Daily Inspiration Quote by William Ames

Creation, for Ames, isn’t a heroic burst of inspiration so much as a grammatical problem with real metaphysical stakes. He takes a familiar assumption about agency - that to act is to act on something - and then snaps it in half. “Active creation” looks like a transitive verb: a maker, a making, and an object. Yet the object can’t be there in advance, because creation, by definition, is the act that brings the object into being. So it’s “virtually but not formally transitive”: it behaves like object-directed action while refusing the normal requirement that an object preexist.

That tight scholastic distinction is doing polemical work. Ames, a Reformed theologian writing in a world still debating how God’s will relates to the world, is guarding divine sovereignty against any hint of dependency. If God’s action presupposed an object, then reality would become a kind of co-author - something God must “be concerned about” before acting. Ames won’t grant creation that foothold. The subtext is anti-Aristotelian in spirit: no eternal matter waiting around, no latent stuff requiring divine management, no creation as mere rearrangement.

It also clarifies what “concern” means when applied to God. God’s “aboutness” isn’t reactive attention; it’s productive intention. Ames turns a feature of human action - we work with what’s already there - into the very line that separates creaturely making from divine creating. The wit is in the precision: by making the sentence itself pivot on transitivity, he shows how easily our language smuggles limits onto God, and how hard theology has to work to unsmuggle them.