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Two things are important to note here. The first is that God’s creation is by the word in relation. “The Word was with God and the Word was God” stresses the Trinitarian nature of creation. The fellowship between the persons of the Trinity, what some have called the perichoretic dance, is inter-reception, which involves motion or action. Because God is love, God is interactive in the Godhead. Creation ex nihilo is a production of their active, expanding, and plentiful fellowship: the Trinity’s love creates. When the Trinity’s love expands outside of the Godhead and God creates, the fellowship extended to creation does not subsume the creation into the Godhead, but rather, expands God’s love outside of himself. As Athanasius writes in Contra Gentes, “[H]e envies nobody’s existence but rather wishes everyone to exist in order to exercise his kindness.”[3]
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