Is Eru God?

[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

There is a reason trumpeted loudly throughout the Bible why God created it all. He wanted creatures to love and to be loved by. Everything, absolutely everything originates and hinges on this most central aspect of who God is, according to the Hebrew and Christian traditions. This is NOT way off topic because precisely the same motivation is to found in Eru. Why else does anyone create anything? For the sheer love (and joy) of seeing the thing do what it was meant to do, which in the case of God/Eru, was delight in all that is/was/shall be..

My own understanding (& I think this comes through perhaps more strongly in the Legendarium than in the Bible) is that God creates because it is in His nature to create. God is a creator, that is His essence: He creates because creating is what He does.

Of course, He may have other aspects which we don't know of (can't ?? know of) but in terms of His relationship to us (as creatures) He is primarily our Creator, & its difficult to know/experience Him as anything else.

That said, He is also a destroyer of what He creates (in certain circumstances).

So, God (& Eru) creates not so much out of a desire for something to love (which implies a deficit or lack in God) but because He (being a Creator) can do no other - its kind of spontaneous with Him. Hence we're not told anything about Him pre-Creation.

Which is not to say that He doesn't do other stuff as well - its just that the only aspect of Him that we can know, the only 'relationship' we can have with Him is the Creator/Created one.