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title: "New Creation, Fulfilled Freedom, and Creaturely Growth"
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part_title: "The Completion of Created History"
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# New Creation, Fulfilled Freedom, and Creaturely Growth
Healing is not merely the removal of a wound. A daughter would not be restored if domination ended while she remained unable to receive affection, attend to beauty or act from her own reasons. Even stipulating the mother's salvation, harmlessness would not complete her; love must become capable of truthful action. New creation promises that positive good within a renewed world.
## Creation itself receives liberation
Romans 8 distinguishes creation's groaning from believers' waiting for bodily redemption. Creation was subjected unwillingly and is itself promised liberation from corruption. Its good exceeds its usefulness as a setting for human salvation. Believers already possess the Spirit's firstfruits while awaiting what their present powers cannot accomplish; the Spirit's intercession joins weakness to promised divine action. [^creation-itself-receives-liberation-1]
The risen Christ is the firstfruits of that future. Paul's claim is vulnerable to its historical alternative: without His resurrection, the hope fails. The harvest image joins the gift to the actual risen Lord, while Paul's order and the disputed terminal outcomes prevent the image alone from deciding everyone's saving destiny. Present new creation in Christ begins reconciliation; it does not declare present death and injustice already abolished. [^creation-itself-receives-liberation-2]
Revelation's city descends toward renewed earth. God dwells with humanity; tears are wiped from eyes; the conditions producing mourning end. Israel's tribes and the Lamb's apostles remain named in its gates and foundations. No separate temple is needed because God and the Lamb are its temple. Open gates welcome the nations' glory while excluding falsehood and defilement. A river, fruitful tree, healing leaves, service and enduring reign give material and public expression to communion. [^creation-itself-receives-liberation-3]
The prophetic images differ. Isaiah 65 promises houses inhabited by their builders, enjoyed harvests and animal peace, but retains death within extraordinary longevity. Revelation removes death. Second Peter joins severe discontinuity and judgment to a world inhabited by righteousness. A Christian synthesis can read developing promise without assigning every feature to an identical stage or pretending to possess renewal's physical mechanism. [^creation-itself-receives-liberation-4]
[^creation-itself-receives-liberation-1]: Romans 8:18--27. Ktisis, creation, has a scope beyond the believers' inward condition, without enumerating every individual creature's future.
[^creation-itself-receives-liberation-2]: 1 Corinthians 15:12--28; 2 Corinthians 5:1--21; Galatians 6:12--16. The latter passages address apostolic reconciliation, the cross and religious boasting, rather than supplying a generic formula for desirable change.
[^creation-itself-receives-liberation-3]: Revelation 21--22:5. Equal dimensions, precious materials, and the absence of sea, curse and night have substantive symbolic force without furnishing specifications for construction, astronomy or future zoology.
[^creation-itself-receives-liberation-4]: Isaiah 65:17--25; 2 Peter 3:3--18.
## The Creator completes His handiwork
Irenaeus expects the righteous to receive good in the creation where they were afflicted. Abraham's promise and bodily resurrection protect the Creator's fidelity to His handiwork. His account also specifies an earthly kingdom of becoming accustomed to God before final judgment and the city. That chronology, its gradations and Papias's extraordinary agricultural abundance are not a common patristic timetable. His promised table and freedom from earthly occupation do not independently reveal future artistic careers. [^the-creator-completes-his-handiwork-1]
Athanasius locates the cure in the existing human being: keeping an external danger away would be survival, not restoration. The Word's life must reach the body needing restoration. Courage before death is a separate apologetic argument, not a test that condemns frightened believers. Augustine's bodily future likewise joins rest, vision, love and praise, allowing movement and discoveries while admitting limited specification. His fixed degrees of glory and permanently lost people remain distinct from Gregory's universal restoration. [^the-creator-completes-his-handiwork-2]
[^the-creator-completes-his-handiwork-1]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.7.1 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103507.htm); V.32 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103532.htm), V.33 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103533.htm), V.34 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103534.htm), V.35 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103535.htm), V.36 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103536.htm). His claim that creation's substance is not annihilated belongs to this particular account.
[^the-creator-completes-his-handiwork-2]: Athanasius, On the Incarnation 27--30, 41--45, especially 44, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm; Augustine, City of God XXII.19--20, 30, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120122.htm.
## Wholeness that leaves room for growth
Being wholly known is not being wholly healed. Restoration must give the known person embodied integrity, truthful agency and the freedom to receive and give love. Endless incremental progress that never achieves these essential goods would leave the promise unfinished. Neither infancy nor impaired powers make mature practiced achievement an entrance fee.
For the daughter, healing would permit speech without arranging every sentence around expected punishment. For the mother, it would permit delight in a good her daughter chose independently. These illustrate restored capacities, not reported scenes of the coming world. Their future contact remains unspecified; neither salvation nor affection reinstates entitlement to control.
History stays true. The daughter did not receive the childhood freedom withheld from her; no later gift makes that nonoccurrence an occurrence. Knowing this need not mean compulsively reliving it, and deleting access would not by itself heal its effects. Forgone skills can remain forgone without preventing fulfillment. Conversely, ordinary finitude cannot excuse deprivation of essential good. No life can contain every possible achievement; some possibilities exclude others.
Completion concerns the goods necessary for communion; growth concerns further acts of already sound powers. An affection can be real before all its conversations. A capacity can be whole before all its exercises. Finite fulfillment need entail neither exhaustive knowledge nor endless inadequacy.
Irenaeus describes creation's reception through growth: the giver possesses what the recipient is not yet ready to receive. Gregory of Nyssa compares a departed infant's increasing participation to nourishment, distinguishing freedom from acquired corruption from enlarged enjoyment of good. His example concerns the departed soul, not a complete embodied itinerary. His additional conjecture that some early deaths prevent foreknown wickedness does not follow from that developmental analogy; DDF does not adopt it as the reason an actual child died. [^wholeness-that-leaves-room-for-growth-1]
DDF's moderate constructive proposal is neither static perfection nor infinite therapy: essential healing is actually achieved, while further creaturely understanding and communion remain possible. The exact ordering and duration of reception, purification, resurrection and growth remain undisclosed. Successive creaturely activities would not make God successive or specify a future equivalent of present physical time.
[^wholeness-that-leaves-room-for-growth-1]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.38.1--4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103438.htm; Gregory of Nyssa, On Infants' Early Deaths, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2912.htm.
## Freedom has something good to do
A settled good end need not exhaust particular initiative. Someone can choose a melody, welcome or arrangement because it is fitting to give. The choice has a reason and an author without needing cruelty as a competing source of interest. This applies the compatibility argument for fulfilled freedom; it supplies no new proof that every philosophical objection to divine action has been answered. [^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-1]
Sharing the Lamb's reign adds responsibility to that activity. Luke places table and throne promises beside Jesus' service and His correction of dominating ambition. Revelation joins service, seeing God's face and enduring reign. Paul's promise of judging world and angels does not settle its exact judicial mode: Chrysostom emphasizes faithful lives exposing guilt, while Augustine extends the company beyond the Twelve. Once evil is overcome, the redeemed need no new victims to retain a vocation. [^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-2]
Face-to-face knowing in First Corinthians 13 exceeds present partial knowledge without making a creature the uncreated Knower. Healed communion can coexist with something newly learned about a friend or appreciated in a beauty. Some present questions may cease with their conditions; others may receive an answer as gift. Further discovery is a fitting possibility, not a revealed future research curriculum. [^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-3]
A good performance does not make every further performance pointless. Familiar beauty can sustain attention without being an unfinished repair problem; variation can express understanding and delight. Revelation's song and beauty support creaturely expression, while particular instruments, genres and occupations remain speculative. Play can likewise realize shared rhythm, surprise and enjoyment without humiliation. Art that tells past grief need not require newly inflicted grief.
Rest belongs within this positive life. Purposeful activity cannot reinstall production as the price of belonging. A nurse's attentive love exceeds illness management; a teacher's delight in understanding exceeds correcting confusion. Their goods need not disappear when disease and essential ignorance end. Neither vocation nor faithful labor guarantees an institution's permanence. [^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-4]
[^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-1]: Augustine, Enchiridion 105--107; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.10 aa.1--2. Secure final goodness is given through grace, not predicted from habit. Redeemed creatures do not acquire Christ's unique personal union of divine and human natures.
[^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-2]: Luke 22:24--30; 1 Corinthians 6:2--8; Revelation 5:6--14; 22:3--5; Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians XVI; Augustine, City of God XX.5.
[^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-3]: 1 Corinthians 13:8--13 places gifts' incompleteness beside enduring love. It does not inventory future scientific knowledge.
[^freedom-has-something-good-to-do-4]: Revelation 5:8--14; 21:18--23; Isaiah 65:21--23; 1 Corinthians 15:58; Augustine, City of God XXII.30. Future making and play are DDF fittingness proposals, not revealed catalogues.
## Particular people in a shared world
Love addresses this person, with a particular history. Its good would be lost in an account of interchangeable centers of pleasant feeling. Continuity does not, however, perpetuate every arrangement. Answering the Sadducees, Jesus denies that resurrection reproduces marriage and being given in marriage while naming Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as living before God. This preserves persons without specifying the future shape of every affection. [^particular-people-in-a-shared-world-1]
Particular friendship can welcome the beloved's other friendships without treating them as desertion. Its security need not require possession. Similarly, the nations' received glory can preserve linguistic, artistic and customary good without granting a civilization eternal entitlement. Babylon's trade in human lives exposes the possibility that prestige itself rests upon exploitation. Judgment receives or transforms a good; it does not carry every transmitting institution forward automatically. [^particular-people-in-a-shared-world-2]
The city and garden also prevent reducing fulfillment to isolated inward satisfaction. A shared place enables meeting, welcome and access. No promise identifies which present street or building persists. The absence of a separate temple gives a concrete instance of a mediating form reaching completion in the good it served rather than reproducing itself without end.
[^particular-people-in-a-shared-world-1]: Matthew 22:23--33.
[^particular-people-in-a-shared-world-2]: Revelation 18:9--24; 21:24--27.
## The nonhuman beneficiary
Romans 8's unwillingly subjected creation cannot be assigned an invented animal rebellion. Irenaeus takes Isaiah's predator--prey peace to include actual animals, resisting a solely human allegory. This affirms renewed nonhuman life without specifying every animal's resurrection. [^the-nonhuman-beneficiary-1]
The individual-restoration dispute concerns the suffering subject's own good. Flourishing successors, surviving species and repaired habitats benefit others without yet repairing that subject's loss. DDF's moderate fittingness inference adds the premise that consummation should adequately answer uncompensated suffering in its bearer. A defender of complete finite goods can deny this requirement. The posthumously compiled Thomistic Supplement's objections concerning perishing forms, identity and final purpose remain substantive even after its obsolete heavenly-motion premise is removed. [^the-nonhuman-beneficiary-2]
This requirement must be applied consistently. Culpable human opposition distinguishes judgment from innocent animal suffering but does not cancel the human sufferer's injury. If enduring fulfilled communion is necessary for adequate redress of a particular human horror, an adverse terminal outcome needs revision. Aggregate victory cannot replace the beneficiary in either case.
[^the-nonhuman-beneficiary-1]: Isaiah 11:6--9; 65:25; Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.33.4.
[^the-nonhuman-beneficiary-2]: Summa Theologiae, Supplement q.91 a.5, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/5091.htm. Finite joy's reality does not imply that every valuable organism must continue forever. Individual animal repair remains a further DDF inference, with scope and mechanism unresolved.
## The welcome promised
Moltmann usefully joins hope arising from the crucified and risen Christ to the future of the earth where His cross stood. This hope contests suffering rather than sanctifying its permanence. It neither independently proves resurrection nor licenses a diagnosis of culpable despair from clinical suffering or exhaustion. Present repair can be real without becoming the mechanism that raises the dead. [^the-welcome-promised-1]
Isaiah's feast gives the promised good a shared form: gathered peoples, food and wine, tears removed and death defeated. The kingdom table belongs to the same Lord whose service His disciples receive. These images concern embodied recipients and personal welcome; they are not one technical mechanism of renewal. [^the-welcome-promised-2]
The saved person's essential good must arrive, with finite powers able to receive and enact further good. This positive account specifies fulfillment without proving that every subject receives it or explaining every permitted injury. A fulfilled daughter can love and act as herself. That outcome would answer her loss without making it necessary or good that domination ever occurred.
[^the-welcome-promised-1]: J\"urgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, introductory material in the publisher's reader excerpt, pp.9--13, https://ms.fortresspress.com/downloads/9780800699895_Ch1.pdf. This is contact with that bounded excerpt.
[^the-welcome-promised-2]: Isaiah 25:6--9; John 13:1--17; Luke 22:14--30; Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.33.1.