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It just makes sense once we think about it.

SK talked about ANXIETY and how anxiety was NOT the same thing as despair.

But...

We never talked about the CONTEXT in which ANXIETY takes place.

It's in the context of FREEDOM OF ACTION amid AMBIGUITY.

The POSSIBILITY of rightly OR wrongly interpreting reality.

The reason WHY anxiety (and despair) are even POSSIBLE is because there is a context of FREEDOM IN THE FACE OF AMBIGUITY from whence those phenomena can emerge.

Maya.

:)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/1/2007 4:52:35 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/1/2007 5:20:22 AM (GMT-6)

Hmmm...the Revealedness and Hiddenness of God...

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/1/2007 8:30:05 AM (GMT-6)

PART III(C): Dispositional accountability

I'm floundering here. Let's see where this goes.

So, we have what human being is (freely self-disposing centers of personal relationality who perceive and actualize value and experience this in terms of aesthetic satisfaction (a satisfaction in every possible respect—physical, rational, emotional, etc.). Simply put, we’re designed to love and be loved. We also have what relating (loving) and misrelating (not loving) amount to.

Let’s talk about the consequences of misrelating.

I’m just tossing this our with little or no argumentation. I’m still thinking on this too. But given the dispositional nature of human being and becoming, the consequences of misrelating would include the erosion of dispositional capacities. This amounts to a loss of “self.” When we attempt to establish our meaning, value, and sentient pleasure at the expense of others, we essentially deny ourselves. We just ARE relators, centers of relationality. That’s human being. When we MISrelate, we MIShuman (as a verb). We miss being human.

Consider the full dispositional range of human being, that is, all that we’re able to become. We’re finite, yes. But we’re designed to grow, to become, into our full potential. And who knows what that might be? Far more than we can imagine. As we dispose Godward in love and to others, we solidify Godward; our capacities are enlarged and strengthened and the intensity of aesthetic satisfaction increases.

As we dispose away from God in misrelating, however, the opposite happens. Our capacities are eroded and weakened and the intensity of satisfaction wanes. The dispositional range of possibilities turns in on itself. The result—despair. The possibilities narrow because WE narrow. We increasingly apprehend less and less, misperceive more and more.

Let’s bring in some other things.

1) The impossibility of irrevocably self-disposing inward—total solipsistic existence. I’m thinking of 2Cor 3.17 (which remains to be debate). We cannot exist if God does not sustain us. God cannot sustain us with being present in/to/with us. And I’m concluding that that none of this makes sense if it’s also true that we continue eternally as utterly, irrevocably, and hopelessly lost. It seems to me that wherever God is God introduces at least a minimal measure of freedom to whatever reality he is present to. So the idea that the dispositional range of human being could collapse to zero is a metaphysical impossibility. I don’t know how to PROVE this.

2) Let’s also upload everything we’ve been saying about self-disposing and the consequences of rightly and wrongly relating into a biblical eschatology. That is, we’re embodied in a probationary context wherein we’re determining what sort of beings we become. But there’s a definite demarcation coming—the “end” shall come. And life on earth before that and life after than are different in ways that really matter to this whole dispositional thing. For example, there HAVE to be consequences to misrelating. You can’t misrelate without eroding your capacity to relate, narrowing your dispositional range of possibilities, and decreasing aesthetic satisfaction. Those HAVE to have. But that’s not all biblically speaking. When you set this all in an eschatological framework, the “already/not yet” of the NT, the consequences of rightly and wrongly relating get divided into “already/not yet” aspects too. I think this is something we’ve been overlooking. We’re saved now. We’re blessed now. We experience God’s presence now. Yes, but the real party is yet to come. There is an eschatological consequence to present right relatedness. Similarly, we’re lost now. We’re solidifying inwardly now. We pay the price in terms of despair now. Yes, but the real hell is yet to come. There is an eschatological consequence to present misrelatedness.

I’m offering this. There’s nothing God can do to prevent the immediate consequences of misrelating in this life. That’s the nature of dispositional reality. We mediate between possibility and actuality. And there’s a metaphysical integrity to causation. We can’t mismediate possibility and not bring into being a corresponding actual misrelation. Not even God can prevent this. He can’t heal this by interrupting the causal link between possibility and actuality. That’s GOT to play out. God heals this, it seems to me, by mediating new possibilities into new actualities that embrace the existing misrelations. God doesn’t go backwards to fix things. He can only go forwards.

3) Lastly, I was thinking yesterday again about WHY we must be atoned for. I mean, if I’m (a) a freely self-disposing being, and (b) I cannot utterly self-dispose my “self” into irrevocable conscious solipsism, then why am I not a complete Pelagian? It should be the case that I’m able at any point in time to begin with the freedom I have and work my way back to the full range of possibilities I was created for. And the ability to do this resides in ME, in MY dispositional reality. So what is it about dispositions and relationships that makes it impossible for me to find my way home without God? Why do I NEED grace? Why am I not MYSELF able, apart from such grace introduced, to right all my wrongs?

There’s a sense in which we are free to find our way home. But as I looked over previous posts it dawned on me that I’ve been talking about the “value” and “beauty” as if these are some kind of abstract metaphysical principles that we’re relating to and actualizing (or not). If that was the truth of it then one could argue that since this value is always within our reach, then salvation is something WE accomplish.

But let’s take the “personal” aspect of all this relationality seriously. It seems to me that “value” (or “love” or “beauty”) only exists in and through personal relationships. Apart from persons, there is no value. Value is just the meaning that some object or person has to another object or person. That is, value is the meaning that God has to me, that I have to God, that you and I have to each other.

So it’s not just a matter of exercising our freedom with respect to some abstract NOTION of value or beauty. That’s not what we self-dispose toward or away from. It’s some PERSON that we self-dispose toward or away from. And the history is always there, so that the way out of despair and dispositional closure is along the SAME history. All misrelation is misrelating with respect to some person or persons. You only get healed of the consequences of that be rightly relating to THOSE persons. That’s why apologies work they way they do. If I misrelate to Jeff, I don’t heal the situation by apologizing to Greg. See? I guess what I’m saying is that the way home for misrelating, privated, despairing persons is through rightly relating, yes, but more specifically, through firstly rightly relating TO OUR MISRELATING, that is, to our history, through confession, through facing the truth about the past, and if possible through facing that truth in the presence of the persons I devalued, including God.

So Pelagians are right AND wrong. We are free to make the right choices the consequence of which is our salvation. But those choices must be to rightly relate to the right persons. It’s not that salvation is the consequence of valuing value or of the mere fact THAT we chose right. No, salvation just is right relatedness TO GOD. Yes we’re free to self-dispose Godward. But it’s more significantly the “Godwardness” of our choice that constitutes our salvation. And rightly relating means acknowledging the truth—about ourselves, about God, about Christ, etc.

I’m rambling on. I don’t think I’ve really answered my own question—why GRACE? If I’m always dispositionally free on some level, then why is GRACE necessary? I think Finney would just say that grace isn’t necessary, that’s WHY it’s grace. I think this misses the point. Grace can be necessary to our choosing our way home but not necessarily offered to us at all. We may not deserve to find our way home, but if we are, then it is necessarily by means of grace. Why is that?

Tom

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/1/2007 3:34:01 PM (GMT-6)

You said it, Exousia. I was getting ready to come on and say the SAME thing right now: Grace is dispositional empowerment. I was just gonna say that grace is the enabling presence of God. Same thing.

Here’s what I was doing. I was viewing grace as God’s free response to sinful humanity, seeing grace only in terms of God healing and restoring us, as if sinful persons were the only persons that required grace. But that view leads us to limit the need for grace to restoration.

But it seems obvious now that grace is not most fundamentally God’s response to sinful humanity. It’s God’s response to CREATURELINESS, period. It’s not as though we come to need God’s grace after we misrelate. Relating rightly requires God’s grace as well. All creatures require divine grace. But this means we have to view grace in terms of “enablement” or “empowerment” and not just as “treating people as the don’t deserve.” True, we don’t deserve this or that, but that’s doesn’t get to what’s at the heart of grace, which is our dependence upon God’s empowering presence as creatures. We were never meant to function rightly apart from the infusion of divine empowerment. That’s the more fundamental point about grace, not just God’s helping sinful beings who don’t deserve God’s help.

Also, this means God’s grace, understood as God’s enabling, empowering presence, is free and contingent in the sense that God need not have created at all. But once God creates, once creatures come into being, God loves necessarily. Creation is an underserved and free gift. But God’s enabling presence in creation is an expression of the essentially loving nature of God. There’s no question about whether God is free to not love creatures, no matter how freely loving or how hardened into despair. God is libertarianly free to create or not. God is not libertarianly free to love creation or not. Grace is just the empowering love of God.

This applies to human self-disposing. We are dependent upon God’s enabling presence at all times, whether it’s moving from one rightly related state to another rightly related state or whether it’s moving out of misrelatedness into right relatedness. Grace isn’t just God helping undeserved sinners. It’s God’s enabling creaturely becoming. We’re not self-existent. We need God.

Tom

PS Are we in a position to start talking about what forgiveness and unforgiveness mean in dispositional terms? I'm going to begin by assuming these both are compatible with divine love and grace unconditionally extended but conditionally effectual.

Post Edited (TGB) : 2/1/2007 3:43:23 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Exousia) : 2/2/2007 7:45:44 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (TGB) : 2/2/2007 7:55:43 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (TGB) : 2/2/2007 7:56:46 AM (GMT-6)