peter Stork
I believe in the Triune God as the living ground of all existence and being—Father, Son, and Spirit in eternal communion of self-giving, self-receiving, and mutual delight. Divine being is not a corporeal entity but a spiritual–relational plenitude, from whose infinite communion creation flows. The universe is therefore neither a necessity nor an assembly of ready-made creatures, but a self-creating and unfinished universe —the ecstasy of divine processual love and freedom —unfolding in fundamental relationality at all levels and scales toward greater complexity and novelty.
I hold that creation participates in God’s relational life, not as a closed system but as an open field of becoming. In granting existence, God also grants freedom—the capacity of built-in creativity to explore all realisable potentialities. Such freedom is both gift and risk: for genuine participation in divine creativity entails the possibility of deviation, distortion, and dissonance. Contrariness arises not as a rival principle to God’s goodness but as the shadow cast by love’s spaciousness, the inevitable cost of a creation allowed to be truly other.
I confess Jesus Christ as the incarnate expression of divine relational fidelity and wisdom. In him, the eternal Word enters the world’s fractured field and bears its contrariness into renewed communion. The cross is not divine punishment but divine participation in and solidarity with the created world. His suffering is the moment where dissonance is neither denied nor destroyed but transfigured into a deeper resonance. Hence, the resurrection affirms once more creation’s openness to God, whereby freedom is not revoked but fulfilled in theotic-relational coherence.
I affirm the Holy Spirit as the dynamic presence of divine relationality pervading all processes of becoming. The Spirit sustains the world’s freedom while guiding it toward consonance, working within even the most chaotic systems to quicken possibility, empathy, and response. Every act of resonance—physical, biological, moral, or spiritual—is a trace of the Spirit’s harmonising activity within creation’s freedom.
Human beings, as self-reflective participants in this open cosmos, embody creation’s capacity for resonance as co-creators and as resistance. Sin is thus the wilful constriction of relational openness, when freedom freezes into self-enclosure. Yet divine fidelity abides: God continues to draw creation toward the fullness of communion, where freedom and love will be one.
I hold that the ultimate destiny of creation is not absorption nor annihilation but the consummation of all potentialities in the triune life of God—when all that responds to the divine frequency shall find its home, while redeeming love will transform every discord into a contribution to the fulfilment of the final harmony of divine and creaturely freedom.
Bio Peter Stork is retired Geo-scientist and theologian, an Emeritus Faculty and former Research Fellow of the Australian Catholic University, Canberra, and a Fellow of ISCAST, Australia. Author of Cosmos and Revelation: Reimagining God’s Creation in the Age of Science (2021).
26 October 2025 © AIOCS
Please support our not-for-profit ministry (ABN 76649025141)
For donations, please go to https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/aiocsnet or contact us at info@aiocs.net
