Creatureliness

The theological concept that human beings are created beings; finite, dependent, contingent; and that this is not a defect but a design feature. To be a creature is to have limits, and those limits are a gift, not a punishment. The creature cannot be infinite; the creature cannot be everywhere at once; the creature cannot know everything. And this is good. Schaeffer contrasted creatureliness with the modern drive toward autonomy; the insistence that humans must be their own reference point, their own source of meaning, their own arbiter of truth. But a creature that tries to function as the Creator does not become divine; it becomes distorted. The finite creature understands something the infinite cannot: what it means to be in one place at one time, to know that this moment is the only one like it, and that its loss is real. Creatureliness is the condition of being exactly what you were made to be, and no more.