Specifically, Tanner's rules in speaking about a non-contrastive metaphysics help us express a both/and relation between God and human agency. As noted in our discussion of Tanner's rules, God is universally present and active in creation and human agency is wholly dependent upon God. And yet, this transcendence is so radically immanent that creaturely reality possesses its own creaturely integrity. Not separately or independently of God, but simply in its existence as a creature. The creature is wholly dependent upon God, yet is not God. In keeping with Tanner's two rules, the creature cannot be identified with God (pantheism) or be independent from God (deism).
Summarizing, creaturely reality has a logic and internal coherence within its domain. And yet, this domain is also wholly dependent upon God for its reality and existence. Here's how Tanner describes this in God and Creation:
The theologian talks of an ordered nexus of created causes and effects in a relation of total and immediate dependence upon divine agency. Two different orders of efficacy become evident: along a 'horizontal' plane, an order of created causes and effects; along a 'vertical' plane, the order whereby God founds the former. Predicates applied to created beings may concern what happens within the created order; they can be understood to hold simply within the horizontal plane of relations among created beings. Predicates of that sort say nothing about the vertical relation of a creature's dependence upon God. Ascribing them to created beings cannot run contrary, then, to our rules for talk of God's agency and the creature.
This is just the sort of both/and metaphysics we were searching for in January. Instead of God and the creature competing against each other within a single plane of being--where more of God means less of the creature, and more of the creature means less of God--Tanner suggests a two-dimensional model. The "horizontal" plane is our creaturely reality, our world of "created causes and effects." This is our material, empirical world. This world can be described and understood from within its material frame of reference. And yet, due to God's transcendence, there is also a "vertical" plane that intersects horizontal, creaturely reality. This plane represents the dependence of creatures upon God, the ground and founding of the horizontal as the horizontal. (Though the word "intersects" may be confusing as intersections occur at only one point. The better way to say this is that the vertical dimension intersects at every point of the horizontal.)
The point to be observed here, as Tanner points out above, is that any empirical description regarding how the horizontal, material plane relates to itself does not preclude God's presence and activity in founding and sustaining the creature in a universal and comprehensive way.
To be concrete, let's say we're describing the effectiveness of antidepressants or cognitive-behavioral therapy in mental health. Following Tanner's rules, just because these things "work" as "causes" within the material, horizontal plane doesn't mean God is not both active and present in those very causes and effects. God is, in fact, the ground establishing and sustaining the plane containing those causes and effects. The metaphysics here are not contrastive--God or medication, God or therapy. Rather, two dimensions are at work, the horizontal and the vertical--God and medication, God and therapy.
