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Asher
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Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 477
| Posted 4/10/2007 3:15 PM (GMT -6) |   | Amen! And because this is true, the concept of hell must be reworked in the light of love.
God is love. Love never gives up. How about something like this:
In this present age, although resistance is futile (in an ultimate sense), men do resist. But they have to use God's resources to resist God. They have to use their grounding as the ground to fight against their grounding. But God respects their free-will and presently allows them to use His own resources against Himself. Men evade God by using God's own grounding of themselves in love. But something changes at the eschaton...
God disallows His resources from reinforcing men's delusions. And men are left with who they are, who they have become internally as their only resources for continuing to evade God and His love. This is hell because men will burn themselves up in their attempt to continue evading God. They will not find reinforcement from other men, from books, from mass media...they are left with their own thoughts, emotions, etc. to resist God. And as time moves forward for them they begin to deteriorate, they become less than who they are in their state of active turning away from God.
But God does not leave them alone to this state of self-hell. Hell is not the absence of God, hell is the intensification of the presence of God. God, as it were, locks Himself alone in a room with the man who tries to evade Him and His love, and showers love on that man. If a man continues trying to evade God then God's very love increases the man's deteriorization. The man deteriorates on two fronts...his own being is no longer reinforced in it's evasion of God and God's love gives direct display to the lie that evasion is based upon. As the man deteriorates, he is left with less and less self-resources to resist God's love. He can choose God at any moment and stop the deteriorization of his self and be reconciled to God and to love. In the furthest extremities a man is stripped by himself of all his own resources to continue to resist God, he reaches an Omega point, perhaps similar to the consciousness of an embryo, and then bounces back the other way, toward self development and toward God and His love who is constantly present to foster the bouncing back consciousness.
So the process might look something like a funnel, where the rim of the funnel (representing a person's self-resources to evade God) gets smaller and smaller as you approach the Omega point at the bottom of the funnel. Far better to turn to God and stop your evasion toward the top of the funnel, letting your being be reconciled to God, but God will never give up on you no matter to what extremities that takes you and Him.
OK, anyone want to fine tune this, or declare it totally unworkable?
RobPost Edited (Asher) : 4/12/2007 1:38:34 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 4/10/2007 7:30 PM (GMT -6) | | Rob: In this present age, although resistance is futile (in an ultimate sense), men do resist.
Tom: Women resist too!
Rob: Hell is not the absence of God, hell is the intensification of the presence of God. God, as it where, locks Himself alone in a room with the man who tries to evade Him and His love, and showers love on that man.
Tom: Oooooo.
You know, in his "No Exit" Jean Paul Sartre describes his version of hell as being locked in a room with other people (thus his famous "Hell is other people") unable to sleep and without any eye lids. Yep. You couldn't close your eyes to escape other people's being aware of all you had ever done and who and what you truly had become.
Take other people out and put God in and you've got something. Hell is being locked in a room with JUST God and yourself. Oh my goodness.
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 4/11/2007 6:53:10 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Sahid
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| Posted 4/11/2007 1:59 AM (GMT -6) | | How does the idea of love built on free choice jive with God locking people in rooms? There are people who have a legitimate beef with maybe not God but at least the circumstances of their existence: kids in Darfur for example. If such a person chooses not to exist, how is divine love based on the free choice of both the lover and the beloved demonstrated by denying this most fundamental choice? It seems to me that unless God allows humans the ability to make choices which cause them to "surely die," denied freedom would be the foundation upon which all God's action is built. Now I know that there must be some sort of limitation to human freedom, but the choice of existence I take to be essential to any further conception of freedom. Whether or not we can fly or bend spoons with our minds is a question of a particular freedom, but whether or not we exist is the one choice upon which all our other choices are built. For God to create free creatures out of love he must give them existence (which is necessary for any exercise of freedom) and also give them the choice to continue their existence or not (without which all choices might devolve into bad and worse from the point of view of the chooser). Without allowing this ability God becomes a being who submits all to his will regardless of what they might otherwise freely choose. After accepting such a conception of God, why bother with the open view? The one choice with infinitely more moral and existential weight than any other is already forced upon us.
Also, in the real world God has given humans the ability to end their own natural lives. Fittingly, the first choice posed to humans was the choice to live or die.
So if someone hates being in a locked-from-the-outside-by-God hell, what if they ask to be released? Does God ignore this person's free will until he or she capitulates to his? Does he say, "Nevermind what you want; I know what's best for you"? Is this what we have in mind when we talk about love? Sounds more like a torture scene from an action movie. These are the tactics of those who killed the martyrs.
If it weren't for its issues with freedom, universalism would be beautiful and appealing to me. In fact it is still appealing to me in some ways. It is a beautiful hope, and I do share the hope that all will be saved. But I can't support a theology which claims the inevitability of that happening. It's just a more cleverly disguised soft determinsm. It denies the freedom to make the one most supremely crucial choice at its most fundamental level: Do we accept what God has willed for us?
Watch me fly. Freedom like wings and I will use them. Freedom like wings and I will spread them wide. - StavesacrePost Edited (Sahid) : 4/11/2007 2:14:38 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 4/11/2007 9:29 AM (GMT -6) | | "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
"Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
"Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I may be in them."
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One Love
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| Posted 4/11/2007 10:35 AM (GMT -6) | | | Complete, unconditional, loving submission to the Spirit of God is the only source of genuine freedom that exists in this beautiful struggle of a world.
When you become nothing, you gain Everything.
"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be One, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be One as we are One— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete Unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."
Post Edited (One) : 4/11/2007 10:38:43 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Asher
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Total Posts : 477
| Posted 4/11/2007 12:06 PM (GMT -6) | | Sahid,
We are already locked in a room with God, it's just that there are lots more people in the room with us that allow us to hide ourselves in the shuffle and in the maze of our own mind. In the eschaton God separates the man who is hiding from Him and says, "Have you been avoiding me? Why have you been avoiding me? Come and let us reason together." And I am still saying that that man CAN continue to avoid God, it would be equivalent to staying silent toward God and ignoring His entreaties. But that man will start disintegrating, this is why it's hell. The man has the freedom at any point to start listening to God or to not. God is respecting the man's freedom. And why is it that this man is not turned towards God to start with? At some point in his development he has misrelated to reality, to God, to love, to his own grounding...God is just allowing that man to disintegrate back to the point of misrelation. Everything built on a foundation of sand (misrelation) is washed away, and the man is brought to a point of honesty between himself and God, with all lies stripped away. I can't actually imagine a case wherein someone must disintegrate to the Omega Point before he starts to relate to God in honesty, but to account for the most extreme instance the Omega Point shows to what extremities God is willing to go in His love for us.
Once the onion is pealed back to the point of misrelation (and I understand how infinitely complex the situation is, there are probably multiple points of misrelation, but in the extreme, if we have to go back to an Omega Point to find a stable place for God to interact honestly with a person then that's what God will do)...once the onion is pealed back to the point of misrelation, that person no longer has the objections to God that they would have had at an earlier point that caused them to desire annihilation instead of relation to God.
So, no, God loves that person too much to allow that person to choose annihilation based on misinformation, a lie. Are you wanting to posit an instance in which a person reaches their point of misrelation, a stable place of honesty, with lies removed, and say that a person can at that point choose annihilation instead of relation to God? I can't understand that at all, it's incomprehensible to me.
Rob | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 4/11/2007 12:23 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Rob, are you somebody else I know using “Rob” as a front? Come on now.
Rob: In the eschaton God separates the man who is hiding from Him and says, "Have you been avoiding me? Why have you been avoiding me? Come and let us reason together."
and
Rob: Once the onion is pealed back to the point of misrelation (and I understand how infinitely complex the situation is, there are probably multiple points of misrelation, but in the extreme, if we have to go back to an Omega Point to find a stable place for God to interact honestly with a person then that's what God will do)...once the onion is pealed back to the point of misrelation, that person no longer has…
Tom: I’m cool with this, except that I don’t think people immediately perceive the truth of their situation in terms of God’s saying “Why have you been avoiding me?” Of course, none of us knows HOW hell works, but it seems to me if we’re going to take free choice seriously, that means taking the effects of choices seriously, which in turn, I think, means the fire doesn’t instantly bring people to perfect clarity. That’s perhaps part of the point in using “fire” as a metaphor. It takes time to do its work. Eventually however, I think people are brought to a point of clarity.
But…and this is where D and I went around and around (and might still go around), however clear things become, some ambiguity is necessary to constitute the sufficient context in which free choice is possible.
Talbott doesn’t like this, but I think he’s wrong. He feels ANY ambiguity at all (at least in a post-mortem context) renders freedom impossible. Actually, he doesn’t think persons in hell make free choices anyhow. Greg MacDonald goes this route. In the end, God makes the choice for people. He determines them (by means of constructing a context in which agents have no recall but to choose God). I don’t have all the answers, but I can’t get with a notion of hell that means persons are left with absolutely no way of making a meaningful rejection of God. THAT’S what accounts for the fact that the mathematical possibility of UR is not 100% but rather 99.99999999999%.
And now here comes One to explain it…
Tom
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Asher
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Total Posts : 477
| Posted 4/11/2007 1:28 PM (GMT -6) | | Hey Tom,
Yeah, I don't think we have a disagreement at all.
"the fire doesn’t instantly bring people to perfect clarity"
Agreed, hell is not an instantaneous solution that God works, but it is God entering into our lives exactly where we are, at that point, ready to take on our vitriol, enter into our ambiguity, get His hands dirty. For however long it takes.
"the mathematical possibility of UR is not 100% but rather 99.99999999999%"
I'm not in disagreement with this per se, I'm just locked securely in hope that God knows how to add .00000000001%
without man losing his freedom. But looking at it from this side of things, I don't know how that would function and I won't argue for it, I just live in shear hope.
"a meaningful rejection of God"
Can one make a meaningful rejection of meaning? I'm just asking...
Rob | | Back to Top | | |
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Sahid
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Total Posts : 2013
| Posted 4/12/2007 1:19 AM (GMT -6) | | One: We have the freedom to utterly bring ourselves to ruin spiritually before ultimate redemption(I like the "Omega Point" idea from Asher)...but that's not enough for us. We need to be able to COMPLETELY eliminate our own dispositional existence in order for human freedom to be genuine. Is this what you are saying?
Zach: Yes, that's what I mean. If God determines the context of our existence, then the only way to perserve freedom is to allow the individual a sort of veto. Why can't God allow us to say "No thank you" and decline to participate? Is that so unreasonable? Otherwise, he has created us locked into a situation where freedom is only allowed within his groundrules; this is not the consequence of freedom-grounded love. It is divine control within which certain provisions are given.
I do, however, agree completely with your radical view of oneness with Christ "for those who will believe in" Jesus. It is because I hold to this view of oneness that I feel relationship with God should not be construed as taking place with a background of divine domination. If we are to be one with the Son as the Son is one with the Father, how can we at the same time view freedom as only occuring within the boundary of coercion? If we do so we must also say that the Son's relationship to the Father is the potentially forced result of the Father's backing the Son into a corner. I tend to see the Father/Son relationship as mutually chosen harmony with no security walls or funnel needed.
Rob: We are already locked in a room with God...
Zach: I disagree. There is no proof of this, but there is instead circumstantial evidence which hints at just the opposite. The first choice given to man was the choice to live in harmony with God's will or to perform an action which would lead to his sure death. In our natural existences there are many who take their life. God, being omnipotent, must be allowing such action. Now none of this speaks directly to post mortem decision making, but I think it does tell us something about God's character. Until I see evidence to the contrary I think I must stick with the idea that since God allows people to terminate existence in this world, there's a good chance he will allow the same in the next world. I do hope that the deceased will be allowed to make a more informed choice after death, but I don't see why a loving God would lock up people who simply want to be left alone. Maybe properly informed people will never want to be left alone by God. If this turns out to be the case, there is no need for God to lock them up in the first place.
(EDIT: Actually, I can see why God might lock them up if some sort of purgatory is needed to reach this Omega Point. But once the point is reached and misunderstandings cleared, a loving God allows freedom. There should be no walls, funnels, or locks once this point is reached.)
Rob: once the onion is pealed back to the point of misrelation, that person no longer has the objections to God that they would have had at an earlier point that caused them to desire annihilation instead of relation to God.
Zach: But the world God created has not been good to some people. Maybe there will be people who still disagree with God's choice to submit them to the risk of suffering for the sake of future benefits. Perhaps these people will continue to be offended by God's choice even after reaching the Omega point with no misunderstanding. Or maybe not. Maybe everyone will come to see it God's way. If so, why lock them up at all?
(The same EDIT as above belongs here.)
Rob: Are you wanting to posit an instance in which a person reaches their point of misrelation, a stable place of honesty, with lies removed, and say that a person can at that point choose annihilation instead of relation to God? I can't understand that at all, it's incomprehensible to me.
Zach: Yes. But I don't see anything inconsistent or incomprehensible about it. If two beings are free to act as they will and free from all misunderstanding, what is to stop these two free beings from choosing differently? This could be a pre-moral or a-moral choice. Like the choice between vanilla and chocolate. If one being holds different preferences than the other, why can't they choose differently? Or are you saying that God determines our preferences too? This would be like saying God gives us freedom to do as we please only God determines what we please. Was it Augustine who argued for that kind of 'free'-will?
Watch me fly. Freedom like wings and I will use them. Freedom like wings and I will spread them wide. - StavesacrePost Edited (Sahid) : 4/12/2007 1:33:49 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Asher
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Total Posts : 477
| Posted 4/12/2007 2:17 AM (GMT -6) | | Sahid,
I may be wrong, but I think some of your concern with what I'm saying is because I have used specific wording that you may think that I think is the crux of what I'm getting at, but that from my perspective I am not married to at all, I can just as easily use a different wording and retain what I am trying to say. For example, you seem to have a strong aversion to my phrasing of being locked in a room with God. Let's scrap that particular way of saying it and let me try to explain my underlying meaning.
What I see mostly happening is people avoiding God. Notice my first use of the locked room example:
"God, as it were, locks Himself alone in a room with the man who tries to evade Him and His love"
"as it were"...I'm not shooting for exact coorelation in my example. We can forget the specifics of my example and look to what I am trying to say. (I'm sorry that I have left some of my own assumptions unstated.) It's not that God has some desire to "lock" us up until we submit, it's that in many if not most cases people are avoiding God because of some misperception about Him. An example might be someone who has a misperception about God and this has led them to such a disdain of God that they want nothing to do with Him, they don't want to hear God at all. Now, God knows that that person's attitude towards God is based on something untrue about Himself, so he approaches that person to explain Himself (Does this help you at all? My use of the locked room was meant to convey a face to face encounter that God initiates in order to explain Himself.)
The other major point in which I perhaps left out too many of my own assumptions is a case in which a person reaches a point of arriving at a true understanding about God. Theoretically, I can agree with both you and Tom that there is some fraction of a percentage chance that a person can truly understand God and still choose against Him...but only theoretically...because of an encounter I had with God and His ecstasy of love, I just cannot see that happening. I can say "Yes, that can happen." but I don't feel it and I can't really wrap my mind around it either. But that is existential to me, so in words at least I can give ground to your perspective.
So, I ask, what then? The two choices would seem to be 1) annhilation and 2) to be left alone, as you said.
Annhilation, chosen by a person for themselves, when they have no misperceptions about God, is something I cannot speak to. I don't know if it's possible or not. And I cannot understand it enough to say anything about it. So I'll just leave it there. But I still have hope that no one would choose that.
To be left alone...I guess I have some problems (perhaps not unresolvable, give it a try) with how the dynamics of that would work. How can a person truly be left alone when they are living in God's world. When they live and move and have their being in God and His reality. They are never alone. Something relating to God is around every corner, and the corner itself relates to God. What do you mean exactly by being left alone?
Rob | | Back to Top | | |
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Sahid
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| Posted 4/12/2007 12:31 PM (GMT -6) | | I understand that "locked in a room" is metaphorical. But I do have a problem with the idea of a free person being forced. To the extent that a man is forced he is not free. So if a woman (with clear understanding or with significant misunderstandings) chooses to be alone, God's act of "approaching that person to explain Himself" is opposed to the woman's freedom.
So the question becomes: Does God tolerate human choices that are against his will? At least some of the time the answer is yes (for the adherent of the open view). I personally go further to assert that God tolerates all human choices unless they take place under the umbrella of a previous, freely chosen, bilateral covenant. It is my claim that anything else is inconsistent with love as demonstrated by Christ.
So, more to the point, I see no reason why God would act in a different manner after a person has died. If the person, after death, wants understanding or love, then I have no problem with God "approaching that person to explain Himself." But if that person wants instead to be left alone, then I think it is only consistent with God's loving character to respect his or her free choice. If the person makes that choice while misinformed, it is still their freedom. Presumably, God had opportunity to clear up misunderstandings during the person's life, and if he couldn't do so because of his other commitments, then that's his problem and it is not just for him to sacrifice the person's freedom to fix his problems (at least not if the person has not entered into covenant with God). But to disregard the beloved's freedom is to render love impossible. Love is a risk.
Now when I talk about being left alone and annihilation, I am doing something similar to your using the phrase "locked in a room." My understanding is that if a person chooses to finally be left alone by God this will be annihilation. God offers us his gifts of life and love. If we choose to decline his offer, we go back to "being nonexistent." Even if all would be happer if eventually they were won over, this would be God loving the future person at the expense of the present person. I believe God tolerates and respects the choice of the present person.
Watch me fly. Freedom like wings and I will use them. Freedom like wings and I will spread them wide. - StavesacrePost Edited (Sahid) : 4/12/2007 12:34:36 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Asher
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Total Posts : 477
| Posted 4/12/2007 4:14 PM (GMT -6) | | Sahid,
I'm pondering, give me some time. But a few questions to help me along the way to understanding you:
Do humans have more freedom than God?
Do you believe that God necessarily exists?
Do you agree with the concepts from One's statements in the original post of this thread:
1) Necessary Existence is love
2) Necessary Existence grounds our being
thanks,
Rob | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 4/14/2007 9:59 AM (GMT -6) | | | I'm not sure what everyone means by "necessary being," but for me, it means that given that something exists, something must have always existed. This is because of causality--from nothing, nothing comes. Change requires causal agency (and, therefore, a causal agent=being). But this still leaves us with the possibility that there could be an infinite chain of beings into the infinite past.
So we might rather say, God is the ground of our particular creation. If Hebrews is true, God swore by Himself because He knew of nothing greater to swear by. And this seems to imply that God at least believes He is the greatest being even if He came from some other being. I think the human mind, armed with these ideas, just tends to parsimoniously accept that God probably is an eternally existent being, having no prior ground or cause of His existence. Regardless, all of our hopes and aspirations depend upon the competence and faithfulness of our creator.
And though our free choices are, in some important sense, grounded in us as the true final causes of them, it is also true that our capacity for free choice is grounded in God. So, in this sense, even our free choices are grounded in God. For with no capacity for free choice, we could not freely choose at all.
So I think it's fair to say that God is the ground of all created beings and all their activity so long as we define how we mean "ground" and don't imply thereby that God is the final cause of our volitional choices.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 4/14/2007 11:26:43 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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