 |
Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Theological Q&A > (No Subject)
| Forum Quick Jump
|
| 
Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 3/19/2012 9:37 AM (GMT -6) |   | http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-body-knows/201203/emotional-habits-the-key-addiction
A very interesting article in Psychology Today: Emotional Habits: The Key to Addiction.
It’s not the application to addiction per se (or her thing for dancing per se, though that’s interesting) that interested me. Rather, as I read it I got to thinking about whether it’s possible to conceive of a person SO emotionally healthy that they are able to immediately “resolve” (her word, you’ll see) negative events (experiences that generate negative emotion in US) into an undisturbed sense of well-being, an infinitude of positive emotional energy. That’s more along the lines of the doctrine of an apatheia I can get with.
Tom
"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 | | |
 |
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/19/2012 2:06 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
Rather, as I read it I got to thinking about whether it’s possible to conceive of a person SO emotionally healthy that they are able to immediately “resolve” (her word, you’ll see) negative events (experiences that generate negative emotion in US) into an undisturbed sense of well-being, an infinitude of positive emotional energy. That’s more along the lines of the doctrine of an apatheia I can get with.
100% agree, Tom. 
She says:
A fear-based person wants to hear that she has what it takes to succeed. She wants to hear that nothing can stop her along her path. A grief-based person wants to hear something different. He is not afraid. He does not doubt his ability to make things happen in the future. He is haunted by the past. He needs to hear that the meaning of what has happened in the past is not yet determined. Meanwhile, an anger-based person is neither afraid of failing nor desolate at having failed. She wants the world to give her what she wants. She needs to hear that she already has it. She just has to receive it.
Hearing these words is, of course, not enough. The task is to feel for ourselves the movements that they represent. Even so, hearing the words can help dislodge emotional habits where they attach in our minds so that we can better resolve their emotional sting into life-enabling energies of gratitude, affirmation, and joy. We want to be able to feel the real possibility of an alternative move, and feel our way to it, even in the midst of an emotional storm.
There is play in every moment, and with practice, we can learn to find it. There are impulses to move arising in us, and we can learn to discern which ones align with the wisdom in our desires. Through such creative action we come to love our lives and everything about them as the very conditions we needed to discover the deep pleasure of moving-dancing-participating consciously in the creation of what is.
I had this thought:
What better to ground UNCONDITIONAL "gratitude, affirmation, and joy" than the "dance" of the Trinity within the self, and it's uncreated love, joy, and peace via the "sacrament of the present moment"?
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/19/2012 2:10:49 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 3/19/2012 3:56 PM (GMT -6) | | I also liked the way she talked about how negative emotions can (if dealt with in a healthy way) "resolve" into positive emotions. So fear can resolve to trust re: the future, grief can resolve to hope and joy, anger can resolve to love and affirmation.
Here's the thing when it comes to God/apatheia and open theists. OVers WANT to fully affirm God's FEELING the world (being sad, grieving, weeping, being angry, on the negative side, but feeling compassion, joy, etc. as well). With regard to negative emotions, WE all AIM to resolve this when we are injured emotionally. We know that being healthy means resolving negative emotions and emotional injury into positive emotional energy and healthy perspectives. We even speak of being HEALED of the effects of such emotions.
OVers really need to examine how this would apply to God. We've totally rushed into things here. Are we to think of God as being "hurt" (i.e., the felt quality of his experience as God takes a HIT when the world generates negative energy in God)? Hurts from which God must “recover”? Do we think of God then convalescing? Being healed? Does it TAKE TIME to "resolve" this negative energy into positive energy through focusing on a hopeful future? Maybe it just heals REEEEEEALLY quickly. SOME OVers would say so. I can't.
It makes no sense to me to exclude from those aspects of God's necessary existence a certain equally necessary "felt quality of experience.” But beside that, I don’t know how to imagine God rebounding or recovering from emotional hurt or trauma if we suppose the world is able to injure God. I mean, WE get healed over time as we come to perceive truth on deeper levels and expose our wounded emotions to the truth of our security in Christ, etc. We GET healed because there are resources OUTSIDE ourselves. But how is this to be applied to God? God’s emotions are already fully informed by truth’s totality, including absolute assurance of future success and fully reciprocal, interpresonal acceptance and affirmation of F, S, and HS. What could possibly mediate healing to God should THIS God be truly injured? On what basis would a God who perceives all truths infallibly but who nevertheless is ‘wounded’ by the world ever recover the felt sense of well-being the world robs him of? What resources would an injured God have to recover when healed that would not also PREVENT such injury?
Seems to me that if God’s necessary existence includes (among other things) a necessary “felt quality of experience” (i.e., a “sense of well-being”), then we really must insist on SOME kind of doctrine of immpassibility (or apatheia as the Fathers called it). If we DON’T, THEN the question becomes How is a God whose felt quality of life, whose sense of well-being, whose emotional life is literally at the mercy of the world, and who once injured and omniscient has no conceivable resources to recover—how is such a God to HEAL ME of my loss of well-being?
Honestly? I’ve shared all this on open theism FB sites and pretty much got shut down for being corrupted by Greek philosophy. One guy called me a classical theist and wouldn’t believe I was an open theist because I insisted that God is “unsurpassably aesthetically satisfied.”
How dare God not be injured by me!
-----------------------
Of course, missing from her article was ANY appreciation for the fundamental bankruptcy of human nature to supply the resources needed ultimately to "resolve" negative energy into positive.
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg BoydPost Edited (Tom) : 3/19/2012 4:03:29 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/19/2012 4:24 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
How dare God not be injured by me!
Well, if I can't really emotionally "hurt" God by anything I do, then I can't make God emotionally "feel good" by anything I do either...right?
Wouldn't that be a problem for some people? Get it? 
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
|
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/19/2012 4:32 PM (GMT -6) | | I further believe that non-incarnate humans experience the ACTUAL apatheia of the Trinity by "receiving" Divine Presence in faith by Grace "in Christ". In other words, the actual love, joy, and peace of the One Triune God directly grounds, indwells, personalizes, and empowers us...and it's "satisfies our souls" and grounds our senses of identity, stability, etc.
And it makes sense. The Holy Spirit (part of our constitutions) is nearer to us than our own selves in a real sense. (The Incarnation REVEALS that!) And God WANTS to give Himself to us via his Spirit. (Jesus SAID this!) This IS the "eternal life" that Jesus spoke about: Knowledge of the Father and the Son is impossible without the Holy Spirit.
This is also the importance of the this...
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 8:31-39 ESV)
Because of God's UNCONDITIONAL love, we can UNCONDITIONALLY CONQUER our anger, fear, and grieve through Him who loveS us...right here, right now!
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/19/2012 4:36:00 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/19/2012 4:49 PM (GMT -6) | | Hey...
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Satan is an angel...and a ruler. Paul knew that.
Satan is no match for the "love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" in the Holy Spirit.
Nothing that can ever occur in the FUTURE will be able to separate us from this love.
If God be for us...IN US...who indeed can be against us?
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/19/2012 5:05:48 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 3/19/2012 8:18 PM (GMT -6) | | | D: Well, if I can't really emotionally "hurt" God by anything I do, then I can't make God emotionally "feel good" by anything I do either...right?
Wouldn't that be a problem for some people?
J: It's a problem for me because I don't know how to even define free-choice independent of changes of sentient states. If the divine sentient state is static, then there is no divine sympathy, no diversity of divine aesthetic experience, etc. It leaves us saying words about God that have no meaning because they have no analogy to anything else we're familiar with.
Even Hartshorne had to appeal to analogy to do his own ontological argument. No analogy, nothing worth knowing. For nothing practical can follow.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 3/19/2012 9:49:08 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 3/19/2012 11:58 PM (GMT -6) | | Is undiminishable happiness really a meaningless notion? Or is it a notion with no analogy? I don't think so. I have no problem conceiving of a being who has resources that provide a happiness which no power outside those resources can diminish AND that this being can care for those powers outside these resources. Do we really want to say that compassion by definition entails a vulnerability to victimization or personal injury? Really? I can't care for or love that which cannot harm me?
Tom
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg BoydPost Edited (Tom) : 3/20/2012 12:19:24 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 3/20/2012 6:48 PM (GMT -6) | | Happiness, I think, is like contentment in the sense that it's a perspective conditioned by a certain ACCEPTABLE degree of impulse satisfactions. Satisfaction typically (or at least sometimes) refers to sentience at the level of a particular impulse. An impulse has an associated desire (I'll try to quote Porter later) which is pleasure-oriented and/or displeasure-averse. If the desire is satisfied, the increase of pleasure and/or diminishing of displeasure occurs. Happiness and contentment don't seem to apply at the level of a specific satisfaction of a specific impulse.
So I don't find it counter-intuitive that God has an impulse to stop human/angelic suffering so as to stop the sympathetic suffering He feels because of it. But He forebears because of how He knows His longsuffering is ultimately resulting in the greater good of all which produces an even GREATER amount of sympathetic satisfaction. Thus, He remains HAPPY with the creational project even though His sufferings FROM it come and go.
It seems to me that free-will is the bottom-line of the project that conditions the possibility and, now, the necessity of so much divine suffering to maximize His satisfaction from it. Because once we partake of the divine nature, we may provide God no more sympathetic pleasure than we would have had He created us compatibilistically holy from the get-go. And in that sense, there is a true expiration date to the TELEOLOGICAL aspect of the project. Beyond that, maybe, it's no different than if He had created us with the divine nature from the get-go.
What I CAN get on board with is that the Father may ONLY get satisfaction from creation SYMPATHETICALLY from the Son's satisfaction. I'm willing to see how the diversity of the godhead can buy us things if it keeps the scriptural language analogically meaningful.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 3/20/2012 7:06:21 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/21/2012 10:27 AM (GMT -6) | | | I could say it like this: I can imagine a person having the 4 immeasurables...and undiminishable "happiness" and "contentment" from their experience of the 4 immeasurables WHILE being emotionally responsive to the joys and sufferings of others BECAUSE OF the 4 immeasurables. Surely, we can imagine this of God who IS love.
-----------------------
The four immeasurables are:
- Loving-kindness (Pāli: metta, Sanskrit: maitri) towards all: the hope that a person will be well; "the wish that all sentient beings, without any exception, be happy."[11]
- Compassion (Pāli and Sanskrit: karuṇā): the hope that a person's sufferings will diminish; "the wish for all sentient beings to be free from suffering."[11]
- Empathetic joy (Pāli and Sanskrit: mudita): joy in the accomplishments of a person—oneself or another; sympathetic joy; "the wholesome attitude of rejoicing in the happiness and virtues of all sentient beings."[11]
- Equanimity (Pāli: upekkhā, Sanskrit: upekṣā): learning to accept loss and gain, praise and blame, and success and failure, all with detachment, equally, for oneself and for others. Equanimity is "not to distinguish between friend, enemy or stranger, but regard every sentient being as equal. It is a clear-minded tranquil state of mind—not being overpowered by delusions, mental dullness or agitation."[12]
Loving-kindness and compassion are both hopes for the future (leading, where possible, to action aimed at realizing those hopes). Joy and equanimity are attitudes to what has already happened, but also with regard to consequences for future action. While these four might be delineated as attitudes to the future or past, they contain the seed of the "present" within their core (as a living embodied practice). This is the essence of the spiritual laws of karma, self-responsibility, and right thoughts (samma sankkalpa, literally 'right commitments'). A dedicated intention that all beings are in the "here and now", tranquil, happy, in touch with their gifts and accomplishments, and feeling interconnected by that synergy to eschew suffering by abdication
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
|
Similitude
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 3/21/2012 7:10 PM (GMT -6) | | | Tom: I guess the question I’d ask if whether we think the triune relations (a) are necessary/essential to God (and not undetermined by the world)
Jeff: I don't know what that means unless you're claiming the ability to know a priori what the intra-godhead relations ARE such that what I'm arguing just MEANS that they are "undetermined by the world." By my view, I can't know any such thing a priori. God is the benevolent/competent designer of my capacity to apprehend. For me, everything works further out from there analogically and with the additional information of revelation. Neither of these YET tell me what you are claiming about God. But maybe you just haven't articulated it in a way that I can see it yet.
| | Back to Top | | |
|
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/22/2012 7:42 AM (GMT -6) | | I think you're missing something big here, Jeff. Greg says in T&P that the "unsurpassably intense" beautiful experience (via loving relationship between the uncreated Persons in the self-relationality of the One Triune God) aesthetically satisfies God. In other words, God can experience NO FURTHER INTENSITY of beautiful, loving experience than God does within Godself...and it is this "unsurpassable" INTENSITY of experience rather than DIVERSITY of experience that aesthetically satisfies God. Greg was breaking with general process theism by saying that God did NOT require maximal diversity in order to acheive aesthetic satisfaction (which would make for an evitably necessary God-world relationship).
What Tom and I are saying is this:
Because NOTHING in the God-world relationship can increase or decrease the intensity of beauty experienced by God in divine self-relationship, there is NOTHING that occurs in the God-world relationship diminish or increase God's aesthetic satisfaction. No amount of creaturely suffering can diminish it and no amount of creaturely joy can enhance it.
Feel me?
"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/22/2012 7:59:38 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
|
Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 3/22/2012 10:31 AM (GMT -6) | | I think Jeff gets that, D (I mean, he gets what we're saying). But I think he just doesn't agree or see why we should think of God's own ad intra sense of well-being grounded in the necessary triune relations as being undiminishable. But perhaps that's because Jeff (if I understand you, Jeff) doens't think the triune relations themselves are necessary. If the Son via incarnation can temporarily cease to be, i.e., cease to stand in conscious relatedness to the Father and Spirit), then the triune relations (as 'actual' relations which are experienced subjectively) are not necessary to God. What's necessary can't cease to be temporarily. So I'm not sure how Jeff posits the necessity of the triune relations.
And of course Hartshorne wasn't a trinitarian. So he HAD to ground God's unsurpassable aesthetic satisfaction in the God-World relationship and ended up saying that God's felt quality of expeirence, his sense of well-being, was just the sum total of God's feeling the world in all its ups and down, its joy and horrors. And Hartshorne said almost what Jeff's said here, i.e., God's sense of well-being, his felt quality of experiece, is unsurpassable and undiminishable in the sense that being any happier than God is at any given point in time is inconceivable, for God is by definition the sum total of all present sorrows and joys. But a moment from now God will doubtless be a bit more happy (if the world improves a bit) or a bit less happy (if the world descends into despair a bit more). God's experience of aesthetic satisfaction is a measure of the world's well-being (plus whatever happiness God might get from consideration of himself, which Jeff doesn't think needs to be conceived of as providing God an infininite source of pleasure and delight, perhaps because he thinks there's something to God more fundamental than those relations which IS that which is necessary to God).
I dont know how to think of the triune relations fully realized necessarily and sans creation without also thinking of those relations as beautiful to perceive (by God, that is, self-perceiving) and experienced as an infinite delight and joy. That's Greg's T&P in nutshell. To say the world can 'disturb' that which obtains necessarily sans creation is just a denial of its necessity. But I think, D, that this necessity is exactly what Jeff denies. Not sure.
For me, God's competency to achieve his ends just IS the indiminishable aesthetic satisfaction which he is apart from the world. I don't see his competency being located outside his sense of well-being; his well-being IS the ground for our own hope of transcending pain and suffering.
Tom
"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 | | |
|
One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 3/22/2012 12:49 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
I dont know how to think of the triune relations fully realized necessarily and sans creation without also thinking of those relations as beautiful to perceive (by God, that is, self-perceiving) and experienced as an infinite delight and joy. That's Greg's T&P in nutshell. To say the world can 'disturb' that which obtains necessarily sans creation is just a denial of its necessity.
That's exactly right.
****************************
Tom:
But I think, D, that this necessity is exactly what Jeff denies.
But, MERELY for the sake of argument, even IF the uncreated trinitarian relationships could be conceived as NOT being necessary, Jeff WOULD say that those interpersonal relationships DID unceasingly exist prior to creation. There would be no reason for the uncreated interpersonal relationships to "cease" before the Incarnation, right, Jeff?
That's why for me the question to Jeff is this:
Is the uncreated triunity relationship within God's self-relationality a SUFFICIENT (though not necessary) condition for God's unsurpassable aesthetic satisfaction. If not, then that mandates a God-World relationship to help "satisfy" God. If so, then...
****************************
Tom:
For me, God's competency to achieve his ends just IS the indiminishable aesthetic satisfaction which he is apart from the world. I don't see his competency being located outside his sense of well-being; his well-being IS the ground for our own hope of transcending pain and suffering.
Exactamundo!
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 3/22/2012 1:15:05 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
| 103 posts in this thread.
Viewing Page : 1 2 3 4 5 |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 3:49 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|