...to be is to be passible.  God is no exception to this rule.  God, should such an object exist, would be one being, one particularly complex multiple, that composes, is composed of, and is in interdependent relation with many other objects.  Like every other object, God would be available, passible, resistant, and graced by the unavoidability of hard work.

This last point about the link between grace and passibility is crucial to the experiment I've undertaken because it fundamentally reframes the problem of suffering.  To say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of passibility is to say that grace guarantees the universality of suffering.  Moreover, it is to say that the imposition of suffering (classically understood as the problem) and the reception of grace (classically understood as the answer to this problem) are equivocal....both sin and salvation turn on this equivocity.

However, whatever the nature of salvation, suffering, because it names the double-bind of resistant availability constitutive of every object, cannot be expunged.  To be is to suffer and, outside of classical theism, suffering must characterize both activity and passibility.  Available for relation, every object passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, repurposed, or redistributed by other objects.  Moreover, even in actively influencing other multiples, each object will suffer the only partially reducible resistance of those objects it means to influence.  And it is important to note that, because every object (God included) must also suffer itself.

This universality, though, is not simply bad news because suffering is the universal mark of grace.  Without exception, grace comes.  Suffering it to be so, grace is what enables us to act, think, feel, love, an be.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 80-81

None of this, of course, is a threat to the unique role and stature of The Church of Jesus Christ.  It simply reinforces the obvious notion that God loves all people and influences them through many channels.  I have come to see that as a Latter-day Saint I can allow the term "chosen people" to have no room for an elitest tinge.  The deepest meaning of this difficult term is revealed for me in the image of the Christ who washed the feet of His deciples.  Perhpas we are a people chosen to serve people.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 250) A Thoughtful Faith

Among the religious philosophies of the world, I can discover no completely universal answer to my question, "How am I to live with meaning and authenticity?"  However, the three responses that seem to come nearest are these: human beings are invited to love, to render service to their fellows, and to pursue the acquisition of knowledge...These three answers to my question resonate within; they "feel" true instinctively, like worthy answers.  Numerous prophetic figures have given varying emphases to these goals and have themselves pursued them with varying degrees of success.

Now through all of the conflicting claims and bewildering confusion on the planet earth, one knwn thing completely captures my soul and imagination as an actual, historical incarnation of "meaningful and authentic existence"--and that "thing" is Christ.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 244-245) A Thoughtful Faith

Whatever I am to make of this life, all human beings are in it together.  other persons and toher cultures must be valued by God; surely they matter no less than I.  Yet their beliefs and values in some ways conflict with mine.  I must deal with this.  I have a great bias toward my own local culture, but I become increasingly suspicious of it as I make contact with the wider world.  I grow wary of such terms as "chosen people."  I begin to understand that genuine truth may have many vantages.  My home town is less unique in God's eyes than I had assumed.  I learn and assimilate relativism.

-Philip L. Barlow, "The Uniquely True Church" (pg 243) A Thoughtful Faith