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Similitude
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| Posted 3/27/2012 9:38 PM (GMT -6) |   | There are mutliple issues:
1) Is something true just because tradition said it? I don't think so.
2) Can something fill up (occupy) space and not BE what we call matter?
3) If matter is not that which occupies space, what IS it?
4) If we can't define matter in a way to where we can differentiate between material beings, we can't define "immaterial" either, can we?
5) How would positing space-occupancy as an essential attribute of deity explain anything in need of explanation?
To me, it's our own seeming non-locality that renders deity NON-LOCAL as well. But non-local just means having no cognizable relation to space. For omnipresence INCLUDES local-ness. If the Father can occupy space and still be immaterial, why can't we?
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/28/2012 12:14 PM (GMT -6) | | |
D: Maybe that would help you, Jeff: to view God's relationship to the world NON-SPATIALLY. In other words, God is directly present and involved with all that exists in Creation (local or non-local) in being the continuous ground of their existence. I don't care HOW you put that...but it simply means that everywhere/everywhen SOMETHING exists, God is their as the ground of it's existence. And ABSENT from any Creation, God is all that is.
Does THAT help you, Jeff? Can you AGREE to this?
J: I would agree in these senses:
1) I don't see what positing beings/persons, SANS creation, beyond the biblical godhead buys us, so I don't posit them.
2) I don't know how (now that I've thought about it due to the book I mentioned) to conceive of God as both space-occupying AND omnipresent, so I try to just remember that such language for me is compelling only because it's virtually psychologically irresistable, though conceptually unintelligible to me upon analysis,
3) I think the godhead is the ground (in the sense of constituting the necessary conditions) of all created beings because they ARE created beings.
4) Somehow God acts in space though I can't conceive of Him as extended in space in a meaningful way since that seems to render my definition of matter meaningless.
5) I suspect that God FEELS spatially as we do, though such experiences don't involve spatial EXTENSION, but mere "where-ness" (just as is the case for us). But the "whereness" of a feeling is not logically equivalent to "whereness" of being (as our own case implies).
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One Love
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| Posted 3/28/2012 12:34 PM (GMT -6) | | D: Maybe that would help you, Jeff: to view God's relationship to the world NON-SPATIALLY. In other words, God is directly present and involved with all that exists in Creation (local or non-local) in being the continuous ground of their existence. I don't care HOW you put that...but it simply means that everywhere/everywhen SOMETHING exists, God is their as the ground of it's existence. And ABSENT from any Creation, God is all that is.
Does THAT help you, Jeff? Can you AGREE to this?
J: I would agree in these senses:
1) I don't see what positing beings/persons, SANS creation, beyond the biblical godhead buys us, so I don't posit them.
2) I don't know how (now that I've thought about it due to the book I mentioned) to conceive of God as both space-occupying AND omnipresent, so I try to just remember that such language for me is compelling only because it's virtually psychologically irresistable, though conceptually unintelligible to me upon analysis,
3) I think the godhead is the ground (in the sense of constituting the necessary conditions) of all created beings because they ARE created beings.
4) Somehow God acts in space though I can't conceive of Him as extended in space in a meaningful way since that seems to render my definition of matter meaningless.
5) I suspect that God FEELS spatially as we do, though such experiences don't involve spatial EXTENSION, but mere "where-ness" (just as is the case for us). But the "whereness" of a feeling is not logically equivalent to "whereness" of being (as our own case implies).
Ok. I'll take all those senses for the sake of the discussion. What's being said is this:
If God the Father's nature is essentially, unchangably how you describe, then the Co-eternal Son, being the "exact imprint" of God the Father ALSO has that nature and does not surrender that nature upon Incarnation. In other words, immediately post-Incarnation, the Co-eternal Son REMAINS how you describe.
Would you not agree with that?
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/28/2012 12:40:08 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Asher
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| Posted 3/28/2012 4:44 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: Being the father sans creation not consciously related to the Son in loving mutuality is a bit like shooting a hole in one by yourself, with nobody to share the moment with. Disaster.
And psychologically speaking it would have to have a HUGE solipsistic influence! There is either the Son and Spirit's influence...or the influence One experiences takes on the aspect of "no" influence. And one wonders whether the influence of the other members of the Trinity was instrumental in formulating the whole "creation" project. Would there have been a creation if all there was...was an undifferentiated Being. Wouldn't such a Being be trapped in a solipsistic nightmare? I know we're just speculating, but that is the sense I get. | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/28/2012 6:06 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Tom: What's the relationship between the 'Father' as the biblical God and the 'godhead' here of which you speak? Does this godhead include all three? Only the Father? Do you see the Son and Spirit as created beings? If uncreated, then do you then distinguish between a variety of kinds of uncreated being (i.e., the Father is do this or that necessarily given his nature as 'uncreated' and the Son and Spirit who have these or those capacities given their nature as 'uncreated')?
Jeff: Covering old ground, but in order:
1) What's the relationship between the 'Father' as the biblical God and the 'godhead' here of which you speak?
At bare minimum the Spirit is quintessentially the Father's Spirit. As such, I infer by analogy that it conditions capacities for Him as scripture says the human spirit does for human souls. The difference is, humans have as necessary conditions of their psychic capacities MATERIAL brain states as well. This is how we are different from angels as well as God.
As such, I infer the Spirit is the Fathers's source of causal capacity as well as specific cognitive and sentient capacities and the way they NATURALLY relate. By analogy, again, I infer that the Father's volitional capacity is conditioned by the Spirit.
I assume the Beloved gets his capacities from either the Spirit, the Father or a combination of the 2. As I can't make sense out of the 2-mind view of the incarnation, I believe the Beloved BECAME a quickening spirit (1 Cor.), etc, IN TIME. That is to say, the Beloved took on new capacities because of what he did IN TIME. This implies, to me, further, that we don't know exactly what the essential attributes of the Father and Son are. We can make reasonable guesses, and two such guesses for me would be that they are both persons, and social ones at that. This explains how creation can be FOR them and require no necessary god-world relationship.
2) Does this godhead include all three?
Yes. Each of the 3 are necessary conditions of creation; not merely one or 2. The Hebrews already knew the Father and His Spirit were necessary conditions of the existence of the world prior to the incarnation. I doubt most of them inferred another person in the creational mix, though.
3) Do you see the Son and Spirit as created beings?
No. The Father Himself gets His capacities FROM His Spirit.
4) If uncreated, then do you then distinguish between a variety of kinds of uncreated being (i.e., the Father is do this or that necessarily given his nature as 'uncreated' and the Son and Spirit who have these or those capacities given their nature as 'uncreated')?
Even though they are not created, they do take on accidental attributes in TIME just as we do. This is key to my view. If the persons of the godhead were static in all respects, creation would be impossible.
D: If God the Father's nature is essentially, unchangably how you describe, then the Co-eternal Son, being the "exact imprint" of God the Father ALSO has that nature and does not surrender that nature upon Incarnation. In other words, immediately post-Incarnation, the Co-eternal Son REMAINS how you describe.
J: I would have to say that the sense in which the incarnated Beloved is the "exact imprint" of the Father is the sense in which he is essentially benevolent and teleologically competent, much as Greg has claimed. And though I think the Beloved is a necessary being, as the Father is, I'm not sure that's even what is being addressed in the phrase "exact imprint." When Jesus told his disciples "if you have seen me, you have seen the Father," I don't think he was alluding to something as abstract as necessary existence, even though he has existed necessarily from eternity, IMO.
Tom: Being the father sans creation not consciously related to the Son in loving mutuality is a bit like shooting a hole in one by yourself, with nobody to share the moment with. Disaster.
Jeff: He's called the Beloved precisely because there IS a social, harmonious relationship between the 2. But you are claiming that a finite cessation of conscious enjoyment of that relationship is a show-stopper for a coherent conception of that relationship. I disagree. I've already given an analogy of how unconsciousness can be an INTENTIONAL MEAN to a SOCIAL END. The decrease of enjoyment caused by that unconsciousness can be chosen because of its teleological result. The whole idea of "he endured the shame for the joy set before him" screams out the TELEOLOGICAL nature of THIS creational project. I.e., enjoyment can diminish in the short term for greater enjoyment in the long term.
You seem to accept this for humans but deny it for divine persons. I not only see no ground for the denial, but the denial deprives me of conceiving of how creation is a FREE/VOLITIONAL (i.e., teleological) act. In short, you see freedom more in terms of what it is not. I see it in terms of what is not AS WELL as what it is--a choice of one of a plurality of conflicting impulses. This choice, to be rational, is the choice of that which is intellectually seen to result in the GREATEST LONG-TERM PLEASURE. And "greatest," here, can include "qualitatively," not merely "quantitatively."
Post Edited (Similitude) : 3/28/2012 6:59:18 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 3/30/2012 10:19 AM (GMT -6) | | | Quoting from Hart...
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"...the triune God stands in need of no determination in the finite, no probation of the negative, no moment of becoming: nothing can give increase to that fullness of community and joy. God enjoys a peace that is absolute, never needing to define itself over against death or violence (for then it would not be essentially peace, but only final armistice). With or without creation, as Athanasius so often insists, God would be fully God as he eternally is.
This, again, is why God's love is called apatheia. For us, of course, as finite beings, our every expression of ourselves and sense of what we are—in word and will, knowledge and love, form and recognition—is fragmentary, the frail emanation of a confined subjectivity, present to itself only as a play of presence and absence, light and darkness; but as God is not a finite being, but infinite being, his expression of himself and knowledge of and delight in that expression are, in each moment, completely and infinitely God: God's Word is the perfect expression of God and so is God; the living Spirit of God is God's life and joy, and so is God. An infinite and infinitely full distance is here, an infinite capacity, that is also infinite unity; in God, in these hypostatic distinctions, there opens up that infinite "place" that is the possibility of every place— of creation and in creation (as Hilary of Poitiers says, there is no place but is in God). No created interval could possibly add to or subtract from that distance, which is the distance of an eternally accomplished act. And in that distance there is always more than mere difference: there is the infinite longing of desire and the infinite peace of satiation, for the Spirit—the desire, love, power of the Father—comes to rest in the Son, there finding all the delight he seeks. As the light and joy of the Trinity's knowledge and love, the Spirit re-inflects the distance between Father as Son not just as bare cognizance, but as perfected love, the whole rapture of the divine essence. To call this infinite act of love apatheia, then, is to affirm its plenitude and its transcendence of every evil, every interval of sin, every finite rupture, disappointment of longing, shadow of sadness, or failure of love—in short, every pathos.
Another way of saying this is that God has—indeed is—only one act: the single ardent movement of this infinite love, delight, and peace. Indeed, so insistent are many of the fathers on the simplicity and singleness of the divine essence—that is, the trinitarian event—that they will not acknowledge that God in any literal sense ever tastes of any other "feeling" than this love. Even the wrath of God in Scripture is a metaphor, suitable to our feeble understanding, one which describes not the action of God towards us, but what happens when the inextinguishable fervency of God's love towards us is rejected; according to Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Isaac of Ninevah and others, even hell itself is not a divine work, but the reality we have wrought within ourselves by our perverse refusal to open out—as God himself eternally has done—in love, for God and others, for when we have so sealed ourselves up within ourselves, the fire of divine love cannot transform and enliven us, but only assail us as an external chastisement: For our God is a consuming fire, and the pathos of our rage cannot interrupt the apatheia of his love.
Does such divine self-sufficiency, though, in some terrible way leave us out (to resort to the emotive terms in which this complaint is often framed)? If the fecundity of divine love is an infinitely achieved act, do all the dark passages of history and pains of finitude then have no ultimate meaning? How could such a God want us, if he has no intrinsic need of us? But, again, love is not need, is not lack, but is itself creative, and so is always gracious; and because God's is a Trinitarian love, one that is always open to the other, it can include us in itself without changing in its nature: indeed love us with an ardor that no mere finite passion could evoke. Apatheia, defined as infinitely active love, "feels" more than any affect could possibly impress upon a passive nature; it does not require our sin and death to show us "mercy": God loved us when we were not, and by this very "mercy" called us into being. And this is the ground of all our hope."
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/30/2012 10:25:30 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 3/30/2012 11:55 AM (GMT -6) | | Just had a thought.
I bet that the reason why so many "romantic" relationships fail--including marriage--is because of a fundamental misunderstanding of love. We largely see loving relationships in terms of meeting our own emotional/psychological needs, not as FREE, GRACIOUS, CREATIVE ACTION.
Instead of being like infants (who can share loving smiles spontaneously without seeking anything), we seem to, more often than not, seek something for our acts of kindness...something we feel needs fulfilling. Many "love" relationship are instances of mutualism at best.
THIS, I think, is the sentiment of people--like many open theists--hold where they believe that to be LOVED is to be (at least functionally) NEEDED! The doctrine of apatheia shows this "love" to be a form of DESPAIR.
Just a thought.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/30/2012 12:22:55 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 3/30/2012 4:59 PM (GMT -6) | | I like the way Hart explains the Orthodox understanding of apatheia in musical terms. You have to check it out in The Beauty of the Infinite. He even picks certain works by Bach to demonstrate how a particular theme or refrain of music—utterly beautiful—can overcome discordant notes and phrases introduced into it by taking them up into the flexibility of its own fullness, transforming them without compromise to itself by a kind of accommodating movement. Evil offers up its ‘noise’which is heard and taken in without producing a negative moment of perturbation in the overall intensity or beauty. The work is never less because of evil’s ‘noise’ (evil can never be 'music'). In God there is only ‘music’.
So Jeff, you’ve got three books to read now!
CH’s The Logic of Perfection.
Greg’s T&P.
David Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Best single book I’ve read outside the Bible.
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 3/30/2012 5:18 PM (GMT -6) | | | How about four?
Loder and Neidhardt's "The Knight's Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science"
Jeff already knew I was gonna say that 
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 3/31/2012 8:59 AM (GMT -6) | | "I like the way Hart explains the Orthodox understanding of apatheia in musical terms. You have to check it out in The Beauty of the Infinite. He even picks certain works by Bach to demonstrate how a particular theme or refrain of music—utterly beautiful—can overcome discordant notes and phrases introduced into it by taking them up into the flexibility of its own fullness, transforming them without compromise to itself by a kind of accommodating movement. Evil offers up its ‘noise’which is heard and taken in without producing a negative moment of perturbation in the overall intensity or beauty. The work is never less because of evil’s ‘noise’ (evil can never be 'music'). In God there is only ‘music’."
I see the application of these analogies. These are the kind of analogies that I think explain how we are DESIGNED to learn and mature by SOME suffering. This would have been true in a paradise. Babies would get hurt learning how to walk, etc, even in a paradise. It's when the suffering and death take on the quality of futility that they undermine the validity of really fundamental analogies that such music analogies seem to fail to explain.
When we can't say all eyes are meant to see, can we really know that any eyes are meant to see? It's not like we can argue, apart from teleology, that we see at all. When we can't say that volitional-becoming is meant to be completed in this world for all humans, can we really know that any humans are meant to complete their volitional-becoming in this world? In short, when even these kinds of analogies fail, it seems to imply an incompetence on the part of the Designer. In the meanwhile, I'm not seeing why divine suffering is even problematic so long as God renders, providentially if necessary, creation WORTH it to Himself and His beloved. What's the philosophical problem with my view? That's what I'm not seeing.
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Similitude
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| Posted 4/5/2012 8:13 PM (GMT -6) | | | But note, Tom, Greg is merely asserting that it is necessary. It doesn't follow that because a SOFA obtained sans creation that it is necessary. Greg says "we ... hold." That's just his opinion that creation can't affect God's over-all sentient state. And I would LOVE for him to define all his language about God regretting, etc., if he means, by "zenith," a necessary UNSURPASSABLE/UNDIMINISHABLE bliss. I, for one, can't make sense of God caring about us at all if He is literally unaffected, sentiently, by creatures. But what does it mean to say "affected" if not CONSCIOUSLY so?
On the other hand, I have no problem holding that the Father has an undiminishable, necessary affection for His Beloved.
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One Love
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| Posted 4/6/2012 10:55 AM (GMT -6) | | Jeff:
I, for one, can't make sense of God caring about us at all if He is literally unaffected, sentiently, by creatures.
More Greg...due to Tom's diligent, hard work! 
starting at page 380, Jeff...
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vii.2.2 Divine Suffering and the Beauty of the Trinity
Does this view that God is eternally and unsurpassably “satisfied” within God’s eternal triune sociality imply that God does not partake in the suffering of the world? Is the portrait of God we have here painted a view of God as insensitively independent in God’s own self-contentment? If God’s self-experience is unsurpassably intense, regardless of the state of the world’s state of affairs, is not the “virtuous mutability” of God undermined? Are we not back in the position of God as actus purus? I do not believe so.
In chapter IV, we utilized the analogy of an experiential subject who was composed of actual occasions with differing “specious presents” to argue that a subject—viz., God—could be both actually necessary and actually contingent in differing respects. Against Process thought, God’s absoluteness need not be only abstract. And against the classical tradition, it being perfect and actual need not rule out it also having contingent elements. We may now expand upon this in addressing this present issue of the relationship between God’s eternal satisfaction and temporal suffering.
There is, it seems, no contradiction in maintaining that a being can be self-content on one level, and yet suffer at another. For example, a person need not sacrifice their self-love, their contentment with who they are, their own internal “fullness of life” in order to genuinely enter into the sufferings of another. Indeed, it seems that the person who enters into the sufferings of others with a sense of internal fullness is in a better position to genuinely enter into these sufferings than one who lacks such “fullness.”
To speak more specifically, a person who suffers for another because she needs the other—e.g., needs this other to make her “feel good” about herself, to feel loved and needed, etc.—is more inclined to yet have herself as the object of concern, and thus more inclined to be, to that extent, shut off to the real needs of the other. In contrast, one who enters into solidarity with a sufferer but who is self-content, who loves herself, who possesses an internal fullness which is not destroyed by the suffering, is free to have the sufferer as the sole object of her concern. She is free, in a sense, to “forget herself” in devotion to another.
In the case of the former person, one who “needs” the other to arrive at her self-love, the act of entering into solidarity with a sufferer is an expression of her deficiency. In the case of the latter person however, the act of entering into solidarity with a sufferer is an expression of her wholeness. And the more whole she is, the more perfectly she can suffer with and for the other.62
There are, of course, millions of humans who hold to a superficial form of self-contentment to the exclusion of, or even at the expense of, others’ happiness. In fact, the instances of an opposite disposition are unfortunately rare. The prevalence of this attitude, especially in first world countries, is no doubt one of the reasons why we have such difficulty in seeing God as being both eternally self-satisfied and also temporally self-abased. But, as we have argued, there is no necessary connection between self-contentment and insensitivity.
We may, then, conceive of God as one who is both unsurpassably self-content in God’s essential sociality, while being, at the same time, fully incarnated in the sin and suffering of the world in God’s expressive sociality. Indeed, implied in what we have argued thus far is the supposition that God is free to enter into and redeem the sufferings of the world fully precisely because God is eternally self-sufficient within Godself.
As Barth has so cogently argued, God is revealed as God precisely in the act of becoming human. God’s “weakness,” the weakness of the cross, reveals how “full” God eternally is!63 God is revealed as “Lord” precisely in the act of being revealed as “servant.” God is not threatened in God’s essential being in becoming vulnerable to another, in suffering with and for another, even when this solidarity means death.64 Rather, God’s immanent involvement with the world in the core of its horrifying evils is an expression of God’s self-defining abundance. “Virtuous mutability” thus implies “virtuous immutability.”
Note 62:
The analogy has, of course, a limited application to God in that all humans need other humans to be full within themselves. Their social nature is actualized only in relation to other humans. God too is social, but this sociality is satisfied within Godself. But the analogy does articulate that, as a person may enter into selfless solidarity with another out of fullness—a fullness derived from this person’s other relationships to human and to God—so God can enter into selfless solidarity with suffering humanity out of a fullness “derived” from this One’s “other” sociality—the eternal sociality God has within Godself.
Note 64:
The metaphysical necessity of God’s self-relationality means, I believe, that it is not possible to conceive of the death of the Son as anything other than an expression of the intense love of God’s inner life. This paradox shall be discussed shortly, but it presently needs to be said that this mean that all talk about a “breakdown of the relationship that constitutes the very life of the Trinity” such as we find (for example) in Moltmann is, if taken literally, strictly impossible. See Trinity and Kingdom, p. 80. Jungel too speaks of God’s being as “a being-in-a-becoming threatened by perishing,” Doctrine of Trinity, p. 84. See also Rice, God’s Foreknowledge, p. 43. If taken at face value, these positions would imply that God’s essential being, God’s triunity, is contingent. What is necessary can never “perish” or “breakdown”—though it can experience death.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 4/6/2012 10:59:46 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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