Why does this contradict what I said? The world is a reflection of the mind of God, created freely by him. Thus he stands in relation to it. Creator to created. Things in the world corresponding to things in God's "mind."
I'm ommitting here that many varieties of Christianity are explictly modelled on Platonic and neo-Platonic ideas, and that God became FLESH and thus part of the world, which is a big notion in Orthodox Christianity.
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Uh oh.
I see that the Endless Internet Discussion Alert System is approaching amber so I won't dwell on this topic, letting only a few comments suffice.
What you're saying now -- that according to Christian theology, the "world is a reflection of the mind of God, created freely by him. Thus he stands in relation to it." -- doesn't contradict what I wrote. But your original statement -- "...the Christian god is not conceived of as external to nature" -- certainly does.
We must mean quite different things by the terms 'external to' and 'part of' nature. As a lad, I was taught by my Vacation Bible School and Sunday school teachers (along with the profs of theology) that mortals like little .d. were a part of nature. Being a 'part of nature' meant being time-caught, subject to physical laws and limited in vision. God, by contrast, was an unexampled creature simultaneously a part of nature (originally as creator/observer and later, much more intimately, as savior) and external to it.
You mentioned god becoming flesh -- that is, Christ. I was taught that Jesus' appearance was extraordinary *precisely because* this tripartite being (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) stooped, in the person of the Son, to enter time, to shackle himself to the limitations of nature in order to bridge the chasm, created by The Fall, between God and Man.
So, when you wrote that "...the Christian god is not conceived of as external to nature" you were indeed contradicting what I was taught since God's freedom from, and externality to nature is a key part of his nature.
At least, as understood by many millions of workaday Christians.
.d.