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A God whose predestining and reprobative determinations are both utterly pure of prevision and irresistible, who creates a world that bears no more proper relation to his nature than any among an infinite number of other possible worlds, who requires a justice of his creatures that he himself does not exhibit, who condemns whom he chooses to condemn, and who is himself an efficient cause of the sinful actions he punishes, is a God whose will is sheer power, not love, and certainly not governed by reason. This is the God of early modernity in his full majesty: the God who either determines or is determined, and who therefore must absolutely determine all things—a pure abyss of sovereignty justifying itself through its own exercise. He may be a God of eternal law, but behind his legislations lies a more original lawlessness. He is, in every way, the God of nihilism.
Voluntarism, after all, began as a doctrine regarding God, and only gradually (if inevitably) migrated to the human subject. The God of absolute will who was born in the Middle Ages had by the late sixteenth century so successfully usurped the place of the true God that few theologians could recognize him for the imposter he was. And the piety he inspired was, in some measure, a kind of blasphemous piety: a servile and fatalistic adoration of boundless power masquerading as a love of righteousness. More importantly, this theology—through the miraculous technology of the printing press—entered into common Christian consciousness as the theology of previous ages never could, and in so doing provided western humanity at once both with a new model of freedom and with a God whom it would be necessary, in the fullness of time, to kill. It was from this God that we first learned to think of freedom as a perfect spontaneity of the will, and from him we learned the irreducible prerogatives that accrue to all sovereign power, whether that of the absolute monarch, or that of the nation state, or that of the individual. But, if this is indeed what freedom is, and God’s is the supreme instance of such freedom, then he is not—as he was in ages past—the transcendent good who sets the created will free to realize its nature in its ultimate end, but is merely the one intolerable rival to every other freedom, who therefore invites creatures to rebel against him and to attempt to steal fire from heaven. If this is God, then Feurbach and Nietzsche were both perfectly correct to see his exaltation as an impoverishment and abasement of the human at the hands of a celestial despot. For such freedom—such pure arbitrium—must always enter into a contest of wills; it could never exist within a peaceful order of analogical participation, in which one freedom could draw its being from a higher freedom. Freedom of this sort is one and indivisible, and has no source but itself.
More importantly, perhaps, so terrible was the burden that this cruel predestining God laid upon the conscience of believers that it could not be borne indefinitely. It was this God who, having first deprived us of any true knowledge of the transcendent good, died for modern culture, and left us to believe that the true God had perished. The explicit nihilism of late modernity is not even really a rejection of the modern God; it is merely the inevitable result of his presence in history, and of the implicit nihilism of the theology that invented him. Indeed, worship of this god is the first and most inexcusable nihilism, for it can have no real motives other than craven obsequiousness or sadistic delight. Modern atheism is merely the consummation of the forgetfulness of the transcendent God that this theology made perfect. Moreover, it may be that, in an age in which the only choice available to human thought was between faith in the modern God of pure sovereignty and simple unbelief, the latter was the holier—indeed, the more Christian—path. For, at some level, faith in the God of absolute will always required a certain extirpation of conscience from the soul, or at least its pacification; and so perhaps it is better that the natural longing of each soul for God—even if only in the reduced form of moral alarm, or an inchoate impulse towards natural goodness, or of a longing for a dues ignotus—refuse to make obeisance before this idol. Perhaps it was the last living trace of Christian conscience in western man that moved him—like the Christian “atheists” of the first few centuries of the church—to reject any God but a God of infinite love.
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd |