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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 8/6/2003 3:48 AM (GMT -6) |   | Sorry big guy! I've been obsessing with counterfactuals. My wife is accusing me of having a "counterfactual affair" she's seen so little of me.
Ah, where were we? Oh yeah, loving Satan. I guess I don't feel like I need this to avoid objectifying evil (as you mentioned). That's oen thing. Now, this love you have for Satan, it's sole manifestation is "mourning" (what could have been and what now is because of Satan's loss). And I share this grief. So in terms of what we feel about Satan in this respect, you and I are the same. I just don't see that this constitutes "love" for Satan. If it must, then I guess I love Satan, though God will have to judge me for refusing to call it this. 
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 8/6/2003 4:49 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 8/6/2003 6:11 AM (GMT -6) | | John:
quote:
Why must we try to make God the ultimate Mr. Nice Guy? Why feel the need to divest him of all characteristics that don't give us warm, fuzzy feelings? The Open View certainly does not require this, nor does the Bible. God does in fact HATE evildoers, and will cast all who don't repent into hell. This is so obvious it shouldn't need to be said.
John, if you’ve been here for a while and seen my posts, you know that I’m the LAST person to try to make God the ultimate Mr. Nice Guy. Can I get a WITNESS on this one?? That’s why Modes said what he said:
quote:
BTW: does anyone else find it comical that Mephi (of all people!!!) is out doing Greg in terms of God's love? That's gotta make someone besides me smile. 
I am the FIRST one to try to illustrate some of the more heinous things that we see God doing in Scripture…and the first one to press the theodicy issue to it’s ultimate precipice. Ask anyone around here or check my old posts.
So, it is hoped it be understood that I am not promoting this idea for “warm, fuzzy feelings”. I just don’t do that. Actually, I feel that this should be anything but that. It should really jar our minds that love really CAN look like judgement and exclusion. It should really jar our minds that loving our neighbor really isn’t as EASY as we thought it was, even when we gave lipservice to how hard it was. It should really make us shiver that if God can love his consummate enemy even while battling said enemy into utter destruction, that we now have ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to hate and objectify ANYONE for ANY REASON. This is not warm, fuzzy feeling stuff. This is convicting, cognitive dissonance producing, existentially wrenching stuff.
Which is why I love it.
"I've been converted three times. The first was to traditional Christianity; the second to honesty and the third was to the Love of God and man (humanity) The third was the real conversion. The first two were preliminary."
--Nels Ferre, a theologian speaking of his spiritual journey with the Triune God
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Electra
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Date Joined Feb 2002
Total Posts : 611
| Posted 8/6/2003 8:25 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by rossfadeinout
Hey all,
Good stuff Icon, you beat me to the point... But it needs to be said again and again! What is the gospel anyway? GOOD NEWS! quote:
For we yet being without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will with difficulty die for a righteous one, yet perhaps one would even dare to die for a good one. But God commends His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. ---ROMANS 5:6-8
God's anger, wrath, hate, judgement are expressions of His love, not opposed to his love.
Ross
I agree, good show Mephi & Iconoclast.  For anyone who is interested in exploring the biblical support for the intuition Ross expresses above, I highly recommend anything written by OT scholar, Terence Fretheim. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.  Electra
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. ~ Dostoevsky | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 8/6/2003 9:28 AM (GMT -6) | | Mephi: I just want to limit this to PREFERENCE or just plain “not wanting to do it” rather than it not being logically warranted to say that God loves Satan.
Tom: That's not entirely fair. I'm certainly not resting entirely on preference or plain not wanting to do it. I respect your conviction in the logical warrant of your view to love Satan. I however am not convinced by it.
Mephi: I think my definition of love makes the latter possible and warranted.
Tom: Cool. But that doesn't mean my reason for not loving Satan boils down to personal preference and lack of willingness to love Satan.
Mephi: But this actually wasn’t the heart of my question. My question was essentially why are you so AVERSE to calling this “love” with respect to Satan.
Tom: I'm not averse to it. I just don't see that "mourning" Satan's loss and the pain God must experience due to his output of evil amounts to presently loving Satan himself. It seems more likely to be be an expression of love for God.
Can you offer me some motivation to seeing the importance of this issue at all? So far you've offered only "protection against objectifying evil." Is that it? I'm mean that's important (I'm not downplaying it). I just don't think I require this to avoid objectifying evil, if that's OK with you all.
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One Love
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| Posted 8/6/2003 10:20 AM (GMT -6) | | Ok…
Tom:
quote:
But that doesn't mean my reason for not loving Satan boils down to personal preference and lack of willingness to love Satan.
That’s what I’m trying to find out then. What IS the reason? It has not been really specified. I think that now I have a HINT here…
quote:
I just don't see that "mourning" Satan's loss and the pain God must experience due to his output of evil amounts to presently loving Satan himself. It seems more likely to be be an expression of love for God.
What I’m hearing is that you don’t see “mourning” for Satan as an expression of LOVE for Satan. You choose to see this as an expression of love for God. But this wouldn’t work because if GOD mourns for Satan, then obviously it wouldn’t be God expressing love for Godself.
I tried to explain that, from my understanding, for God to mourn “what could have been” and “what tragedy now is” with respect to any being is to do exactly what my description states. 1) There is obviously an acknowledgement of another’s existence in all of it’s distinctiveness 2) Worth is given on that basis. If God didn’t CARE, then whence would be any of the mourning? 3) There is not only benevolent disposition, but investment of the self in the mourning of the other genuinely for that other.
Again, like Iconoclast said and I seconded, we don’t “mourn” things that we are against. (Would anyone TRULY mourn the existence of AIDS, cerebral palsy, or SIDS when they cease to exist?) We rejoice completely at their elimination WITHOUT remorse of its destruction. To say that God actually mourns Satan without LOVING Satan not only seems completely incoherent given God BEING love, but it just doesn’t make sense even from an EMOTIONAL and psychological standpoint. Genuine mourning PRESUPPOSES love and care.
***********************
Tom:
quote:
Can you offer me some motivation to seeing the importance of this issue at all? So far you've offered only "protection against objectifying evil." Is that it? I'm mean that's important (I'm not downplaying it). I just don't think I require this to avoid objectifying evil, if that's OK with you all.
The importance is thus: For the description of love that we are attempting to intuit, does love mean to unconditionally love ALL SENTIENT BEINGS, regardless of how evil they are? This question is necessarily answered in processing the idea of God loving Satan, who is supposedly the MOST solidified of all those solidified in being anti-love. To say that God loves ALL enemies and objectifies NO ONE, not even Satan, has huge praxeological implications that I’d hoped I had already spelled out.
Moreover, this position truly has the power to RESOLVE the theodicy problem. No joke. No lie. It goes along with what I suggested before about the sustaining grace of God being seen as loving action TO each individual being IN their distinctiveness. But it won’t work if it can really be shown that God, for whatever reason, really doesn’t LOVE all sentient beings.
And this is why I’m pressing this here. I’m looking for the means to DISPROVE this idea logically just like one would look for some idea to disprove a hypothesis. To the extent that a hypothesis fails to be disproven, it has that much more credibility. So far, I have seen no convincing arguments to show that God (who IS love) CANNOT or DOES NOT love all sentient beings unconditionally.
If YOU, Tom, have such an argument upon which you base your refusal to say that God loves Satan, then THAT’S what I’m looking for.
Hope this helps,
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Tom
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| Posted 8/6/2003 1:15 PM (GMT -6) | | At 2:30 AM I'm too tired to put in the commands for bold!
Mephi: The importance is thus: For the description of love that we are attempting to intuit, does love mean to unconditionally love ALL SENTIENT BEINGS, regardless of how evil they are?
Tom: The importance of the question can’t be a question. Give me a succinct statement of the importance of this question (the importance of the answer that is).
Mephi: Moreover, this position truly has the power to RESOLVE the theodicy problem.
Tom: I admire your confidence, but I categorically deny this privilege belongs (or will belong) to any theology…ever.
Mephi: No joke. No lie. It goes along with what I suggested before about the sustaining grace of God being seen as loving action TO each individual being IN their distinctiveness.
Tom: But sustaining action doesn’t necessitate love. It can. It doesn’t have to. I can choose to prolong the life of one I hate to maximize that person’s judgment. I don’t see anything here Mephi.
Mephi: But it won’t work if it can really be shown that God, for whatever reason, really doesn’t LOVE all sentient beings.
Tom: Does the entire system come crashing down for you if Satan and his cohorts constitute an exception to the rule? Doesn’t bother me. I’m not afraid that God may not love me if it’s true that he doesn’t love Satan. I just figure that in becoming what he became he ceased to be an object (don't get hung up here; I'm not objectifying Satan) of God's love.
But here's the problem. In claiming Satan is an exception to the rule, I am not denying that God grives the loss of what could have been and what Satan could have been which is ALL you claim God's love for Satan amounts to anyhow. And I affirm this. You affirm this. You call this love. I don't. Who friggin cares what we CALL it if we both manifest the same expression in relation to Satan? There is no more argument here, Bro. The importance of the issue must lie in the CONTENT of the expression in question (i.e., grieving and mourning). And in this we agree on CONTENT. You label it love in the present tense. I label it grief and mourning and don't see it as present tense love. Who friggin cares? We're relating to Satan in precisely the same way.
You say Potatoe and I say Patata. Let's call the whole thing off.
Mephi: So far, I have seen no convincing arguments to show that God (who IS love) CANNOT or DOES NOT love all sentient beings unconditionally.
Tom: What you ought to be arguing is that there are no convincing arguments to show that God does not grieve the loss of righteouness, potential goodness, and relationship with Satan that could have been, instead of arguing what we ought to CALL this.
OK, let me toss this out (it’s 2 AM and I’m not thinking clearly anyway!). Here it goes:
The Cross is THE ultimate expression of God’s love. God’s love incarnate. That’s where our assurance that God loves US sentient beings is anchored. Jesus died FOR us, for those he loved. If I can’t render the Cross as an act of love embracing Satan, as an expression of love to him, then I’ll assume God doesn’t love Satan, for I cannot understand God loving outside the Cross. God loves those he died for, and he died for those he loves. Does this supreme expression of love include Satan? We have good reason to believe it does NOT lovingly embrace him. We have every reason to believe rather that the Cross relates to Satan as the bullet in his brain.
If the Cross defines God’s love. And the Cross doesn’t embrace Satan. Satan isn’t embraced by God’s love. Works for me.
Makes sense to anybody else?
Tom  | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 8/6/2003 4:22 PM (GMT -6) | | Heh..hehe…
I’ll deal with your main objecting thought…
Tom:
quote:
The Cross is THE ultimate expression of God’s love. God’s love incarnate. That’s where our assurance that God loves US sentient beings is anchored. Jesus died FOR us, for those he loved. If I can’t render the Cross as an act of love embracing Satan, as an expression of love to him, then I’ll assume God doesn’t love Satan, for I cannot understand God loving outside the Cross. God loves those he died for, and he died for those he loves. Does this supreme expression of love include Satan? We have good reason to believe it does NOT lovingly embrace him. We have every reason to believe rather that the Cross relates to Satan as the bullet in his brain.
If the Cross defines God’s love. And the Cross doesn’t embrace Satan. Satan isn’t embraced by God’s love. Works for me.
Hmmm…if judgment is INDEED a work of love…if God’s wrath truly IS the other side of God’s love, then how could the Cross NOT “embrace” Satan? Unless you truly want to try to separate the Cross’ wrath and judgment against Satan (AND ALL SINNERS) from God’s LOVE, you cannot say otherwise. Are you even trying to say that SALVATION is the only context of God’s love? That God ONLY loves those that end up being SAVED (rather than JUDGED) by the Cross??
Well, now…I just don’t think this works. For your argument to work, it would seem that you necessarily have to bifurcate God’s wrath and judgment from God’s love. A big no-no. What say you, Electra?
The Cross condemns SIN. Utterly and completely. Without remorse or mourning. Those who languish in sin partake in that condemnation. To the breaking heart of God. Advocating centrality of the Cross does NOT end up saying that God doesn’t love those who end up condemned in sin.
Look, Tom. If you have such a problem with this, don’t sweat it. You’ve given me your reasoning, so I suppose that’s all I needed. Do yer thing…
PS: Just a favor and aside. Your polled is locked. I didn't know if you knew it or not. Could you unlock it so I (and some others) could get my vote in? Sweet.
"I've been converted three times. The first was to traditional Christianity; the second to honesty and the third was to the Love of God and man (humanity) The third was the real conversion. The first two were preliminary."
--Nels Ferre, a theologian speaking of his spiritual journey with the Triune God
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Tom
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| Posted 8/6/2003 7:35 PM (GMT -6) | | Mephi: Look, Tom. If you have such a problem with this, don’t sweat it. You’ve given me your reasoning, so I suppose that’s all I needed.
Tom: So, here's you hat, what's your hurry? OK OK I'm leaving! Don't rush me out the door so quickly though. I don't "have such a problem" with any of this, which I attempted to express to you. You and I "feel" the same thing for Satan. We share the same grief. Outside of that CONTENT, that expression, it's just labelling a shared reality. And I say, who cares? I don't have a problem with you labelling your grief for Satan as present-tense love. None at all. You however seem to have something of importance at stake in the label, the tag.
I also feel like you just reduce my objections down to being personal "problems," "preferences," and lack of "willingness to do" things "to do"? Come on dude! I'm "doing" to and with regard to Satan the same thing you're doing. Just calling it something different.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 8/6/2003 10:17 PM (GMT -6) | | Doc:
quote:
Meph, (as asked on the part deux thread) if God's love is shown to all sentient beings by virtue of the fact that he holds them in existence, then if God ultimately annihialtes them, does this mean he stopped loving them? And what CONDITION led him to do so when he did and not earlier?
I deal with this extensively in Part Deux thread. Check it out.
***************************
Doc:
quote:
My pre-existent twin is so right on, by the way, in his seeing the compatibility between mourning a being and being wholly against a being -- for the being has become something that is the antithesis of love. You LOVE and MOURN what could have been, what should have been, and THEREFORE HATE what now is.
Oh, I see. Heh. This is what I see you thinking…
Imagine your beautiful, intelligent, loving, diligent wife (Hi, Shelly! ) were, by terrible circumstances taken to an laboratory and tranformed into a horrific zombie like person. (Resident Evil, the video game, baybaaaaaaaay!!) Everything that you knew about your wife is GONE. Only this shell of drooling, seething evil remains. NOTHING of who she used to be is there. You would mourn the LOSS of your wife whom you loved…and you would HATE the mockery of her existence that is the zombie.
This is how I see you thinking. That for God, Satan (or anyone else solidified in sin) would be seen as just a ZOMBIE with nothing there left to love. Satan would be DEAD to God. So, God would only have a MEMORY to mourn and a present reality to HATE.
This ties RIGHT IN with your idea of personhood: the sentient capacity to love. To the extent that a sentient being no longer has the capacity to love, they are DEAD (non-existent) to God and cannot be loved by God except by memory or contemplation on what could have been. If you were to just use sentience as the seat of personhood, then your idea above wouldn’t apply, because you can have a totally evil sentient being.
But understand that this gets you RIGHT BACK to the problem that I tried to show you earlier, that Iconoclast agreed with. I will place it here in full. From page 2 of Part Deux thread…
______________________________-
Let’s cut to the chase of how I see you attempting to get out of this.
Meph, I am saying that God loves the “potential for love” in all persons. Personhood is not just sentience. It is the sentient capacity to love. Actually, THIS is the Image of God. This is the OBJECT of God’s love in all sentient beings. To the extent that sentient beings, for whatever reason, don’t have this object of God’s love, there is nothing there for God to love. Therefore, God doesn’t love them.
This is just to let you know that I know what you are saying. Now…
Think back, Doc. Think back to “Works of Love”
Wouldn’t what you are describing above not be anything but SELF-LOVE as defined by Kiekegaard?? You know the book, Doc.
Think about it. All you are saying is that God ONLY loves the “God-factor” in us. Not only does this completely negate the idea of unconditional love for God, but this also makes it quite clear that God really doesn’t love INDIVIDUAL SUBJECTS in all their distinctiveness at all. He loves LOCI OF LOVING POTENTIAL within some people.
So, God doesn’t really love US (sinful, human beings), God loves the “God” in us, no matter how small it is. And when that’s gone, so is God’s love.
So, instead of saying that God loves all sentient beings including Satan…instead of saying that God loves every thinking, feeling, self-aware, choosing being IN all their distinctiveness unconditionally…regardless of WHO they are, WHAT choices they've made, or HOW they've wasted their lives...you would rather say that God:
1) ONLY ultimately possesses SELF-LOVE of a telelogical sort, not true love for the OTHER qua other…
and…
2) doesn’t love individual persons in their particular distinctiveness, just their abstract potential loci.
_______________________________
See the issue. To the extent that you use YOUR idea of personhood, you get into some BIG problems. Ask Iconoclast. God becomes the ULTIMATE lover of self and relativizer of persons. Surely, you don’t want THIS, do you, Doc?
In short, your idea of mourning the past and hating the present is grounded in an idea of personhood that is PROBLEMATIC, at best, when taken to its logical conclusion. So, I humbly ask that you RETHINK your definition, and in turn, your idea of what it means to MOURN beings presently.
"I've been converted three times. The first was to traditional Christianity; the second to honesty and the third was to the Love of God and man (humanity) The third was the real conversion. The first two were preliminary."
--Nels Ferre, a theologian speaking of his spiritual journey with the Triune God
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Tom
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| Posted 8/6/2003 11:43 PM (GMT -6) | | Very nice point about annihilation Doc.
Mephi, I didn’t suggest that the Cross doesn’t embrace Satan. I suggested that it didn’t embrace him as an act of love. The Cross is rather an act of judgment against Satan. Now, some acts of judgment are evidently redemptive in nature. Love is behind them. God disciplines us. He judges Israel to win her back. But you’ve already conceded Satan’s state is a hopeless. There is nothing to redeem. Hence, this loving dimension to judgment does not embrace Satan. The Cross for Satan is not an expression of God’s love for Satan. But that’s just how I see it.
Two other things.
One, will somebody tell me what Satan’s “worth” is? If love is affirming the worth of another person at expense to one’s self, what is Satan’s present “value” or “worth” to God (or to us).
Secondly...rats, I just forgot my second question. Rats.
My brain is mush.
Tom
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Tom
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| Posted 8/6/2003 11:48 PM (GMT -6) | | I remembered my second point!
I personally don't think solidification without remainder happens to human beings in THIS life. Hitler was bad. He could have been worse. So I don't really find it persuasive to argue that God must relate to Satan (an irredeemably solidified without remainder being) based on supposed parallels with humans who were or are irredeemably solidified without remainder.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 8/6/2003 11:53 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
quote:
So, here's you hat, what's your hurry? OK OK I'm leaving! Don't rush me out the door so quickly though. I don't "have such a problem" with any of this, which I attempted to express to you. You and I "feel" the same thing for Satan. We share the same grief. Outside of that CONTENT, that expression, it's just labelling a shared reality. And I say, who cares? I don't have a problem with you labelling your grief for Satan as present-tense love. None at all. You however seem to have something of importance at stake in the label, the tag.
I also feel like you just reduce my objections down to being personal "problems," "preferences," and lack of "willingness to do" things "to do"? Come on dude! I'm "doing" to and with regard to Satan the same thing you're doing. Just calling it something different.
Besides the “Cross” thing, I didn’t know what else your objections were. This is what it sounded to me like you were saying:
I agree with the CONTENT of what you are saying, but I am CALLING it something else.
To which, my question was:
Ok. WHY are you calling it something else? Is there some REASON that you are calling it something else?
Put yourself in my position. If someone agreed with you about the complete CONTENT of an idea, but not the NAME that you (and others) were using to refer to it…and, to your knowledge, didn’t give you any REASON for why they didn’t like the name, wouldn’t you think that it may have just been personal preference or something like that?
It seemed to be by fiat or just arbitrary.
Now when you started dealing with the Cross thing, then that showed me a potential REASON why you couldn’t call it love. And now things made sense.
quote:
If the Cross defines God’s love. And the Cross doesn’t embrace Satan. Satan isn’t embraced by God’s love. Works for me.
Even though I think that your reason ultimately doesn’t work, I can acknowledge that as being your reason for not calling it love. Cool.
"I've been converted three times. The first was to traditional Christianity; the second to honesty and the third was to the Love of God and man (humanity) The third was the real conversion. The first two were preliminary."
--Nels Ferre, a theologian speaking of his spiritual journey with the Triune God
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Tom
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| Posted 8/9/2003 10:04 AM (GMT -6) | | It's too late to matter now, but this poll is open now. Sorry I had it closed. Thought it was open. Then Mephi mentioned it. Ooops.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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ReasonableDoubt
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| Posted 8/12/2003 1:19 PM (GMT -6) | | Who exactly is Satan, anyway? The Bible doesn't give us much to go on - it's mostly outside tradition that asserts he is Lucifer, a fallen angel, etc. I've been told that only one verse in Isaiah vaguely references "Lucifer"- as "Oh how far you have fallen, etc" but that many believe that he was talking about a star and not a fallen angel....
In the Jewish tradition Satan "the accuser" is an angel - not some evil demon who rules over hell (another pretty non-Jewish notion)- and so the accuser acts according to God's command- they cite the book of Job for some support.
I'm just tossing that out there.
If instead of being an actual essence or being, "Satan" is merely the idea or concept of sin and evil, then the question about loving Satan is moot.... | | Back to Top | | |
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