Can God need the world? It sounds like a simple question. It isn't. If God is complete in himself, what are we to make of a theology that says creation, Incarnation, and deification are not afterthoughts (not divine improvisations) but somehow internal to who God eternally is? And if they are internal to God, does that mean God requires the world to become himself? That evil, suffering, and the Cross are not only what God overcomes but ingredients in divine self-realization?

David Bentley Hart and Jordan Daniel Wood are not enemies. They share more than they dispute. But the pressure point between them is real, and what's at stake is nothing less than whether the God revealed in Christ is the whole truth of God. Or whether there is always some hidden God behind Christ, safely untouched by what happens on Golgotha.

One distinction tries to hold the tension together: creation is internal to God's eternal intention, but not constitutive of God's eternal identity. Whether that distinction survives — Christologically, Trinitarianly, pneumatologically — is what my essay tries to find out.