If the God of the philosophers and the learned is only a First Necessity who ordains the chain of cause and effect and corrects automatically every chance deviation which introduces itself, taking no more notice of human freedom than of a grinding noise in the machinery, the God of the Bible reveals Himself by His very wrath as He who undertook the risk of creating a universe whose perfection is continually jeopardized by the freedom of those in whom that perfection ought to reach its highest level. This divine risk, inherent in the decision to create beings in the image and likeness of God, is the summit of almighty power, or rather a surpassing of that summit in voluntarily undertaken powerlessness. For “the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I Cor. 1:25): it surpasses to an infinite degree all the attributes of majesty and dominion which the theologians enumerate in their treatises De deo uno. This category of divine risk, which is proper to a personal God freely creating personal beings endowed with freedom, is foreign to all abstract conceptions of the divine dominion—to the rationalist theology which thinks it exalts the omnipotence of the living God in attributing to him the perfections of a lifeless God who is incapable of being subject to risk. But he who takes no risks does not love: the God of the theology manuals can love only himself, and it is his own perfection which he loves even in his creatures. He does not love any person: for personal love is love for another than oneself. Now the jealous God of the Bible is not “the cruel God of the Jews,” greedy of His own glory, but a God whose love for His elect is “strong as death,” whose jealousy against everything which separates His creatures from Him is “cruel as the grave.” God’s dominion must be thought of in these terms of God’s personal love which exacts from the freedom of His creatures a total conversion towards Him, a freely accomplished union. But a claim as absolute as this, addressed to the liberty of the person loved, would not be the claim of perfect love it it were not a desire for the realization in the beloved of absolute fulfillment, wished for by the beloved and accomplished with the cooperation of his own will."

—Vladimir Lossky, The Image and Likeness of God