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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/13/2006 9:46 AM (GMT -6) |   | Jeff: Help me understand, Tom, this toleration of evil in terms of relative meaninglessness. As I understand you, you say in one sense we're relatively meaningless to God. Got that. But in another, we ARE meaningful. Explain the difference in the two in your conceptual framework in a way where I can see why God's tolerance of young girls being slaughtered is intelligible. You started down that discussion in this thread but I never saw you tie it back to the meaningless/meaninglessness idea. So I don't really understand it, yet.
Tom: I’m not sure I do understand it. I mean, like you I’m clear on the sense in which we’re meaningless to God (where God’s aseity is concerned). And I’m clear on the sense in which God freely decides to create and engage us now. We matter to God. We’re valued by him. Great.
God’s tolerance of evil then only makes sense to me if there’s some beauty/good to be had in THIS life (premortem) which requires risking such evils and prolonging a world so overrun by them. I think you hit on that too. There are this-worldly factors related to God’s ultimate purposes that constrain providence (more specifically, that constrain or define the specific factors that will define when it’s time to initiate the final act in the Eschaton). I think the way you worded it works well: volitional suffering with Christ now yields a good, a beauty, so supreme (and one which is absolutely forfeited by postmortermers), that prolonging the present age in the hope of gathering more people into THAT is worthwhile. So God waits. However many more people end up in the postmortem half-way house doesn't matter. They'll all make it eventually. But what waiting does is produce MORE who volitionally suffer with Christ and increase the shared 'reign' of God among human beings.
I guess it works.
Tom
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 10/13/2006 10:34 AM (GMT -6) | | I think Alan's old post about intrinsic vs. extrinsic worth really clarifies this. I wish I had it handy right now. But the intrinsic worth is the sentient satisfaction (pleasure) attained by a volitional action. Something can have extrinsic worth if it contributes as a MEAN to that intrinsic value (i.e. pleasure).
So God's pleasure (derived from glory, beauty, or pleasing another--Christ) must be the intrinsic value that grounds God's purpose for creation. But that purpose always DID entail an evolutionary growth towards a FULLNESS. The FULLNESS is an object, but the evolutionary growth entails a kind of beauty in and of itself. Because that growth was to occur in a harmonious order that had all the attributes of a fine work of art, when viewed objectively. So we have, then, a teleological object of FULNESS as well as pleasure derived from the intermediate MEANS to that FULNESS.
When the Fall occurs (or sin in general), displeasure enters the picture. But we don't have to say that God so desired His own gratification from beauty or glory that He tolerated madness for it. Because God seemingly is in no need of glory at all. We can see hints in scripture like the verse that says God promised life before the ages. If this is true, the purpose of God may have been attended with a PROMISE to attain that purpose. And God cannot lie. So we can posit that God is compelled both by love and promise to attain the glory of Christ, which was a primary object of creation.
We are relatively meaningless in this sense. Because we are NOT the primary purpose of creation and hence have no absolute worth in this sense. But we eventually have, once we become part of that FULLNESS by entering the family of God, an absolute value for God. Until then, creatures have a kind of extrinsic and relative value as means to Christ's glory in the growth phase of creation. Christ's glory in creation is an absolute value because it IS the primary and dedicated purpose of creation.
This way, God's tolerance of evil was never intended even in some kind of "it's worth it" evaluative way. It is totally unintended and tolerated only as inevitable to attain a purpose which can truly be described as NOT "seeking one's own." We can truly posit that, apart from God's commitment to glorify Christ maximally, He WOULD stop the madness. In short, we can make sense of all this without positing two seemingly contradictory notions:
1) God is completely self-sufficient and needs nothing from creation.
2) God is so impelled by a disposition towards sentient satisfaction that He will tolerate madness to get it.
Don't those two, juxtaposed, seem a bit incoherent? What I'm arguing is that the plurality of the godhead buys us a relationality which can get us around this. I.e., the Father would NEVER tolerate madness ONLY for His own satisfaction, because He has no need for anymore satisfaction. Isn't that what's driving the main idea of this thread's title?
This also gets us around the dissettling sense of "rook for queen" activity amongst humans. If this activity is conditioned by a higher, primary loving purpose, it doesn't entail the seeming inequity of love. Since humans are not the PRIMARY objects of God's love with respect to the PURPOSE of creation, we don't have to see God's perfect love as being marred by inequitable experience of that love in "rook for queen" circumstances.
The other way around this is to say that Christ's glory is NOT the primary object of creation and, yet, perfect love is not experienced equitably even when volitional choices are identical. But that seems a bit problematic. Two people who make perfectly wise and enlightened LFW choices can experience radically different amounts of gratuitous suffering. Which again lands us back into what seems to amount to: Madness is worth it for God's pleasure. Surely we can find a way out of this.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 10/13/2006 10:58:56 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/13/2006 11:15 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
God’s tolerance of evil then only makes sense to me if there’s some beauty/good to be had in THIS life (premortem) which requires risking such evils and prolonging a world so overrun by them. I think you hit on that too. There are this-worldly factors related to God’s ultimate purposes that constrain providence (more specifically, that constrain or define the specific factors that will define when it’s time to initiate the final act in the Eschaton). I think the way you worded it works well: volitional suffering with Christ now yields a good, a beauty, so supreme (and one which is absolutely forfeited by postmortermers), that prolonging the present age in the hope of gathering more people into THAT is worthwhile. So God waits. However many more people end up in the postmortem half-way house doesn't matter. They'll all make it eventually. But what waiting does is produce MORE who volitionally suffer with Christ and increase the shared 'reign' of God among human beings.
Hmmm...
Think about the FREELY-CHOSEN emergence of God's "little images." If God wants the NUMBER of human beings to emerge from freely chosen activities of human beings...doesn't it stand to reason that God is going to hold out this thing until there is a genuine chance that humanity will annihilate itself? If an extinction level event were to occur such that all human life is extinguished, then God's glorification in human beings will be at a STOP at that point.
If God wants to have as many FREELY-CHOSEN human beings come into existence as possible...for the purpose of having more being to eternally be unified with, God will WAIT while humans "fill and subdue the earth". And this makes PERFECT SENSE of God's command to multiply.
Doesn't this provide what you are looking for? A plausible reason WHY God is waiting so long?
"All is full of love." -- Bjork
"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." -- 1 John 4:16b
"God is most glorified in us as we are most satisfied in God's all-loving nature." -- the newest mantra of the Evangelical Universalist :) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/13/2006 12:23 PM (GMT -6) | | Jeff:
Alright, Namaste, now you're saying something that I can see more clearly with your starting point. But let's say that humans, because of LFW, never become extinct. What if the tower of Babel story is true and man will be able to do all things that come into his mind if he is unrestrained? What if this means that man's technology will allow him to colonize the whole universe? Or what if there ends up being a managed population CONTROL policy that allows indefinite existence? Can creation conceivably continue indefinitely with evil, to your mind, so long as their is any beauty at all in it?
God will know when the 'tipping point' hits, with respect to human population vs. technological or atmospheric disaster. That's all we need to know.
"All is full of love." -- Bjork
"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." -- 1 John 4:16b
"God is most glorified in us as we are most satisfied in God's all-loving nature." -- the newest mantra of the Evangelical Universalist :) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 10/13/2006 12:42 PM (GMT -6) | | | That's why putting Christ's glory as primary really does buy us something. Otherwise, we can't even explain why God wouldn't allow this mixed bag of pleasure and suffering to go on forever. The idea of Christ's temporal reign of glory explains WHY gratuitous suffering must be tolerated and WHY it has an expiration date.
The gratification of beauty, alone, can't explain the temporality of divine tolerance of suffering. In fact, it seems to demand that God would tolerate it indefinitely because of the superior aesthetic satisfaction it provides. Somehow God's LONGsuffering (vs. INFINITEsuffering) has to come into play to account for the temporality of divine tolerance of gratuitous suffering. But this means that God is truly forebearing, enduring, and SUFFERING because of this temporal aspect of creation.
But if it's all relatively meaningless to God, how can it really occasion any significant suffering for God? I would say the creational project IS meaningful because it's FOR His beloved Son. And that's why He is willing to significantly SUFFER over it--knowing, of course, that His purpose will prevail because of His competence. In the end, it will have been worth it for all concerned. But we ALL, including God, suffer from it in the short run because of the Fall.
IOW, there is no beauty going on right now at the human level that justifies the tolerance of the madness (which causes God suffering). It is the FUTURE joy that even Christ looked to (the joy set before him, per Hebrews) that justifies the suffering of God, Christ, and man. But this is just another way of saying that prolonging the project really buys something for Christ, and hence, God. If nothing else, it gives more historical occasions for divine revelatory events (which contribute to Christ's glory) and more time for augmenting the number of brethren Christ will have.
The bottom line is, when we say that God sees more or better beauty in the complexity of suffering in this probation period than in the post-mortem state (because of its less complex LFW possibilities), we sound like we're saying that God ONLY gives up on the current scenario because He had to (because of extinction or something). As if God would have PREFERRED the current scenario with all of its gratuitous suffering. The scripture seems to suggest just the opposite--that God is looking FORWARD to the future and suffering now because that future is what makes it WORTH that suffering. And this is easier for my mind to grasp, when it contemplates perfect love.
This does not involve a contradiction with UR. UR is grounded in God's essentially loving nature and the effectualness of the atonement.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 10/13/2006 1:41:58 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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