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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/8/2006 5:33 PM (GMT -6) |   |
TGB said...
We live in time by changing and becoming. God lives in time without such becoming.
Tom wrote: God lives in time without such becoming.
PoW: I've read from very good sources just the opposite, to the effect that
God does NOT live in time, but IS "Becoming."
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/8/2006 5:49 PM (GMT -6) | | |
D.:
KRONOS is an experience of time where there is change and becoming of that sort.
KAIROS is an experience of time where there is no change and becoming...just CONSTANT BECOMING-COME-BEING.
(Dynamic equilibrium...Movement without change.)
TRUE KAIROS only takes place in the Uncreated. (The necessary essential existence of God)
KRONOS can only take place in the Created. (The contigent expressive existence of God where NON-DIVINE REALITY take place)
PoW: So far so good.
And... this leads us to consideration of Adam and Eve, who without the almost inevitable fall could have grown more and more into participation in grace, becoming -- trying to say as little as I can here -- in their own kairos the image of God.
D: But God IS process. KRONOS and KAIROS are two forms of process.
PoW: Here's where you uncharacteristically have your logic break apart.
D.: Bruce, I think that Tom just wants to CLEARLY ARTICULATE that without SOME form of temporality in God's necessary being that there would BE no possible non-divine contingent expressions at all.
PoW: Assumes facts not in evidence. (Like being divine...one of the Trinity. Where's this perspective come from? Are we God?) Tom even said: "...tell me WHAT the unacceptable consequences of such a divine experience would be.") Its a bad habit if you think we need to imagine -- or feel able to imagine -- what being God is like, or what 'logically' extends from there.
.
After your post about "rest," D., I'd expect differently. Rest is NOT inactivity. Being does not exclude becoming.
The arguement that Tom unfortunately is fond of assumes that those limitations are in force: that rest iisI inactivity, etc. But THOSE ideas are not those of the Church Fathers. And they didn't make things up. And neither need we.
(o)Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 12/8/2006 4:54:08 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/8/2006 6:48 PM (GMT -6) | | POW:
After your post about "rest," D., I'd expect differently. Rest is NOT inactivity. Being does not exclude becoming.
I don't think that I ever said that rest is inactivity. Well, maybe I miscommunicated. I don't believe that rest is merely inactivity. And I definitely don't believe that there is "inactivity" in God.
Love, bro! 
"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 love." -- the newest mantra of the Evangelical Universalist :)
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Tom
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| Posted 12/9/2006 7:34 AM (GMT -6) | | POW: But THOSE ideas are not those of the Church Fathers.
Tom: We're free to disagree with the Fathers.
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POW: But becoming does not require temporality.
Tom: I can just 'state' the opposite, but we're looking for argumentation and reasons. Can you give me some analogy of "atemporal becoming" that will help me give meaning to this description of God?
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POW: Then to say -- as you [Namaste] seem -- that creatures could not have "contingent expressions" without God being in tremporality......... that's not logical at all.
Tom: It certainly seems logical to a lot of people.
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POW: God is becoming, without being temporal.
Tom: Does not compute. Has no meaning. Does not compute. Has no meaning. Does not... 
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POW: Not being temporal does not make for in-activity. Logic, then, says that being active, for God, does not require temporality.
Tom: Logic says that? What logic? Can you spell it out step-by-step for me?
Tom
PS Namaste, I can get with pretty much everything in your last post.
Post Edited (TGB) : 12/9/2006 7:22:48 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 12/9/2006 7:59 AM (GMT -6) | | How did we go from an argument for universalism (the original post of this thread) to debating TIME? Interesting.
But going with the flow, let me post the relevant comments from Safe Haven's "Process and Creation" thread that I mentioned to Namaste. You have to search to find it.:
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OK, onto why, how, and in what sense I see God being necessarily temporal.
(1) One reason relates to the nature of ‘potentiality’. I’ve been impressed by Whitehead in this regard. Potentiality is an attribute of actuality. Another way to say it would be to say potentiality is a dispositional reality. It is realities which might become this or that, and those capacities for becoming define the actualities themselves. But it seems obvious to me that this entails temporal existence (since becoming be defintion entails change and time). If an actuality might become this or that, it has a future. It's having a future defines it's potentiatlity. Do the math. If God sans creation grounds potentiality. If God IS unrealized potentiality sans creation, then God sans creation has a future. But what's that mean? It's nonsense (to my mind) to say of any atemporal actuality that it "has a future" or that it "might become this or that." Thus, time and potentiality presuppose each other. If God were atemporal sans creation, he could not possess unrealized potentialities, in which case he couldn’t create. He could never get off the dime.
(2) This can be expanded into semantics. For any actuality (keeping in mind that actuality grounds truth value; actuality being that in virtue of which a proposition is true or not) that has potential, i.e., that has a future, it would be the case that this actuality grounds a future-tense truth. But future-tense truths are grounded in temporal realities or tensed states of affairs. Think about it. One needs tensed states of affairs to ground tensed truths (since truth supervenes on being). But if God is atemporal sans creation, there can be no tensed states of affairs. And if there are no tensed states of affairs sans creation, there are no tensed truths. And if there are no tensed truths sans creation, there are no truths positing potentialities, i.e., what actuality might become--i.e., no potentialities. Potentialities are tensed states of affairs. That's what I'm saying. And if you're going to say God exists atemporally sans creation, you destroy all sans creational potentialities and hence have no way to get to creation. You need time.
(3) Thirdly, and lastly, there’s the question of how to incorporate temporality into divine aseity. God sans creation would be in process, constantly changing but remaining unsurpassably intense with respect to loving sociality. How’s that done? Wouldn’t time and change amount to God’s either being less or more lovingly social and intense as time goes by?
I don’t think so. Here’s how I’m doing it. God is infinitely creative. And his creativity is part of what constitutes his beauty and in turn determines the intensity of his experience. Let us view God as being in process, not the God-world process of Whitehead and Hartshorne but a Trinitarian process along the lines of Doc’s reconstruction of CH. OK?
There’s a beauty to actual love as actually communicated. But there’s a beauty to change as well, to anticipation of love. Such anticipation contributes to, heightens, the intensity of experience. Why, oh why, should this be denied God? And don’t we have a deficient view of him if we view him atemporally even if we suppose he’s locked in at “peak” intensity? Suppose the same insurmountable intensity can be had through a slightly different realignment of posture? Perhaps the perfection of beauty that is God takes ‘creativity’ seriously. I mean, takes in into account in the definition of aseity, of God himself. Creativity isn’t just exemplified in the God-world relationship. It’s exemplified in the God-God relationship. If God is infinitely creative, then there are infinitely many ways, postures, God can perceive himself via Trinitarian relationships. Do the math. If you have THREE you can multiply out to anything else. Perhaps the self-sustaining beauty and goodness of God is to be found in the ongoing process of Father, Son, and Spirit expressing relational love and beauty in creative process, posturing themselves with respect to one another in unceasingly novel ways, every one of which is different but no one of which is more or less perfect or intensely beautiful. It is pure Platonic assumption to think that such change would require a decrease or increase in aesthetic beauty or experiential intenstity.
I suck at assemblage, but you get the idea.
Tom
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I’m not suggesting that there’s a 100% turnover to God continuously, i.e., that everything about who and what God is constantly changes. That’s not even true of us temporal beings. Keep Whitehead’s comments about process in mind. There’s change but continuity. God is maximally personal, loving, knowledgeable, etc., but these attributes subsist (I hate language sometimes; as soon as you found a word that ‘includes’ what you want you end up ‘excluding’ other things you want, but anyway…) continuously in a process of trinitarian reposturing (I’m making that word up). What I think I mean by posture here is ‘ways God reflects upon and relates to and expresses himself to himself’. God gets off on how many different ways he can view himself in the mirror. This doesn’t involve a deficiency of beauty IF the beauty God enjoys just IS God’s own creativity and personal novelty. If (a) there’s beauty to be had in creativity, novelty, and anticipation, and (b) God is self-sufficiently beautiful, then (c) the beauty of creative novelty and anticipation have to abide in God by definition. An atemporal God would be deficient in beauty. There’s enough continuity in God to maintain an individual identity (as triune of course), but there’s enough process to maximize the beauty of creative expression.
This is the only way I can see to maintain that creation really is unnecessary and free. The categorical beauty found in creation and novelty WOULD demand a necessary God-world relationship (as process claims) if God is necessarily beautiful and if there's a unique categorical beauty to creative novelty. To avoid a necessary God-world relationship and still maintain that God actualizes every possible beauty (and creative novelty IS its own category of beauty that can only be had by temporal process), the beauty of creative novelty has to be an inner trinitarian reality that defines God. But that would require a temporally eternal God.
Tom
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I wanted to quickly comment on what I think a good ‘model’ for a temporally eternal God would be. It kinda takes off from Vincent Brummer’s Speaking of a Personal God and his The Model of Love.
The model is ‘dance’. Think of ‘dancing’. Think of God as a ‘dance of love’. Applied to God, the model suggests that a relationship that involves a dialectic of individualities with enduring identities (Father, Son, and Spirit) engaged in a dance (a process) of love that amounts to an unchangingly and unsurpassably intense experience of love—the perfection of importance (to use Whitehead’s phrase). That intensity and perfect enjoyment is unchanging in the sense that it never fluctuates between ‘more’ and ‘less’ intense experiences of beauty and loving sociality. This is analogous to the ‘issue’ (Whitehead’s term again) of process. But dancing also involves constantly changing. It’s an intensional and interpersonal pursuit of creative reposturing, and this creative novelty is a beauty in its own right and is part of what constitutes God’s enjoyment of loving relationality. The triune God is the eternal dance of love.
Of course, ‘dancing’ is just a ‘model’, so like all models it’s the map and not the territory. But it expresses well the source and manner of ‘change’ that you’re looking for to explain how God is eternally temporal. The answer is, he’s dancing. It’s what he is and what he likes to God and he doesn’t get tired of it!
I’m in process on all this too. But I think the atemporal model undermines what’s really at the heart of this ‘maxed out intensity’. The atemporal model retains some truth. Certainly there are unchanging aspects to God. But that model pictures God’s experience of himself as perceiving himself in a mirror so to speak. Something of the truth about the actual object is reflected, yes, but it’s two-dimensional. It misses what’s most importantly understood about God as loving and personally relational (I think), making God out to be an sort of unblinking cosmic stare. The ‘dancing’ model on the other hand retains those unchanging aspects (enduring triune identities, unsurpassably intense experience of beauty, maximal knowledge, etc.) but views these all as engaged in a, well, a dance (as it were). Again, the ‘anticipation of beauty’, that movement, is a beauty in its own right, a beauty an atemporal God could not experience.
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 12/9/2006 9:12:03 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Starkman
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| Posted 12/9/2006 9:25 AM (GMT -6) | | Can we say it this way, though I think Bruce will still disagree...
God is always God; He cannot change, thus, He is the only one in the arena of karios;. It isn't that there is no kronos (sequencing) within the Trinity - indeed, there would have to be, or, as Tom had said, "If God were atemporal sans creation, he could not possess unrealized potentialities, in which case he couldn’t create. He could never get off the dime." Only God "dwells" in karios, but to do so requires kronos. Not calculated solar system kronos, but sequencing.
The aspect of God being independent and not subject to anything but His own aseity is karios.
The aspect of God being able to reveal Himself via His economies is chronos.
Hence, as N. has said, "Both of you are saying TRUE, important things that DON'T ULTIMATELY contradict each other.
Both/and, gentlemen. Both/and."
Starkman
My teacher used to say that whenever he read Scripture, he would always ask the question, "What does this have to say about the character of God?" Working off his thinking, as I read Scripture, I have come to ask, "What does this have to say about the heart and passion of God's desire for relationship with us? | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/9/2006 10:11 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 12/9/2006 10:13 AM (GMT -6) | | Good stuff, Tom.
Wow. A DANCE, huh? Seems to fit to me. 
"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 love." -- the newest mantra of the Evangelical Universalist :)
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2006 12:06 PM (GMT -6) | | Jaroslav Pelikan
From the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite the devotees of contemplation had learned that God is not only beyond all existing realities, but beyond essence itself; and thus they had come to the true meaning of deification.
(p.10, Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 2))
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2006 12:17 PM (GMT -6) | |
TGB said...
Can you give me some analogy of "atemporal becoming" that will help me give meaning to this description of God?
Godel reminded us that everything (except God) has something outside of itself.
The matter at hand, Tom, is not determined the way you are going about it. And can't be. No one can determine it experientially except God. (Neither can you disprove what so many before you have said!)
But there IS something that can be said. There IS an experiement that has been being run for a long time. And the report on that tells us something of the nature of the project that God has been working on; which is deification. (Read Pelikan's vol. 2 on that, in the first chapter.)
Logic is only as good as the facts it works with -- we must work with the correct facts.
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2006 12:28 PM (GMT -6) | | D.,
Go back and look at the propensities of East and West as per essence vs. person. Tom's perspective of defining everything from a logical growth from time is "western" in that way, defining God's essence by linking it with time. "Eastern" wisedom avoids that, and does not create a problem that needs solving.
As appears to us (alla Lossky or Yannaras) both essence and person appear" to us simultaneously -- speaking in the economy. But Pelikan's comment should be consulted in the end. It is very, very wise.
- B.
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One Love
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| Posted 12/9/2006 12:50 PM (GMT -6) | | POW:
Tom's perspective of defining everything from a logical growth from time is "western" in that way, defining God's essence by linking it with time.
Hmm...
Tom is not defining everything from a logical growth of sequence, and defining God BY THAT.
Think about it, B.
The only reason why "sequence" even exists is BECAUSE of the Eternal "procession" of the Son and Spirit from the Father.
PERSON (MIND) comes first, B. Not TIME or SEQUENCE.
PERSON (MIND) comes before BEING.
The PERSON of the Father, the Primordial Hypostasis of God.
So, Tom is NOT trying to say that God is subject to time. All he is doing is METAPHYSICALLY describing the RAMIFICATIONS of the eternal act of God. Because of how the Father, Son, and Spirit interrelate, THERE IS SEQUENCE AND TIME.
Time COMES FROM God's ad intra enteral activity!
God is NOT subject to time. Time is OF GOD.
When we say that God is the EXEMPLIFICATION of all metaphysical truth...we are in some way saying that all metaphysical truth COMES FROM God. Because God IS Truth, Beauty, and Right-relatedness.
How about this, B?
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.
Therefore (YOU) go and introduce all peoples into the Way, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and intstructing them in following everything I have commanded you. (Great Commandments!)
And surely I am with you always, even to the very end of the age."
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2006 1:04 PM (GMT -6) | | Two things, D. (became three)
First, I'm not sure that Tom is with you in all that -- doesn't seem so.
Second, when you yourself say "NOT trying to say that God is subject to time. All he is doing is METAPHYSICALLY describing the RAMIFICATIONS of the eternal act of God. Because of how the Father, Son, and Spirit interrelate, THERE IS SEQUENCE AND TIME." you may be, yourself, more western than eastern.
Finally, Tom would see more in this quote than you mean it to say.
So...... I've provided you with a few accurate quotes, in these few threads, that you can compare yourself to more than just me, or Tom. *My_job* is to give clear navigation points. (Not to be the navigator; and definitely not an expert.)
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One Love
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| Posted 12/9/2006 1:11 PM (GMT -6) | | Hmmm...
Let's say this...to clarify.
The quality of MIND necessitates the idea of POSSIBILITY...which implies the reality of SEQUENCE.
MIND and SEQUENCE exist together...but it is from MIND that sequence actually occurs and is grounded.
That's why I put priority on MIND.
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.
Therefore (YOU) go and introduce all peoples into the Way, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and intstructing them in following everything I have commanded you. (Great Commandments!)
And surely I am with you always, even to the very end of the age."
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Tom
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| Posted 12/9/2006 1:20 PM (GMT -6) | | Oooo doggie! Yeeeeah.
Exousia (summarizing Tom): God is NOT subject to time. Time is OF GOD.
Tom: Precisely.
POW (to Exousia): First, I'm not sure that Tom is with you in all that -- doesn't seem so.
Tom: I am with D in all that. He sees my point.
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POW: Second, when you yourself say "NOT trying to say that God is subject to time. All he is doing is METAPHYSICALLY describing the RAMIFICATIONS of the eternal act of God. Because of how the Father, Son, and Spirit interrelate, THERE IS SEQUENCE AND TIME." you may be, yourself, more western than eastern.
Tom: Drop the labels B. Who friggin cares whether it's East or West? If the West agrees with what we're saying, good for the West! If the East agrees, good for them. If not, they'll live.
POW: Finally, Tom would see more in this quote than you mean it to say.
Tom: D's quote, "NOT trying to say that God is subject to time. All he is doing is METAPHYSICALLY describing the RAMIFICATIONS of the eternal act of God. Because of how the Father, Son, and Spirit interrelate, THERE IS SEQUENCE AND TIME," looks pretty straightforward and accurate to me. I don't see any room for me to sneak in something D didn't intend.
Tom
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One Love
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| Posted 12/9/2006 1:22 PM (GMT -6) | | In my thoughts...
Deification is in being in the LIKENESS of the Divine Mind. Being a person who totally in truth, beauty, and right-relatedness...and lives in CREATIVE REASON....at all times.
This is why True Christlikeness is SANITY and FREEDOM.
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.
Therefore (YOU) go and introduce all peoples into the Way, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and intstructing them in following everything I have commanded you. (Great Commandments!)
And surely I am with you always, even to the very end of the age."
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PotOnWheel
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| Posted 12/9/2006 1:29 PM (GMT -6) | |
TGB said...
POW: Second, when you yourself say "NOT trying to say that God is subject to time. All he is doing is METAPHYSICALLY describing the RAMIFICATIONS of the eternal act of God. Because of how the Father, Son, and Spirit interrelate, THERE IS SEQUENCE AND TIME." you may be, yourself, more western than eastern.
Tom: Drop the labels B. Who friggin cares whether it's East or West? If the West agrees with what we're saying, good for the West! If the East agrees, good for them. If not, they'll live.
Lets not rant: using friggin.
(I wasn't addressing you anyways.)
Tom, you are responding to my message to D. It was D who was making careful observations and inquiries using those categories, to possitive gain. I'm simply continuing conversation along that line. And also presenting comparisons that are meaningful when laid out in clear comparisons.
So, no, when labels help then we will use them.
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