as creation evolved and became what it is today,
but was present within, and with, creation
The preceding essay, “The Evolutionary History of Humanity,” sought to provide Christian readers with a reasonably clear account of humanity’s emergence within the long history of life. It explained why human beings remain primates and great apes without having descended from any primate species living today. It traced evolutionary branching, geographical dispersal, hominin diversity, coexistence, interbreeding, extinction, and the extended emergence of Homo sapiens. It also challenged the familiar ladder of progress in which primitive life rises toward modern humanity as though we were evolution’s intended destination.
Essay 2A asked what evolutionary science and archaeology presently allow us to say about humanity’s becoming. Essay 2B asks what kind of reality that history discloses and how relational Christian faith may truthfully inhabit it. Rather than repeating the scientific history in detail, this companion essay moves from evolutionary reconstruction toward relational interpretation, theological confession, ethical responsibility, and participatory faith.
These movements must remain distinguishable even as they remain in conversation. Evolutionary science investigates the natural history of life through fossils, genetics, comparative anatomy, archaeology, geology, palaeoclimatology, and other forms of evidence.
1 - Relational philosophy asks what kind of reality that history appears to disclose - what it may tell us about relation, becoming, emergence, identity, constraint, agency, contingency, and possibility.
2 - Relational theology then takes a further interpretive step, asking how this same reality may be understood in relation to God.
3 - Relational Christianity asks how Christian confession, community, ethics, hope, and participation might faithfully inhabit such a world.
The order matters. Theology must not determine which scientific findings may be accepted. Philosophy must not present itself as hidden biology. Christian confession must not disguise itself as a conclusion required by fossils or genetics. Science cannot demonstrate that God exists, but neither can it demonstrate that God does not exist. The theological movement toward God remains an interpretation of reality rather than a scientific discovery within it.
This essay therefore does not argue that evolution proves relational theology. It argues that if Christians confess God as Creator, then their theology should correspond with the creation that responsible inquiry actually discloses.
If evolutionary history presents us with a world that is embodied, historically developing, deeply relational in its processes, and open to the emergence of novelty, Christian theology should not require creation to be recent, static, separately assembled, or exhaustively predetermined.
The question is no longer whether faith can prevent evolutionary history from being true. It is whether Christian faith can become truthful enough to live within it.
Introduction: What Kind of Reality Does Evolution Disclose?
Evolutionary history does not disclose a substance-first universe composed of isolated and completed things that only afterward enter into relationships. No organism creates itself independently and then chooses whether to become related. Every organism begins within inheritances it did not originate: genetic histories, cellular structures, reproductive processes, ecological conditions, geographical locations, climatic patterns, nutritional dependencies, developmental constraints, and communities of life.
A living entity possesses genuine identity, but that identity is neither self-created nor self-contained. It becomes through relations. Its body incorporates the history of ancestral populations. Its development depends upon environmental conditions. Its survival depends upon exchanges of energy and matter. Its reproductive possibilities involve other members of a population. Its capacities become meaningful within particular ecological fields.
Evolutionary history consequently offers a vivid example of relational becoming. Populations inherit structures from earlier populations, vary across generations, encounter changing environments, migrate, separate, reconnect, adapt, interbreed, and sometimes disappear. New forms arise through the transformation and reorganization of inherited conditions. Novelty is real, but it never begins without a past.
The developing philosophy of Generative Relational Realism begins with the conviction that relation is ontologically primitive - belonging to the constitution of whatever becomes rather than being added afterward between independently completed substances.
Entities emerge and endure through patterned relations that persist, change, respond, and sometimes dissolve. Process names the dynamism of those relations, while relational responsiveness names their primitive activity: differences within relation make differences to what becomes.
Responsiveness at this fundamental level does not mean feeling, awareness, experience, or consciousness. Experience emerges only within sufficiently complex organizations of relational responsiveness, while reflective consciousness emerges later within still more complex biological, neurological, social, and symbolic organization.
relation → responsiveness → organized complexity → experience → reflective consciousness
Evolution provides an extraordinary history of this generativity. It presents neither an unchanging creation nor a chaotic succession without continuity. It reveals inherited relations (not necessarily relational organization; we wish to stay less formed at this point) becoming newly organized through embodied relations over time.
- Relational philosophy interprets this history as evidence of a reality in which becoming occurs through inherited relations, responsive relations, constraint, and emergent novelty.
Relational theology takes this same metaphysical account of reality and asks how it may be understood in relation to God - what it means to confess such a reality as creation.
Relational Christianity, in turn, asks how specifically Christian confession may inhabit that theological interpretation - reconsidering creation, humanity, providence, suffering, sin, hope, and participation within an unfinished world.
I. Science Must Speak Before Theology Interprets
- Science - reconstructs the natural history of the cosmos and world: “What has happened, and through what natural processes?”
- Relational philosophy - interprets the ontological and metaphysical character of reality disclosed through that natural history: “What is reality, how is it relational, and how does it become through relation?”
- Relational theology - extends relational philosophy's ontological and metaphysical inquiry into the God-world relation: “What is reality-with-God, and how do God and reality relate within reality’s becoming?”
- Relational Christianity - interprets and inhabits that God-related relational reality through specifically Christian confession, doctrine, ethics, and participation: “How do Christians understand, confess, and live within that God-related relational reality?”
*Note. Relational theology, as used here, is therefore broader than relational Christianity. Other religious traditions may develop their own interpretations of relational reality in relation to God, the divine, or ultimate reality, while agnostic and atheistic perspectives may engage relational philosophy without making the theological movement toward God. This essay proceeds specifically into relational Christianity because Christianity is the faith tradition being examined.
For much of Christian history, interpreters approached the natural world through cosmologies inherited from Scripture, classical philosophy, and the limited observations available to their societies. This was not necessarily dishonest. Ancient and medieval communities interpreted reality through the best conceptual worlds they possessed. The difficulty arose when those inherited worlds became identified with divine revelation so completely that later evidence could be treated only as rebellion against God.
Modern evolutionary science approaches questions of natural history through a different method of inquiry. It does not begin with a sacred account then ask nature to conform. It examines fossils, rocks, organisms, genes, environments, and material remains. Its explanations remain provisional, but they are constrained by publicly examinable evidence. A newly discovered fossil, improved dating method, recovered ancient genome, or revised climatic reconstruction may alter previous conclusions. Such correction is not weakness. It is how responsible inquiry learns.
Theology should allow this investigation to proceed without interference. It should not decide beforehand that humanity must descend from one original pair, that biological death must begin after human sin, that the earth must be young, or that species must have appeared separately in substantially their present forms. These are theological interpretations placed upon nature and the natural sciences. They are not observations supplied by nature itself.
Similarly, no philosophy should predetermine what scientific inquiry must discover in order to confirm a preferred metaphysics. Philosophy, too, must listen before it interprets. Once science reconstructs evolutionary history as responsibly as available evidence permits, philosophy may ask what kind of reality that history appears to disclose.
Theology may then take a further interpretive step, asking how that reality may be understood in relation to God. Theology may contribute questions of value, meaning, purpose, worship, hope, and ethical responsibility. It may confess the world as creation. But it must not rewrite the evidence to preserve an interpretation inherited from another age whose understanding of the natural world differed substantially from our own.
This discipline protects theology as well as science. A faith that makes its survival dependent upon rejecting accumulating evidence places itself in an increasingly fragile position. When believers eventually encounter fossils, genetics, archaeology, and deep time, they may conclude that Christianity itself has been disproved. But what has often failed is not faith in God but an interpretation of faith that mistakenly made God dependent upon an unsustainable account of natural history inherited from a pre-scientific age.
Relational Christianity begins by listening. It allows science to investigate creation and historical scholarship to investigate religious texts. Only then does it ask how Christian confession may truthfully inhabit what has been learned. Because human beings are themselves products and participants of the evolutionary history they investigate, this listening is never performed from wholly outside the reality being studied.
II. Relational Philosophy and Evolutionary Becoming
Philosophy is sometimes treated as an abstract exercise removed from actual life. Yet every society operates through philosophical assumptions, whether or not those assumptions are acknowledged. Ideas concerning substance, mind, causation, identity, freedom, nature, humanity, and God shape institutions, moral judgments, political arrangements, economic systems, religious doctrines, and personal conduct.
Philosophy is therefore both formed within society and formative of society. It arises from lived reality, reflects upon the assumptions embedded within experience, and returns to influence how communities understand themselves. It must remain accountable to science, history, criticism, and consequences. When philosophy ceases listening, it becomes ideology. When it refuses to articulate its assumptions, those assumptions continue operating without examination.
Relational philosophy does not deny individuality. It asks how individuality becomes. Relational philosophy begins neither by denying individual existence nor by dissolving everything into undifferentiated unity. It argues that individuality itself is relationally achieved. A living organism possesses boundaries, organization, and agency, but these arise through patterned exchanges and inherited structures. Independence is never absolute. Even the most autonomous organism depends upon conditions it did not create.
Evolution displays this vividly. No species can be adequately understood as an isolated essence. A species has ancestral relations, ecological relations, reproductive relations, geographical relations, competitive relations, cooperative relations, and possible future relations. Its identity is real, but it is historical. Its characteristics have become through time and remain vulnerable to further change.
Generative Relational Realism (GRR) is an integrated philosophical account that interprets such evolving histories through the categories of relation, responsiveness, constraint, emergence, and becoming. Relation is ontologically primitive, not because relations exist without relata, but because nothing that becomes exists independently of the relations through which it becomes what it is.
Relational responsiveness names the primitive activity within such relations: differences encounter differences and make differences to what follows. Constraint both limits and enables what can become. Emergence names the arising of organized properties and capacities that cannot be adequately described merely by listing their constituent parts. Becoming names the continuing historical generation of actuality from inherited conditions within an open but constrained field of possibility.
None of this requires adding a hidden spiritual force to evolutionary mechanisms. Mutation, inheritance, selection, drift, migration, developmental processes, environmental change, and other biological mechanisms remain biological mechanisms. Yet the presence of biological mechanisms does not require us to interpret biological life or evolutionary becoming as merely mechanistic. Evolution employs mechanisms, but evolution is not itself a machine.
GRR does not replace their scientific explanation. It asks philosophically what kind of reality makes such relational, historical, and generative processes possible.
III. Relational Responsiveness, Inheritance, and Novelty
Evolution is therefore not merely change. It is relationally conditioned change carrying inheritance forward into new configurations. The result is a relationally becoming world characterized by:
- continuity without stasis,
- genuine novelty arising from inherited conditions, and
- coherence without an exhaustively predetermined future.
Relational responsiveness is the primitive activity of the world described by Generative Relational Realism. This does not mean that atoms feel, rocks experience, cells think, or every organism possesses consciousness. It means that entities exist within relations through which differences have consequences: what one condition is or does may alter what becomes possible for another. Such responsiveness occurs through changes, constraints, reactions, exchanges, attractions, repulsions, regulation, adaptation, and increasingly complex forms of response.
Life intensifies relational responsiveness. Cells maintain boundaries while exchanging matter and energy with their environments. Organisms detect conditions relevant to survival. Plants orient toward light, regulate water, respond to injury, and exchange chemical information. Animals develop sensory systems, movement, memory, learning, and increasingly complex forms of agency. Experience emerges within sufficiently complex forms of organized living responsiveness, while reflective consciousness emerges later within still more complex biological, neurological, and social organization.
Evolution depends upon inheritance, but inheritance is not the simple repetition of the past. Organisms receive genetic structures, developmental systems, ecological conditions, and, in some species, learned behavior and culture. These inheritances constrain what may become. A vertebrate develops from a vertebrate history; a primate inherits a primate body; a human develops through biological and social conditions specific to human life. Yet inheritance does more than constrain. Within inherited conditions, new relations and organizations may generate novelty, while sufficiently integrated patterns may achieve coherence - persisting through change without becoming fixed against further change.
Constraint, however, is not merely prohibition. The structure of a hand limits what the hand can do, but it also enables grasping, carrying, making, signaling, writing, and touching. Language constrains speakers through inherited words and grammar while enabling expressions no previous speaker has uttered. Evolutionary history similarly produces structures that limit possibility while opening new fields of action.
Novelty arises within this interaction of inheritance, variation, environment, and organization. A new capacity is neither wholly disconnected from the past nor reducible to a list of earlier components. Human language depends upon primate communication, vocal anatomy, hearing, memory, social learning, symbolic association, and brain organization. Yet the novel organization of these inherited and developing capacities within new relations produces possibilities that no component possesses independently.
Coherence arises as inherited relations, constraints, and emerging capacities become organized into forms capable of persisting through change. It does not require a fixed or predetermined outcome. A living organism, a species, or an ecosystem may maintain sufficient relational coherence to endure while continuing to change. Coherence therefore describes neither permanence nor perfection, but the patterned integrity through which becoming can continue.
Relational emergence therefore avoids two extremes: 1) It does not imagine novelty appearing without history, and 2) it does not reduce novelty to nothing more than what preceded it.
In this way, evolutionary becoming carries the past forward through inheritance and constraint, while generating through changing relations novel forms the past had never previously embodied, some of which achieve sufficient coherence to persist through further change.
In evolutionary terms, this gives concrete expression to what is meant by Generative Relational Realism (GRR) = Embodied Relational Reality (ERR) + Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB).
past inherited → present encountered → novelty generated → future opened
IV. Biogeography and the Relational Formation of Species
Evolution takes place somewhere. Populations inhabit forests, coasts, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, deserts, islands, valleys, river systems, and seasonal corridors. Geography does not merely provide scenery around evolutionary events. It helps constitute the conditions under which populations separate, survive, migrate, encounter one another, and become different.
Changing climates repeatedly reorganized these conditions. Forests expanded and contracted. Deserts became greener and later returned. Lakes appeared, shifted, or disappeared. Sea levels rose and fell. Glacial cycles altered habitats and migration routes. Populations followed food, water, prey, vegetation, and tolerable temperatures. Some became isolated; others met again after thousands of generations. Evolutionary histories therefore emerge not from organisms or environments considered separately, but through their continuing interaction across changing places and conditions.
Species consequently develop through relational histories. Genetic differences accumulate within populations experiencing differing conditions. Natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, migration, reproductive patterns, and developmental inheritance interact in differing combinations across evolutionary histories rather than constituting a single isolated cause. If separation continues, populations may become sufficiently distinct to be recognized as different species. Yet the process rarely supplies one instant at which an earlier species disappears and a completed new species arrives.
This helps explain why hominin classification remains debated. Fossils preserve only portions of once-living populations. Anatomical characteristics may appear in mosaics. Regional populations may differ without being entirely reproductively isolated. Later discoveries can reveal that forms once classified separately were more closely connected than previously thought, or that fossils grouped together represent greater diversity.
A relational account accepts both differentiation and permeability. Species are not imaginary labels imposed upon a biological continuum, but neither are they timeless containers. They are historically achieved patterns of population identity. They can emerge, endure, diversify, exchange genes, and dissolve. The philosophical question therefore becomes not simply what a species is, but how a species becomes and maintains sufficient coherence to remain identifiable through change.
Theologically, this challenges interpretations in which created order requires permanently fixed biological “kinds.” Rather than thinking of created order as biological fixity, let us think in terms of created coherence, which implies that biological identity need not require biological immobility. An evolving creation can exhibit continuity, pattern, and constraint while remaining open to transformation. Its relations allow forms to persist sufficiently to develop recognizable identities while remaining capable of further change.
place → changing environment → population differentiation →
hominin classification → relational species identity → theological implication
V. Branching Trees, Braided Rivers, and Entangled Genealogies
The evolutionary tree remains indispensable because it represents descent and divergence. Ancestral populations separate, and their descendants develop along different paths. Humans did not descend from living chimpanzees; both lineages emerged after separating from an older ancestral population. Nor did every hominin species lead directly toward Homo sapiens. Many were evolutionary relatives rather than ancestors.
Yet the tree alone can create an excessively clean picture. It may suggest that branches separate permanently and never exchange genetic material again. Human evolutionary history is more complicated. Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo sapiens diverged, occupied differing geographical ranges, and later interbred. Some living populations retain Neanderthal or Denisovan genetic ancestry. Additional genetic signals may also preserve evidence of encounters with populations whose fossils have not yet been securely identified.
The image of a braided river therefore supplements the taxonomic tree illustration. Channels separate, travel through differing landscapes, meet again, exchange water, and divide once more. Neither image is sufficient alone. The tree protects real historical divergence. The braided river protects renewed encounter, admixture, and absorption.
This entanglement does not mean that every hominin belonged to one undifferentiated population. Differences mattered. Bodies, technologies, environments, and demographic histories differed. Some populations remained separated for long periods. But separation did not always produce impermeable boundaries.
Relationally, identity does not require an isolated ancestry. Populations may separate, diverge, encounter one another again, and sometimes exchange genes even after substantial differentiation. Thus, a population may possess genuine historical identity while carrying inheritances received from other populations in its past. Modern humanity is not the product of a single isolated lineage. Our genomes preserve biological histories of encounter, separation, and re-encounter, while our cultures, languages, and societies preserve still other histories of human exchange and relational entanglement.
The theological consequences are considerable. If humanity has emerged through histories of separation, migration, encounter, interbreeding, and renewed relationship, then Christian theology should not imagine human identity as requiring isolated biological lineages. Our shared humanity has been formed through differentiation and encounter across deep evolutionary time. Difference is real, but difference does not require separation; identity is real, but identity does not require isolation.
An evolutionary understanding of humanity therefore invites Christian theology to understand human kinship not as the preservation of separate ancestries, but as participation in a deeply entangled human history. Whatever theological meaning Christians give to humanity as created in the image of God, that image is borne by a humanity whose biological history has always been relational and deeply entwined.
Biblical teachings should therefore not be used to justify claims of racial purity, segregation, prohibitions against interracial marriage, or assertions that some human ancestries are divinely preferred or biologically superior to others. Such interpretations impose categories of separation and hierarchy upon a human evolutionary history characterized by differentiation, encounter, interbreeding, and shared ancestry.
Evolutionary history does not, by itself, establish Christian ethics. What it does show is that Christian theology cannot appeal to evolutionary biology as support for supposedly separate, divinely preserved human lineages. The biological premise fails. Rather, theology and ethics must make their own arguments concerning human dignity, equality, kinship, love, justice, and responsibility on theological and ethical grounds.
Evolution proceeds through differential survival and reproduction, not through the preservation of a privileged lineage moving toward a predetermined human form. Populations separate and reconnect, lineages diverge and sometimes encounter one another again, and genetic inheritances may pass across population boundaries. Reproductive isolation may preserve particular characteristics, but prolonged isolation and restricted breeding can also reduce genetic diversity and increase vulnerability to inherited disorders and changing biological or environmental conditions.
Evolution therefore provides no biological warrant for imagining humanity as progressing through the preservation of increasingly “superior” isolated lineages. The human species has emerged through differentiation, encounter, inheritance, admixture, and continuing adaptation within an entangled evolutionary history.
VI. Contingency, Extinction, and an Open Future
Looking backward from the present makes evolutionary history appear more inevitable than it was. Because Homo sapiens survives, earlier developments can be arranged as steps leading towards us. Bipedalism, toolmaking, increasing brain size, language, and migration may then appear as successive achievements along a path whose destination was modern humanity.
But evolution did not know - nor did it determine - that we were coming. Which is to say, "Reality is what it is and can be no more than it is." Placed into GRR terms, "Reality is what it is, but what it is includes the possibilities of what it may later become." Meaning, the future isn't secretly sitting there already actualized. Possibility belongs to reality without possibility already being actuality. Which can likewise be restated in GRR concepts to say, "Constraint narrows possibility without necessarily determining outcome."
Practically, in evolutionary terms, each population lived within present conditions rather than serving biologically as determinative for a distant descendant - though, in hindsight, we can reconstruct how what-presently-exists became possible through the relational conditions, inheritances, encounters, and contingencies preceding it. Thus adaptations arose within immediate relational fields. Climatic changes opened some possibilities and closed others. Populations expanded, contracted, mixed, or disappeared. Contingent events - environmental disruptions, migrations, population bottlenecks, encounters between populations, and innumerable other historical circumstances - could redirect what became possible afterward.
Extinction makes contingency impossible to ignore. Most species that have lived no longer exist. Their extinction does not prove that they were defective or divinely rejected. A population well adapted to one environment may become vulnerable when conditions change rapidly. Small numbers, restricted ranges, disease, competition, ecological disruption, or reproductive isolation may bring a lineage to an end.
Nor does survival prove moral or metaphysical superiority. Homo sapiens is the only surviving human species, but survival does not demonstrate that we were always destined to prevail. Our continuation resulted from interacting biological, cultural, demographic, ecological, and geographical conditions. Even now, survival remains neither guaranteed nor morally deserved.
Nor is an open future an unconstrained future. The past establishes real conditions upon what may become. Human bodies cannot become anything whatsoever. Environments offer limited possibilities. Earlier developments alter what later generations inherit. Constraint narrows possibility without necessarily determining outcome. Inherited conditions therefore shape the future without exhaustively specifying it. Novelty, agency, encounter, and contingency contribute to what becomes. This is the heart of GRR.
This distinction is important for Generative Relational Realism. Openness does not mean that anything can happen. Reality inherits what has already become, and every new actuality emerges within conditions it did not choose. Yet those conditions do not contain a fully completed future waiting to unfold. The future arises through continuing relations among inherited conditions, changing environments, responsive organisms, contingent events, and newly emerging possibilities. Evolutionary history is therefore neither an execution of a predetermined trajectory nor an unconstrained succession of accidents. It is constrained becoming within an open field of possibility.
This openness should not be converted too quickly into a hidden form of theological determination. A Christian may believe that God is present and active within evolutionary history, but evolutionary history itself does not demonstrate that apparently contingent events were secretly directed toward predetermined outcomes. To make that claim is to move from scientific description and philosophical interpretation into a further theological interpretation, and then to smuggle that theological conclusion backward into the scientific and philosophical descriptions from which it did not arise. Such a movement may be made as an act of faith, but it should be identified as such rather than presented as a conclusion established by evolutionary evidence. Otherwise contingency remains only apparent to mortal eyes, the open future becomes a concealed divine script, and church theology quietly restores the predetermined trajectory that evolutionary history gave us reason to question.
For relational theology, this creates a decisive question. If creation possesses a genuinely open future, providence cannot simply mean the execution of an eternally completed script in which every event has already been exhaustively determined. Nor need divine presence be reduced to divine control. The theological question becomes more demanding: what might God's faithful presence mean within a creation whose becoming is genuinely open, and openly consequential? God's relation to such a world must be considered within a history in which creaturely actions, natural events, contingent developments, and emerging possibilities contribute something real to what creation becomes. An unfinished creation would therefore require a theology of providence capable of taking its unfinishedness seriously.
We may therefore conclude within a relational restatement of theology that God's creation requires an open future where a divinely involved God does not predetermine the future, but works with every naturally occurring actuality towards further possibilities within God's own imagination of a relational reality. This then avoids the classical theology statement that says, "God leads creation by God's own predetermined ends" thus closing relational reality's future of genuinely-open-and-innumerable possibilities.
Thus and thus, God does not predetermine what the future must become, but participates within each newly becoming actuality, receiving what has become and working creatively with it towards further possibilities expressive of God's relational imagination. By these restatements, we can see that a truly relational theology creates a decisive question. If creation possesses a genuinely open future, providence cannot simply mean the execution of an eternally completed script in which every event has already been exhaustively determined. Nor need divine presence be reduced to divine control.
A relational theology instead understands God as faithfully and creatively involved within an open creation, receiving each newly actualized future as it becomes - and working within its inherited conditions toward further possibilities expressive of God's relational imagination.
Which means that God does not predetermine what creation must become, but neither is God merely an observer of its becoming. Divine participation within a relational reality continually engages what actually occurs - including contingency, creaturely agency, suffering, loss, novelty, and unexpected possibility - toward possibilities of greater relationship, healing, justice, creativity, and flourishing. An unfinished creation therefore requires not an absent God or a controlling God, but a relationally participating God within an unfinished future.
VII. Humanity as Continuous with Nature and Distinctive Within It
Relational emergence permits another understanding. Humanity remains continuous with earlier life. We share cellular organization, vertebrate anatomy, mammalian development, primate sociality, and evolutionary ancestry. Our emotional lives possess deep biological histories. Attachment, competition, cooperation, grief, play, caregiving, communication, and social learning did not suddenly appear in a species detached from every predecessor.
Continuity, however, does not mean sameness. Human capacities emerged through an unusual organization of bipedal movement, manual dexterity, prolonged childhood, cooperative care, enlarged and reorganized brains, language, symbolic representation, cumulative culture, and social memory. No single characteristic made humanity. Their interaction generated a new field of agency.
This movement from continuity toward novelty invites what might be called a biophilosophical exploration of evolution. Biology reconstructs how living forms developed and identifies many of the mechanisms contributing to their development. Relational philosophy asks a further question: what does the emergence of increasingly complex forms of responsiveness, organization, experience, agency, and eventually reflective consciousness suggest about the character of living reality? Evolution employs biological mechanisms, but evolutionary life should not therefore be reduced to a machine. Living organisms inherit conditions, maintain themselves through continuing exchanges, respond to changing environments, reorganize behavior, reproduce with variation, and participate in histories whose outcomes are not contained within a predetermined blueprint.
Purpose may likewise possess an evolutionary history. Primitive relational responsiveness need not already contain conscious intention, just as responsiveness itself need not already constitute experience. As living organization becomes more complex, increasingly integrated forms of agency become possible. Organisms maintain themselves, respond selectively to environments, pursue food or avoid danger, learn from experience, coordinate socially, and eventually, in some lineages, develop increasingly complex capacities for anticipation and choice. With human symbolic consciousness, purposes themselves can become objects of reflection. Human beings do not merely pursue ends; we can ask what ends should be pursued, criticize purposes inherited from earlier generations, and deliberately imagine purposes that have never previously guided our actions.
This suggests a developmental movement without requiring every stage to contain everything that later emerges: relation → responsiveness → constraint → organization → experience → increasingly complex agency → reflective consciousness → reflective purpose. The sequence should not be mistaken for a predetermined evolutionary ladder. Evolution did not have reflective humanity secretly contained within its beginning. Rather, inherited relations and constraints repeatedly opened and closed possibilities from which new organizations and capacities could sometimes emerge.
Humans became capable of inheriting not only genes and learned behavior but extensive symbolic worlds. Each generation receives languages, technologies, stories, rituals, institutions, moral codes, artistic forms, scientific knowledge, and religious traditions. We live within realities partly constructed by persons long dead. This cultural inheritance expands possibility while transmitting goodness and violence, equality and inequality, confidence and fear, reasonable common sense and distortion.
Humanity's emergence also creates an unusual relationship between evolutionary reality and conscious knowledge of that reality. We are not observers standing outside the history we investigate. The organisms reconstructing evolutionary history are themselves products and participants of evolutionary history. Human perception, imagination, language, reasoning, scientific instruments, and philosophical concepts have all arisen within the same natural history we seek to understand. This does not guarantee that our interpretations are correct. It makes continuing observation, testing, criticism, and correction all the more necessary. But it also means that evolutionary reality has produced participants capable of investigating their own becoming.
Human distinctiveness therefore entails responsibility rather than biological supremacy. We can reflect upon our inheritance, criticize it, and alter what we pass forward. We can understand evolutionary kinship and still destroy ecosystems. We can articulate compassion and yet, institutionalize cruelty. Our evolutionary capacities do not automatically make us wise.
Theologically, human significance need not rest upon exemption from nature. It may arise through intensified participation within it. We are creatures capable of recognizing something of the history that produced us and of becoming responsible for how our actions affect the future of other creatures, communities, and the earth itself.
VIII. From Special Creation to Continuing Creation
As different from an evolutionary understanding special creation traditionally imagines God producing the principal forms of life through discrete divine acts. Species appear according to established kinds, humanity arrives separately, and creation is substantially completed near its beginning. Evolutionary history displaces this account. Life diversifies through descent, variation, selection, drift, migration, isolation, development, ecological interaction, and extinction across immense periods of time.
Relational theology need not respond by removing God from creation. It can reconsider what creation means. Creation may name not only an original beginning but the continuing dependence, generativity, and becoming of the cosmos. God does not create merely by producing completed objects. God creates a relational reality capable of producing new relations, organizations, agencies, and possibilities - which is precisely how a relational reality becomes.
Such continuing creation should not be imagined as a biological machine whose future was completely engineered at its beginning. Evolution contains mechanisms, but the presence of mechanisms does not make evolutionary history mechanistically predetermined. Mutation, inheritance, developmental processes, selection, drift, migration, ecological interaction, and other natural processes contribute to what becomes without together constituting a blueprint specifying every future outcome. Evolutionary history displays structured becoming without a predetermined blueprint: inheritance supplies continuity, constraints limit and enable possibility, changing relations alter what becomes possible, and novelty arises through new organizations of inherited conditions.
Natural selection illustrates the distinction. Selection helps explain why some variations persist more successfully than others within particular environments, but selection operates upon variations and organisms that already exist. Evolutionary explanation therefore cannot be reduced simply to selection acting as though it were an engineer designing future forms. The continuing philosophical question concerns how inherited conditions, variation, development, organization, environmental encounter, constraint, and selection together participate in the arrival of forms that did not previously exist. Relational philosophy interprets this not as evidence of a concealed designer manipulating individual biological events, but as evidence of a reality possessing genuine generative capacity.
Continuing creation does not make evolution a disguised miracle in which God secretly inserts every mutation or determines every selection event. Such an account would retain exhaustive control while relocating it beneath scientific observation. Nor should God be used to explain gaps in present knowledge. As those gaps close, the theological God constructed within them would also recede.
Nor should continuing creation become another name for a divine blueprint hidden beneath evolutionary contingency. To say that God creates through evolution while maintaining that every evolutionary outcome was eternally specified merely relocates special creation from visible interventions to invisible determination. The biological history would appear open while remaining closed from the divine perspective. Relational theology instead takes evolutionary openness seriously. Whatever becomes enters into the actuality with which God and creation continue relationally towards further possibilities.
Relational theology therefore confesses God as intimately present throughout the whole history without competing with creaturely causes. Natural processes remain natural processes. Mutation remains mutation. Selection remains selection. Climate remains climate. Creaturely agency remains creaturely agency. Variation remains genuinely consequential variation. Contingency remains genuinely consequential contingency. Divine presence does not require these processes to become something other than what they are.
Creation is therefore not less divine because it has a natural history. Its generativity, complexity, freedom, vulnerability, and continuing emergence become the history within which divine creativity is confessed. Its capacity for novelty need not conceal a predetermined blueprint in order to possess theological meaning. The world need not be completed to be God's creation. It may be an open and evolving creation precisely as an unfinished relational becoming.
IX. Humanity, the Image of God, and Emergent Moral Agency
Because human distinctiveness emerged gradually among evolving populations, there was no scientifically identifiable generation in which parents lacked "the image of God" (Imago Dei) while their children suddenly possessed it. The biblical "image of God" should therefore not be treated as an invisible biological object inserted into the imagined first anatomically modern humans or identified with emerging intelligence or consciousness alone. Any account based exclusively upon cognitive capacity also risks diminishing infants, persons with disabilities, and others whose abilities differ from prevailing norms, while unnecessarily restricting theological significance to human forms of intelligence and consciousness alone.
Thus, it should be noted that other animals, or life forms, possess their own evolved capacities for perception, experience, communication, sociality, agency, memory, learning, emotion, problem-solving, and varying forms of intelligence. Many capacities once regarded as uniquely human have deeper evolutionary histories than humanity and appear in differing forms and degrees throughout the living world, realities which we are only now more fully rethinking within our sciences and civilizations.
Furthermore, humanity did not acquire its capacities independently of this larger history but inherited, reorganized, intensified, and extended capacities already developing within other forms of life.
Nor did humanity emerge from nature only to become separate from it. We remain embodied organisms dependent upon other organisms, ecological communities, atmosphere, water, soil, climate, and the material conditions of the earth.
Humanity is therefore not merely descended from the natural world but remains relationally constituted within, relationally dependent upon, and relationally becoming with the natural world we have evolved from and inhabit. Human distinctiveness therefore arises within our creaturely with-ness rather than apart from creation itself.
The distinction matters because Christian interpretations of human uniqueness have sometimes encouraged more than a simple theological separation between humanity and the rest of creation. When humanity is imagined as standing above and apart from the natural world, other creatures may easily become resources for human use rather than fellow participants within a shared community of life. Animals capable of perception, attachment, fear, pain, social relationship, and varying forms of consciousness may be treated primarily according to their utility to us. Forests become timber, rivers become water supplies, land becomes property, and ecosystems become resources, while their complex communities of interdependence disappear behind brutish categories of human use. A theology intended to affirm human significance can thereby contribute to diminishing the significance of the relational world within which humanity itself lives.
The same logic of separation can also become ethically dangerous within human communities. Once difference is interpreted through an overriding division between us vs. them, those outside the favored community become easier to rank, exclude, exploit, fear, or disregard. Human history repeatedly demonstrates how readily distinctions of race, culture, religion, nationality, class, ability, and identity can be transformed into hierarchies of belonging and worth.
Relational thinking moves in another direction. Difference need not require separation, and distinctiveness need not require superiority. Communities flourish through belonging, cooperation, reciprocity, responsibility, and care across differences rather than through the denial of them.
Evolutionary history therefore invites Christianity to reconsider not only where humanity came from - but how humanity belongs. We did not arrive within an otherwise completed creation as outsiders granted possession of it. We emerged from within its ancient relationships and remain interdependent upon those incorporating relationships.
The soil, atmosphere, water, microorganisms, plants, animals, climates, and ecosystems surrounding us are not merely an external environment in which an independently constituted humanity happens to live. These multivariant conditions participate continuously in the relational processes through which human life remains possible. Our evolutionary inheritance is therefore also one of ecological belonging: humanity becomes with a world upon which it depends and to whose future it increasingly contributes.
Relational Christianity thus is distinctive from its classical forms in that it consequently begins from "belonging rather than separation."
Relational philosophy understands beings as constituted through relations;
Relational theology understands creation and divine-creaturely life through those same realities of relation and participation;
Relational Christianity asks how such an understanding should be lived.
The totality of this comprehensive movement is therefore towards a more embodied and embedded participation within the world - not withdrawal from creaturely existence, elevation above other life, or identity constructed through opposition to those who are different - but deeper responsibility within the communities of life, humanity, and creation to which we already belong.
Yet a relational interpretation understands the image of God vocationally rather than as a separately created biological property. Humans image God through their developing capacities for relationship, creativity, moral responsiveness, care, justice, freedom, reconciliation, and participation in the flourishing of creation. We are to be generative as God is and as creation can be. These capacities emerged through biological, social, and cultural history, but their evolutionary emergence does not diminish their theological significance. Indeed, their emergence may deepen the meaning of human vocation: the capacities through which humanity exercises extraordinary power within creation also enlarge our responsibility for how that power is used.
Human moral agency may therefore be understood as another emergent development within relational becoming. Relational responsiveness need not already be moral responsiveness, just as responsiveness need not already be experience and experience need not already be reflective consciousness. As increasingly complex forms of experience, sociality, memory, anticipation, communication, and agency emerged, organisms became capable of increasingly consequential relations with one another. Within human symbolic cultures, purposes themselves could become objects of reflection: not merely what do we want? but what should we want, what should we do, and what kind of relations should we create?
Moral responsibility therefore need not have appeared instantaneously as a completed human possession. It can be developing even now in a deeper form or passion than when we first felt it eons earlier. It may continue emerging developmentally as human beings become increasingly capable of anticipating consequences, remembering obligations, interpreting the actions of others, preserving communal expectations, evaluating competing purposes, and deliberately altering their behavior. Though past civilizations have inhabited these qualities, perhaps the civilizations of the future will more willfully form-and-join towards greater enhancement and embodiment of these participatory qualities. Thus, evolution can again explain the conditions through which such capacities became possible without determining how human beings may subsequently respond in developing their organizational depth and value.
We might speculate from paleo-excavations that early human populations likely possessed varying forms of empathy, obligation, cooperation, conflict, ritual, memory, and social expectation. As language and symbolic culture intensified, communities became capable of narrating identity, preserving norms, interpreting suffering, honoring the dead, assigning responsibility, and imagining powers beyond immediate perception. Yet no single artifact proves the arrival of religion or morality. Burials, pigments, carvings, ornaments, tools, and ritualized spaces must be interpreted cautiously. Together, however, they reveal populations increasingly able to live within symbolic, religious, and moral worlds.
The image of God may consequently be understood as both gift and calling. Humanity possesses emergent capacities for relational participation, but those capacities remain incomplete and frequently distorted. In relational terms, we image God not through biological supremacy or domination but through responsible love - through the kinds of relations we create with God, one another, other creatures, and the future.
Human distinctiveness therefore need not mean human separateness, supremacy, or privileged entitlement - just as creaturely kinship need not erase meaningful difference. The theological question is not merely what characteristic humans possess that other creatures do not. It is what humanity will do with the extraordinary relational, symbolic, moral, and creative capacities that have emerged within us.
X. Adam, the Fall, and Sin After Human Evolution
Evolutionary history leaves no credible place for a single, recently appearing human couple from whom all humanity descends. Nor for a previously deathless ecosystem altered globally by their one solitary act. Human populations cannot be reduced to the simple biological arrangement required by traditional readings of Adam and Eve. Population genetics instead points towards ancestral human populations numbering at least in the thousands, with estimates varying according to the period and genetic evidence being examined. Even the popularly named "Mitochondrial Eve" was not a solitary first woman or the female member of an original human couple, but one woman living among a much larger population whose mitochondrial lineage happens to be ancestral to all living humans. Moreover, death, predation, disease, competition, and extinction existed long before humanity.
This does not make Genesis meaningless. It simply changes the kind of meaning Genesis can responsibly carry. Adam and Eve may be read as archetypal and theological figures through whom ancient Israel reflected upon human identity, moral awakening, desire, shame, mistrust, alienation, labor, sexuality, conflict, mortality, and estrangement from God.
In this reading, Adam and Eve are not merely two distant individuals but archetypal figures representing humanity awakening within relationship. Adam, the soil-man and earth-creature, expresses humanity’s embodied belonging to the ground, while Eve, named as the mother of the living, expresses kinship, generation, and shared life. Together their story explores relationship, vulnerability, desire, freedom, responsibility, and estrangement. It dramatizes something repeatedly true of human beings: we awaken within a world we did not create, receive freedom within limits, desire wisdom and control, damage trust, evade responsibility, blame one another, and experience alienation.
The Fall may then be interpreted not as one biological event transforming the laws of nature but as the recurring misuse of emergent human freedom. The same capacities that make love, cooperation, creativity, moral reflection, and responsible participation possible also enlarge humanity's capacity for intentional harm. As human agency became more complex, so did the capacity to injure deliberately, dominate systematically, preserve injustice culturally, rationalize violence symbolically, and transmit damaged relations across generations. Emergent moral agency therefore creates not only new possibilities for responsible participation but new possibilities for relational distortion.
Original sin need not mean inherited biological guilt from one ancestor. It may name the fact that no person begins morally from nothing. We are born into histories already marked by violence, fear, inequality, tribalism, exploitation, and self-protection. We inherit social worlds that form us before we can evaluate them. We then participate in those worlds, sometimes resisting their distortions and sometimes deepening them.
Sin is thus relational rupture. It damages relationship with God, neighbor, self, community, other creatures, and future generations. Evolution explains how human capacities emerged. It does not excuse what we do with them. Relational theology preserves moral seriousness without requiring a scientifically untenable account of human beginnings.
XI. Suffering and Death Within an Evolving Creation
Evolution unfolds through reproduction, heritable variation, differential survival, cooperation, competition, consumption, vulnerability, and death. Organisms obtain energy and material from their environments and from other forms of life. Predators kill prey. Parasites inhabit hosts. Diseases spread. Climatic disruptions alter or destroy habitats. Many individual organisms die before reproducing, and the great majority of species that have existed eventually became extinct.
Traditional theology often attributed suffering and death to the human Fall in Genesis. Evolution makes that explanation impossible as a natural history. Death preceded humanity by billions of years. Long before moral agency appeared, organisms aged, suffered injury, consumed one another, and disappeared.
This creates a profound theological difficulty. If God is real and creation is evolutionary, then suffering and death cannot be explained solely as punishment for human sin. Nor is it morally sufficient to say that every instance of suffering was individually planned according to a hidden divine purpose. Such an account risks turning God into the secret author of every disease, extinction, disaster, and agony.
Relational theology begins with creaturely finitude. To exist as an embodied organism is to possess limited capacities, occupy one place, depend upon other conditions, and remain vulnerable to change. A world capable of producing complex life through stable natural processes is also a world in which those processes may disrupt, injure, harm, and destroy. Tectonic activity contributes to a habitable planet while also producing earthquakes. Cellular replication permits growth while making cancer possible. Sensitivity enables pleasure and attachment while making pain and grief possible.
This does not solve the problem of suffering but it also prevents theology from solving it too cheaply. God may be understood not as determining every injury but as present within creaturely suffering, calling relations toward healing, companionship, resistance, adaptation, and renewed possibility.
Christian faith finds its clearest image of this divine solidarity in Christ. God is not confessed as remaining untouched beyond the pain of creation but as participating within vulnerability, suffering, and death. The theological task is not to justify every wound as necessary. It is to seek God within the work of healing what can be healed, resisting what should be resisted, grieving what has been lost, and creating possibilities for life beyond devastation.
XII. Providence and Divine Presence Without External Intervention
If evolutionary history contains genuine contingency, then providence cannot mean the concealed execution of an eternally completed script. To claim that every mutation, failed birth, disease, predatory death, extinction, climatic disruption, demographic collapse, and evolutionary development was individually predetermined would reduce creation's apparent openness to an illusion. Variation would remain variation only to creaturely eyes, contingency would cease to be genuinely consequential, and creaturely agency would contribute nothing genuinely new. Evolution would become the concealed unfolding of a fixed divine design.
Relational providence offers another account. God is faithfully present within every moment without unilaterally determining every outcome. Whatever becomes, genuinely becomes part of the actuality with which God and creation experience relationally together towards further possibility. Divine action may therefore be understood through relationship, invitation, possibility, empowerment, persuasion, companionship, and the continuing call towards life-giving forms of becoming. Natural processes and creaturely actions remain real contributions to history rather than instruments executing outcomes already exhaustively determined by divine design.
This does not make God passive. Presence is not inactivity. Love can be active without becoming coercive. A parent may guide without controlling every decision. A teacher may open possibilities without determining every thought. A community may sustain persons without eliminating their agency. Every analogy is limited, but they show why effective action need not mean unilateral control.
Nor does relational providence reduce God to one finite cause among others. God is not an invisible organism competing with natural causes inside the universe. Divine presence names God’s encompassing and sustaining relationship with creation, within which the world exists and becomes. God acts relationally within this faithful God-world relationship rather than periodically entering a world from which God is otherwise absent.
Miracle may then be understood as an extraordinary occurrence of healing, transformation, liberation, reconciliation, courage, or new possibility within relational reality. This does not require Christians to reduce resurrection to metaphor or to an unusually fortunate natural event. They may confess resurrection as a real divine act within relational reality while acknowledging that this confession is a theological interpretation rather than a scientific explanation of mechanism.
The essential claim is not that God does nothing. It is that whatever God does occurs relationally within the reality through which creation exists and becomes. Divine action does not suspend relational reality in order to act upon it; divine action participates within relational reality towards possibilities that remain genuinely consequential in their becoming.
XIII. God Within Evolutionary Becoming
Relational philosophy does not prove that God exists. Evolutionary science does not discover God as one more causal object among fossils, genomes, or ecological systems. It is Christian confession that makes the interpretive movement toward God, but a relational theology which makes that confession intelligible within an evolutionary and relational reality, asking what it might mean for God to be present to, participating within, and creatively related to a creation that is itself still becoming.
Once Christian confession makes that movement, its theology must remain consistent with the reality it claims to interpret. It cannot describe creation as relational while making relation optional for God. Nor affirm an open future while restoring exhaustive predetermination through providence. A relational God must be genuinely relational through-and-through rather than merely described with relational language while remaining unaffected, unresponsive, and externally controlling.
Having made this explicitly theological movement into relational reality, God may be confessed as the inexhaustible source-and-presence of relational possibility, the One within whom creation lives, and moves, and has its being as it relationally becomes; and the Divine Participant calling creation towards richer relational possibilities of communion, beauty, justice, healing, and love. This interpretation moves relational theology towards panentheism: creation exists within God, while God exceeds creation and cannot be reduced to the evolutionary process. God is therefore neither identical with the universe, as in pantheism, nor imagined as a distant engineer standing outside it. Divine transcendence need not mean remoteness; but it may name God's inexhaustible depth, possibility, value, and love within and beyond every created form.
Within this theological interpretation, evolutionary becoming may be understood as genuinely creaturely and genuinely held within God. Its contingencies are not illusions. Its losses matter. Its emergent achievements are not merely prewritten outcomes. God receives what actually becomes, responds within its newly actualized conditions, participates within creation's suffering and joy, and relationally opens further possibilities without requiring that those possibilities or their outcomes were predetermined beforehand.
Christians may interpret Christ as God’s embodied self-expression within this history. Incarnation does not require God to invade an alien material order. It expresses the depth of God’s presence within creation and reveals divine love through embodied relationship, vulnerability, healing, justice, forgiveness, suffering, and hope.
The God of relational evolution is not diminished because creation possesses agency. Divine greatness is disclosed not through totalitarian control but through inexhaustible relational presence and creative love.
XIV. Christian Faith, Evolutionary Kinship, and Responsible Participation
1 - Evolution changes more than Christian accounts of the past. It changes how Christians should participate in the present. If humanity belongs within an evolutionary community, then the rest of life is not merely scenery or raw material provided for human use. Other creatures are our distant relatives, companions in vulnerability, and participants in ecological relations upon which human life depends.
2 - Human dominion must therefore be reinterpreted as responsibility rather than entitlement. Our technological power gives us extraordinary capacity to alter habitats, extinguish species, change climate, redirect rivers, modify organisms, and reshape the conditions inherited by future generations. Power without relational responsibility becomes destruction.
3 - Evolutionary kinship also challenges racial hierarchy. Living humans belong to one young and extensively interconnected species. The genetic differences used socially to divide humanity into supposedly pure races do not support rankings of biological superiority. Every population carries histories of migration, encounter, adaptation, and mixture.
4 - Relational Christianity should consequently subject claims of racial superiority, biological purity, ancestral privilege, ecological entitlement, and human domination to sustained theological and ethical criticism. Evolutionary history does not by itself establish Christian ethics, but it undermines biological claims that humanity consists of divinely preserved or naturally superior isolated lineages. Christian judgments concerning dignity, justice, neighbor-love, and responsibility must then be made explicitly on theological and ethical grounds.
5 - Responsible participation extends beyond avoiding harm. Human beings can restore habitats, preserve biodiversity, reduce suffering, share knowledge, reform institutions, cultivate peace, and expand the possibilities available to others. Because the future remains open, action matters. Because the future is constrained, not every loss can be reversed. Extinction is permanent. Ecological thresholds can close possibilities once available to a biogeography. Social violence can negatively harm and shape generations of living individuals, communities, societies, and civilizations.
6 - Christian hope should not become an excuse for neglecting the world. If salvation means reconciliation, then it must include the healing of relations. If creation exists within God, then care for creation participates in love of God. If Christ calls humanity toward mercy, justice, and peace, then Christian discipleship must become materially visible in the worlds Christians help produce.
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* These observations are but a few resulting attitudes and behaviors that might follow when Christian faith understands humanity relationally within an evolutionary creation. They do not constitute a completed relational ethic, nor do they exhaust the possibilities of relational Christian participation. Rather, they illustrate a changed orientation towards the world: from separateness towards belonging, from entitlement towards responsibility, from domination towards participation, and from the preservation of privilege towards the generative creation of relationships in which others may also flourish.
Relational Christianity therefore asks not only what Christians should believe about creation, humanity, and God, but what kinds of relationships those beliefs should generate. If reality is relational, creation unfinished, and the future genuinely open, then Christian participation matters. The worlds we inherit are not simply the worlds we must preserve unchanged. They are also the worlds we receive, inhabit, repair, reshape, and pass onward. Christian faith becomes visible within that continuing becoming through the relations it chooses to nurture and the possibilities it helps make available for others.
To participate responsibly is therefore to become g-e-n-e-r-a-t-i-v-e within creation - not controlling what the world must become, but contributing towards what, together, it still may become - in the image of a relational God, Imago Dei.
Imago Dei is not what separates us from creation.
Imago Dei becomes how we participate generatively within it.
Conclusion: Becoming Human Within the Becoming of Creation
Human evolution is not merely a scientific problem requiring theological accommodation. It discloses a world of inheritance, relation, responsiveness, constraint, novelty, contingency, vulnerability, emergence, and unfinished possibility. Humanity arose within that world rather than being inserted from beyond it.
Relational philosophy interprets this history without replacing its scientific explanations. It recognizes that organisms become through constitutive relations, that species possess historically achieved identities, that novelty emerges through reorganized inheritance, and that increasingly complex forms of experience, agency, consciousness, and reflective purpose may emerge within relational becoming. Evolution employs mechanisms without requiring evolutionary reality itself to be understood as a predetermined machine. The future remains constrained by what has become without being exhaustively specified by it.
Relational theology then makes an explicitly theological movement. It confesses that this evolving reality is creation, that God is intimately present within its becoming, and that divine action does not require external intrusion, concealed predetermination, or unilateral control. Creation becomes continuing relational generation. Providence becomes faithful divine participation within an open future. Miracle becomes extraordinary grace within relational becoming. Revelation becomes divine encounter received through historical interpretation. Incarnation becomes God's embodied self-expression within creation. Salvation becomes healing, liberation, reconciliation, and participation in divine love.
Relational Christian faith need not fear evolutionary history. It should fear the consequences of refusing truth in God’s name. The fossils, genes, artifacts, landscapes, and ancient climates do not ask Christians to abandon God. They ask us to relinquish interpretations that require creation to possess a history it did not have.
Humanity is not evolution’s predetermined destination. Neither are we strangers abandoned within a meaningless mechanism. We are embodied participants in an unfinished creation, formed through relations we did not choose and responsible for relations we now help create.
To become more fully human is therefore not to escape our evolutionary belonging. It is to recognize that belonging, receive it with humility, interpret it truthfully, and participate lovingly in what creation may yet become.
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to live within creation
Bergström, Anders, Chris Stringer, Mateja Hajdinjak, Eleanor M. L. Scerri, and Pontus Skoglund. “Origins of Modern Human Ancestry.” Nature 590 (2021): 229-237.
Clayton, Philip. Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.
d’Errico, Francesco, and Chris B. Stringer. “Evolution, Revolution or Saltation Scenario for the Emergence of Modern Cultures?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1567 (2011): 1060-1069.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1871.
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray, 1859.
Deane-Drummond, Celia. Theological Ethics through a Multispecies Lens: The Evolution of Wisdom. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019-2021.
Edwards, Denis. The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology. New York: Paulist Press, 1999.
Green, Richard E., Johannes Krause, Adrian W. Briggs, et al. “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome.” Science 328, no. 5979 (2010): 710-722.
Haught, John F. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008.
Hublin, Jean-Jacques, Abdelouahed Ben-Ncer, Shara E. Bailey, et al. “New Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the Pan-African Origin of Homo sapiens.” Nature 546 (2017): 289-292.
Keller, Catherine. Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.
McBrearty, Sally, and Alison S. Brooks. “The Revolution That Wasn’t: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior.” Journal of Human Evolution 39, no. 5 (2000): 453-563.
McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
Meyer, Matthias, Martin Kircher, Marie-Theres Gansauge, et al. “A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual.” Science 338, no. 6104 (2012): 222-226.
Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015.
Peacocke, Arthur. Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming - Natural, Divine, and Human. Enlarged ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018.
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Scerri, Eleanor M. L., Mark G. Thomas, Andrea Manica, et al. “Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter?” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, no. 8 (2018): 582-594.
Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.
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The philosophical and theological works were chosen because they address becoming, divine action, evolutionary creation, ecological responsibility, suffering, openness, and relationality from differing but complementary perspectives. Alfred North Whitehead supplies the foundational process account from which much process theology developed, even though Generative Relational Realism differs from Whitehead by treating relation and relational responsiveness as primitive while understanding experience as emergent. John Cobb, David Griffin, Philip Clayton, and Thomas Jay Oord represent important developments in process, open, and relational theology. Ian Barbour and Arthur Peacocke model sustained engagement between science and theology. John Haught, Denis Edwards, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin interpret evolution theologically. Christopher Southgate confronts evolutionary suffering. Sallie McFague, Catherine Keller, and Celia Deane-Drummond extend relational thought toward embodiment, ecological interdependence, multispecies ethics, and planetary responsibility.
These authors do not form one school and do not agree on every philosophical or theological question. They were chosen because together they help distinguish scientific reconstruction from philosophical interpretation, illuminate the theological consequences of an evolving creation, and support the development of a relational Christianity capable of receiving evolutionary history without denying either responsible inquiry or faith in God.
| Field of inquiry | Principal question | Primary methods | Proper contribution | Necessary limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evolutionary science | Through what natural processes did living populations develop, diversify, migrate, interbreed, and become extinct? | Fossils, comparative anatomy, genetics, archaeology, geology, palaeoclimatology, dating methods, and population modeling | Reconstructs the biological history of life and humanity | Cannot determine by scientific method alone whether God exists or how evolutionary history should be interpreted theologically |
| Archaeology and palaeoanthropology | How did earlier humans live, move, adapt, create, and interact? | Material remains, fossils, artifacts, settlements, environmental reconstruction, and chronological comparison | Reconstructs embodied human existence across deep time | Surviving evidence is incomplete and permits differing levels of confidence |
| Historical scholarship | How did texts, traditions, communities, and institutions develop? | Textual criticism, source criticism, archaeology, comparative history, linguistics, and cultural analysis | Locates biblical and religious traditions within their historical worlds | Cannot independently prove or disprove every metaphysical or theological claim |
| Relational philosophy | What kind of reality is disclosed when entities emerge, endure, and change through relations? | Conceptual analysis, critical reflection, interdisciplinary interpretation, and metaphysical construction | Interprets relation, becoming, constraint, emergence, agency, and participation | Must remain accountable to evidence and may not dictate scientific conclusions |
| Relational theology | How may God be understood within a relational, evolving, and unfinished reality? | Theological construction, philosophical reflection, engagement with Scripture, tradition, experience, science, and history | Reconsiders creation, providence, revelation, divine action, suffering, hope, and participation | Does not convert Christian interpretation into universally compelled knowledge |
| Relational Christianity | How may Christian confession faithfully inhabit relational reality? | Worship, ethical discernment, communal reflection, prayer, Scriptural interpretation, and responsible participation | Confesses God and Christ within the world disclosed through responsible inquiry | Must not alter evidence, silence criticism, or require intellectual denial as a condition of faith |
| Christian confession | What does the Christian community choose to affirm about God, Christ, creation, redemption, and hope? | Faith, tradition, testimony, theological reasoning, and communal practice | Makes an explicitly Christian interpretation of reality | Should acknowledge itself as confession rather than disguise itself as scientific demonstration |
| Ethics and participation | How should human beings live within the world they inherit and help create? | Moral reasoning, historical awareness, empathy, communal discernment, and attention to consequences | Directs knowledge and belief toward responsible action | Must remain open to correction by those affected by its judgments and practices |
The movement among these fields may be expressed as:
Evidence → Reconstruction → Interpretation → Confession → Ethics → Participation
The relationship is reciprocal rather than simply linear. Ethical consequences may expose deficiencies in an interpretation. Historical scholarship may correct theology. Scientific discovery may require philosophical reconsideration. Religious experience may inspire new questions without determining scientific answers. Each field contributes to a shared inquiry while remaining answerable to its appropriate evidence, methods, and limitations.
Appendix BEvolutionary Evidence and Relational Interpretation
The following correspondences do not claim that evolutionary science proves relational philosophy or Christian theology. They show how evolutionary findings may be interpreted coherently within Generative Relational Realism and subsequently within relational Christian faith.Evolutionary finding Relational interpretation Possible theological significance Life possesses a deep history extending billions of years before humanity. Present forms inherit immense histories they did not create. Identity includes temporal inheritance. Creation may be understood as continuing generation rather than a completed event confined to an original beginning. Humans share ancestry with other living organisms. Humanity is constituted within biological kinship rather than existing independently of nature. Human creatureliness joins us to creation and need not be interpreted as separation from it. Humans did not descend from any primate species living today. Related populations emerge through divergence from shared ancestral populations. Human distinctiveness need not depend upon denying evolutionary continuity. Evolution branches rather than ascending along a single ladder. Reality generates plural developments rather than progressing toward one predetermined form. Humanity need not be imagined as the inevitable destination toward which creation was always compelled. Evolution occurs among populations inhabiting particular environments. Organisms become through relations with geography, climate, food, predators, disease, competitors, and communities. Creation is not a collection of isolated objects but an interdependent history of creaturely becoming. Species inherit structures from earlier populations. Novelty emerges through the transformation of inherited conditions rather than creation from nothing at every stage. Divine creativity may operate through continuity, possibility, and emergent transformation. Variation precedes selection. New possibilities arise before their future consequences are settled. The future may be genuinely open while remaining constrained by what has already become. Natural selection operates within changing environments. No trait is advantageous in isolation; its significance depends upon a field of relations. Creaturely value should not be reduced to permanent rankings of higher and lower life. Genetic drift, mutation, migration, isolation, and chance affect evolutionary outcomes. Becoming includes contingency as well as regularity and constraint. Providence need not mean exhaustive control or a predetermined historical script. Species boundaries develop gradually and may remain permeable. Identities can be real without being timeless, absolute, or wholly self-contained. Theological thought need not equate created order with permanently fixed biological categories. Different hominin populations coexisted. Human evolution was plural. Several forms of humanity occupied the world simultaneously. Humanity’s history cannot be reduced to a solitary lineage progressing inevitably toward ourselves. Some hominin populations interbred after diverging. Branches can separate, encounter one another again, and exchange genetic inheritances. Creaturely histories resemble braided rivers as well as branching trees. Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry remains within many living people. Extinct populations may persist relationally within later populations. Death and disappearance do not erase every contribution a life or population has made to subsequent becoming. Many hominin populations became extinct. Survival is contingent and does not establish moral, spiritual, or metaphysical superiority. Extinction must not be interpreted as divine rejection or evolutionary failure in a moral sense. Homo sapiens emerged gradually within Africa. Species emergence is distributed across populations, places, and generations rather than located in one instantaneous transformation. Creation of humanity need not require a single biologically isolated couple or moment of external intervention. Early Homo sapiens populations dispersed from Africa more than once. Migration may produce exploration, contraction, absorption, extinction, or renewed expansion. Historical outcomes remain open and cannot always be divided neatly into divine successes and failures. The principal enduring expansion beyond Africa occurred long after the earliest appearance of our species. Biological emergence and demographic expansion are different processes. No single date need carry the entire theological meaning of becoming human. Human capacities developed mosaically. Bipedalism, dexterity, enlarged brains, language, cooperation, symbolism, and culture did not appear simultaneously. Human significance may emerge through cumulative organization rather than being deposited fully formed.
Culture increasingly shaped human biological and social development. Humans became participants in constructing the environments that subsequently formed them. Moral agency involves responsibility for the relational worlds human beings create and inherit. Evolutionary reconstructions remain provisional. Knowledge develops through continuing responsiveness to new evidence. Intellectual humility is not a failure of faith but an appropriate response to an unfinished field of understanding.
*Editorial Insertion: After "Human capacities developed mosaically" -
Increasingly complex capacities emerged through evolutionary history.
Experience, agency, reflective consciousness, and purpose need not be primitive features already present in completed form; increasingly complex capacities may emerge through new organizations of relational responsiveness.
Human spiritual and moral significance need not require humanity to have been separately inserted into nature; theological significance may arise within evolutionary continuity.
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Evolutionary history therefore displays a recurrent pattern:
inheritance → variation → changing relations → constraint → selection → emergence → renewed inheritance
This sequence is neither mechanically predetermined nor without continuity. What becomes is enabled and limited by what has already become, while present relations generate possibilities not fully contained within the past. This pattern has been explored repeatedly throughout the Reality & Metaphysics series.
| Evolutionary finding | Relational interpretation | Possible theological significance |
|---|---|---|
| Life possesses a deep history extending billions of years before humanity. | Present forms inherit immense histories they did not create. Identity includes temporal inheritance. | Creation may be understood as continuing generation rather than a completed event confined to an original beginning. |
| Humans share ancestry with other living organisms. | Humanity is constituted within biological kinship rather than existing independently of nature. | Human creatureliness joins us to creation and need not be interpreted as separation from it. |
| Humans did not descend from any primate species living today. | Related populations emerge through divergence from shared ancestral populations. | Human distinctiveness need not depend upon denying evolutionary continuity. |
| Evolution branches rather than ascending along a single ladder. | Reality generates plural developments rather than progressing toward one predetermined form. | Humanity need not be imagined as the inevitable destination toward which creation was always compelled. |
| Evolution occurs among populations inhabiting particular environments. | Organisms become through relations with geography, climate, food, predators, disease, competitors, and communities. | Creation is not a collection of isolated objects but an interdependent history of creaturely becoming. |
| Species inherit structures from earlier populations. | Novelty emerges through the transformation of inherited conditions rather than creation from nothing at every stage. | Divine creativity may operate through continuity, possibility, and emergent transformation. |
| Variation precedes selection. | New possibilities arise before their future consequences are settled. | The future may be genuinely open while remaining constrained by what has already become. |
| Natural selection operates within changing environments. | No trait is advantageous in isolation; its significance depends upon a field of relations. | Creaturely value should not be reduced to permanent rankings of higher and lower life. |
| Genetic drift, mutation, migration, isolation, and chance affect evolutionary outcomes. | Becoming includes contingency as well as regularity and constraint. | Providence need not mean exhaustive control or a predetermined historical script. |
| Species boundaries develop gradually and may remain permeable. | Identities can be real without being timeless, absolute, or wholly self-contained. | Theological thought need not equate created order with permanently fixed biological categories. |
| Different hominin populations coexisted. | Human evolution was plural. Several forms of humanity occupied the world simultaneously. | Humanity’s history cannot be reduced to a solitary lineage progressing inevitably toward ourselves. |
| Some hominin populations interbred after diverging. | Branches can separate, encounter one another again, and exchange genetic inheritances. | Creaturely histories resemble braided rivers as well as branching trees. |
| Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry remains within many living people. | Extinct populations may persist relationally within later populations. | Death and disappearance do not erase every contribution a life or population has made to subsequent becoming. |
| Many hominin populations became extinct. | Survival is contingent and does not establish moral, spiritual, or metaphysical superiority. | Extinction must not be interpreted as divine rejection or evolutionary failure in a moral sense. |
| Homo sapiens emerged gradually within Africa. | Species emergence is distributed across populations, places, and generations rather than located in one instantaneous transformation. | Creation of humanity need not require a single biologically isolated couple or moment of external intervention. |
| Early Homo sapiens populations dispersed from Africa more than once. | Migration may produce exploration, contraction, absorption, extinction, or renewed expansion. | Historical outcomes remain open and cannot always be divided neatly into divine successes and failures. |
| The principal enduring expansion beyond Africa occurred long after the earliest appearance of our species. | Biological emergence and demographic expansion are different processes. | No single date need carry the entire theological meaning of becoming human. |
| Human capacities developed mosaically. | Bipedalism, dexterity, enlarged brains, language, cooperation, symbolism, and culture did not appear simultaneously. | Human significance may emerge through cumulative organization rather than being deposited fully formed. |
| Culture increasingly shaped human biological and social development. | Humans became participants in constructing the environments that subsequently formed them. | Moral agency involves responsibility for the relational worlds human beings create and inherit. |
| Evolutionary reconstructions remain provisional. | Knowledge develops through continuing responsiveness to new evidence. | Intellectual humility is not a failure of faith but an appropriate response to an unfinished field of understanding. |
*Editorial Insertion: After "Human capacities developed mosaically" -
Increasingly complex capacities emerged through evolutionary history.
Experience, agency, reflective consciousness, and purpose need not be primitive features already present in completed form; increasingly complex capacities may emerge through new organizations of relational responsiveness.
Human spiritual and moral significance need not require humanity to have been separately inserted into nature; theological significance may arise within evolutionary continuity.
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Evolutionary history therefore displays a recurrent pattern:
inheritance → variation → changing relations → constraint → selection → emergence → renewed inheritance
This sequence is neither mechanically predetermined nor without continuity. What becomes is enabled and limited by what has already become, while present relations generate possibilities not fully contained within the past. This pattern has been explored repeatedly throughout the Reality & Metaphysics series.
| Christian doctrine | Inherited formulation requiring reconsideration | Relational reinterpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Creation | God completed all principal forms of life through separate acts in a recent beginning. | Creation is the continuing relational generation of a cosmos in which new forms emerge through inherited processes, constraints, possibilities, and creaturely participation. |
| Divine action | God acts principally by intervening from outside natural processes. | God is relationally present within creation’s becoming rather than absent until supernatural interruption occurs. |
| Providence | Every event unfolds according to an eternally completed and predetermined plan. | Providence is God’s faithful presence, responsive participation, persuasive calling, and generative accompaniment within an open future. |
| Miracle | A miracle requires the suspension or violation of natural processes. | Miracle may name an extraordinary occurrence of healing, transformation, grace, or new possibility arising within relational reality. |
| Human origins | All humanity descends biologically from one separately created couple living several thousand years ago. | Humanity emerged gradually among evolving and interconnected populations possessing increasingly complex biological, social, symbolic, and moral capacities. |
| The image of God | The divine image was deposited instantly into the first human pair as a completed possession separating them absolutely from other life. | The image of God may be interpreted vocationally and relationally through capacities for love, responsibility, creativity, justice, communion, and participation in divine purposes. |
| Human uniqueness | Humanity is unique only if biologically detached from other animals. | Humanity may be biologically continuous with other life while becoming distinctive through language, cumulative culture, moral reflection, symbolic imagination, and conscious responsibility. |
| Adam and Eve | Adam and Eve must be the sole biological progenitors of every human being. | Adam and Eve may be read as theological and archetypal figures expressing humanity’s awakening to moral freedom, alienation, responsibility, shame, conflict, and mortality. |
| The Fall | One primordial act transformed a previously perfect and deathless biological creation. | The Fall may describe the recurring human misuse of emergent freedom within already vulnerable, mortal, and evolving conditions. |
| Original sin | Biological guilt is transmitted from the first human couple to every descendant. | Human beings inherit damaged relationships, violent cultures, self-protective tendencies, unequal institutions, and accumulated histories into which each person is born and within which each participates. |
| Sin | Sin is principally the violation of externally imposed divine commands. | Sin is the distortion and destruction of right relationship - with God, other persons, communities, other creatures, oneself, and the possibilities of the future. |
| Death | All biological death entered creation only after the first human sin. | Death preceded humanity by billions of years and belongs to evolutionary life. Human sin intensifies suffering and death but did not originate biological mortality. |
| Suffering | Every form of suffering must have been individually intended or permitted for a predetermined divine purpose. | Suffering arises through vulnerability, finitude, natural processes, creaturely conflict, chance, and moral wrongdoing. God participates in resistance, healing, companionship, and transformation rather than secretly requiring every injury. |
| Revelation | Divine truth arrives without mediation through culture, language, history, or human interpretation. | Revelation is divine encounter received, expressed, preserved, and reconsidered through historically situated human communities. |
| Scripture | The Bible provides an inerrant scientific and chronological account of natural and human origins. | Scripture records ancient communities interpreting their encounters with God through the cosmologies, narratives, moral struggles, and historical understandings available to them. |
| Incarnation | God enters a creation otherwise external to divine life. | Incarnation is God’s embodied self-expression within the relational creation that already exists through divine presence and sustaining love. |
| Christ | Christ’s significance depends upon rescuing humanity from a biological curse caused by one ancestral couple. | Christ discloses God’s relational character and calls humanity toward healing, liberation, reconciliation, justice, love, and renewed participation in divine life. |
| Salvation | Salvation principally removes inherited guilt so individuals may escape the created world after death. | Salvation is reconciliation with God, neighbor, self, creation, and future possibility; it heals distorted relations and redirects participation toward life-giving becoming. |
| Resurrection | Resurrection must be explained as an arbitrary exception imposed upon an otherwise abandoned material world. | Resurrection is confessed as a real divine act of transformative life within God’s continuing relation to creation, without requiring contempt for embodiment or nature. |
| Prayer | Prayer attempts to persuade an otherwise inactive God to intervene externally and alter a fixed world. | Prayer is genuine participation in God-world responsiveness through attention, lament, discernment, transformation, solidarity, and openness to new possibility. |
| Eschatology | The future is a completed script ending in the destruction or replacement of creation. | Christian hope anticipates creation’s healing and fulfillment while calling communities to participate responsibly in possibilities that remain genuinely open. |
| Human vocation | Humanity rules nature as a superior order created for its use. | Humanity bears intensified responsibility within a community of evolutionary kinship whose flourishing is interdependent. |
These reinterpretations are not produced by evolutionary science alone. Science supplies evidence concerning natural and human history. Christian confession makes the theological movement toward God. Relational theology then asks whether its confessional doctrines correspond coherently with the relational reality it claims God creates, inhabits, and loves.
