I was reading Revelation 5 this morning and paused to puzzle over a familiar passage (vv. 11-12):
Is he lacking in any of these things?
Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,Why would the Lamb (and elsewhere, God the Father) need to receive power, wealth, wisdom, might, honor, glory, and blessing?
"Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honour and glory and blessing!" (ESV)
Is he lacking in any of these things?
Does he not already possess them?
What, in other words, are the creatures giving God here, that is not already his?
I then remembered Athanasius' development of The Incarnation of the Word as the very redemption of all that is. Christ, the Son of God -- the incarnate, redeeming Word -- both made the universe and in his Incarnation brings that universe to its completion.
And his argument set me off to wondering. All the power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing belong to God's Be-ing. They are part of the divine fulness. However, creation, by the will of God, lives and moves and has its being in God. God allows creation to participate, to varying degrees, in Godself. (This notion will need a careful explication, but is at the heart of Athanasian trinitarian theology.)
Creation is from God.
Creation is through God.
Creation is to God.
So wisdom and power and glory (etc.) come from and through God to creation, but they only reach their perfection, their goal, their telos, when they are surrendered back to God. They only become fully what they are when the circuit is completed; when we go with the grain of the universe and orientate ourselves correctly towards the creator; when we cast our crowns before him -- the crowns that he himself bestowed upon us.
So the giving of glory, wisdom, and power (etc.) to God is not to supply a lack in God, but to bring creation to its divine perfection and goal, so that the whole earth can be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
(It's here that I then begin thinking of Basil's On the Holy Spirit. Though written in a different historical context than Athanasius' Incarnation of the Word, Basil makes a very fine rhetorical case that prepositions matter in trinitarian theology. This may well be another of those places where Basil was right.)