Post Edited (MephEternal) : 9/2/2006 4:39:39 PM (GMT-5)

Just saw this.....been away.

I think its safest to "say and unsay to a possitive effect." (mixing negative and possitive, and trying to know when to be silent)

Chicken? No. Just knowing both my personal limitations AND my limitations as a creature.

Glad to see you doing this. And so well.

Selah too.

Meph: The telos for God's creating creation and it's relationship to the Son has NOTHING to do with what we are talking about. I would actually say that you are correct in saying that the Father created Creation, in some part, for glorification of the Son. But this is a distinct conversation from saying whether or not the Father gets angry at people because something doesn't go his way. In other words, just because God's plans about Creation glorifying Christ are sometimes frustrated does NOT emotionally require God to get ANGRY with anyone.

Tell me you're seeing this, dude. I think you're tracking with me.

Jeff: I agree that if creation is relatively meaningless to God that anger is not necessarily required. I can even imagine that if creation is relatively meaningful to God (because of a purpose for glorifying His Son, e.g.) that He could be somehow frustrated without anger. But I don't know how to rule out the sheer logical possibility that He does feel anger at the intentional frustration of His purposes. Even Paul distinguishes, in Romans and Galations, between the wrath that occurs from an intentional trespass and the wrathless sin of ignorance.

But that doesn't preclude the possibility that God can prefer the future well-being even of a trespasser. We do it all the time. We get angry when people knowingly and volitionally do ill to their neighbor. But we can still melt in tears when they return to a more enlightened perspective on love and life. Many a great (and tear-jerking) movie is based on just such a theme.

So maybe God has the capacity, and maybe He doesn't. But I don't see either case as ruling out God's perfect valuation of Himself and His Son, anymore than my anger at evil people has anything to do with a temporary forgetfulness of my value. Anger, to my mind, has nothing to do with feeling devalued, per se.   It's a natural and passionate antipathetic response to intentional ill-doing to others. Such a response in intelligent beings only makes sense if they know that the universe was created with adaptations to the ends of a harmonious and concurrent well-being of all its sentient creatures.

And as James said, man's wrath doesn't work out God's righteousness. By implication, I'm assuming that he is implying that God's wrath does work out righteousness.  So I would think the feeling, per se, is not what is sinful--it is the non-proportionality of it (don't strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, e.g.) and the over-achieving action from it that can be inappropriate. God's anger (if He has it) would be in accordance with perfectly proportional assessment and it would result in the impulse to perfectly appropriate action. But once that loving action is complete, God's emotional equilibrium would be regained. Because the good that God desires would have been attained again.

There is the possibility, I suppose, that whereas emotions/feelings give rise to impulses to action in humans, that they don't in God. But I don't see why it is problematic that God is analogous to us in this respect--so long as His sensibilities are never malicious, petty, or otherwise non-benevolent. But on the other hand, if God never has to volitionally choose between natural impulses (which is what long-suffering entails, to my mind), then His volition is different than ours. In this case, He never restrains an impulse for a greater good and, hence, never truly suffers for another in a way that my mind can understand. But Christ seems to exhibit just such long-suffering restraint during his incarnation--supposedly exhibiting for us the Father.

Thus, God, restrains His impulses towards justice because He is implementing another way, after the Fall, to attain a greater good via mercy (i.e., atonement). This "way," combined with the temporal purposes entailed in Christ's glorification/reign require God to forebear (i.e., restrain an impulse to justice from the emotion of anger) for some finite period of time. And in this manner, we see that His love entails long-suffering restraint because of conflicting impulses just like our love does. So I don't see divine anger and it's associated impulse to justice as problematic. I see it as the condition for true long-suffering restraint--i.e., volitional love. I.e., of course, to the extent that God's love is understood to be analogous to ours.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 9/2/2006 7:20:59 PM (GMT-5)

Wow, how do I respond point for point?

Mephi: God's loving relationship within Godself provides God aesthetic satisfaction that makes Creation "relatively meaningless" to God ...AND... God's omniscience, omnipotence, vast-intelligence, and all-loving character…make for God being the most emotionally healthy and balanced being in relating oneself to Creation.

Tom: Agreed.

Mephi: These two things strongly lead to the idea that God would NOT meet any of the quite limiting criteria needed for God to subjectively internalize (and later, actively externalize) devaluation that comes from God's creation.

Tom: If it proves this then it also proves that God would not meet any of the criteria needed for God to subjectively internalize and later express evaluation that comes from people responding positively to his subjective aims. If we’re relatively meaningless because of God’s untouchable ad intra joy, this would include positive as well as negative affects.

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Meph: Is it possible to conceive of the aesthetically-satisfied, emotionally stable, all-loving, omniscient, infinitely-intelligent God... 1) internally feeling PERSONALLY DEVALUED by a person who sins against God, and... 2) having an active emotional response that exhibits divine displeasure towards said person BECAUSE of the internalized feeling of being devalued?

Tom: If yes to (1), then yes to (2) also. If no to (1), then no to (2). So it’s all about (1). And I agree that such a God would not NEED to feel anything at all (joy, pleasure, anger, hurt, grief). But he’s FREE to feel all these things as an act of grace. I thought we went through all this already?

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Mephi: What about all discovered "truth" (partial as it may be) being God's truth? Hmmm...

Tom: I hear ya. Yes. It’s all God’s truth. But I’m slightly more inclined to prefer Paul’s evaluation of human psychology over Freud’s (not the man Freud; I’m just using that to speak of modern psychology). What I mean is, if modern psychology sees things in a way that fundamentally undermines Scripture, I’m not going to dismiss Scripture in 48 hours. I’m more inclined to think that whatever truth there is in modern psychology will be confirmed by the truth of Scripture. And I’m going to just take Freud’s word for it.

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Mephi: It would seem to me that passionate states that accompany appropriate RELATIONALITY (in the end, judgement and/or discernment are factors of relationality) of an all-loving being would boil down to much one thing: Internalized desire for well-being of self and others.

Tom: But I don’t see how this rules out anger. It rules out sinful dysfunctionality, yeah. And if that’s the ONLY possible type of anger conceivable, then OK, God can’t get angry. So is everybody agreed on this? Are all psychologists agreed on this, Mephi? All of ‘em? That’s it?

I thought we agreed that what’s appropriate for God to do would be to “maximize good and minimize evil” across the board. To seek the well-being of others yes, but not the good of the “one” necessarily. Rather, to pursue a creation that reflects his beauty as much as possible. So it’s the whole deal God has in mind. Why can’t anger be that appropriately passionate response to any willful and so sufficiently responsible devaluing of Christ and Creation?

There’s more to your comments to discuss Mephi, but I gotta run!

Tom

http://www.bensusan.net/razilazenje/2006/03/23/an-angry-god-in-the-hands-of-fr-morelli/

"An Angry and Gentle God in the Hands of Fr. Morelli"

(SAMPLE)

In a March 2006 article, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry or Gentle God?, Fr. George Morelli makes a rather astounding statement:

Jesus is never harsh and strident. He is never shown as argumentative by the gospel writers.

His article is built around criticism of Jonathan Edwards’ famous 1740 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God; a sermon from which he quotes one single line:

The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow.

The point of his article is, as he states in his conclusion:

We are not “sinners in the hands of an angry God” but sinners in the hands of a gentle and loving God.

There can be no doubt, of course, that God is gentle and loving. Fr. Morelli does a very adequate job of marshalling Gospel evidence that Jesus, God Incarnate, was indeed, very loving and very gentle in His earthly ministry.

On the other hand, however, he ignores the other side of Jesus, that which was shown to the Scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites, and will be shown, in the final judgement to all those who reject His love, and who will be “cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

. . .

AND WHATEVER ELSE -- SINCE I DIDN'T ACTUALLY READ IT...

MORE FROM THE SITE AND ARTICLE IMMEDIATELY ABOVE:

I have commented on Fr. Morelli’s article not to deny the goodness, gentleness, or loving-kindness of our great God, or to establish the idea that God is mean, cold, and vicious. Rather, I defend here the idea that we must accept Him as He has revealed Himself to us, not turning to the right hand or the left. There is a significant trend today in Orthodoxy to deny the wrath and justice of God in favour of entirely “non-juridical” conceptions, to assert that God, being goodness and love, and not subject to passions, cannot have any measure of dispassionate wrath; that the good God would not consign anyone to the fire. A key example of this is Alexander Kalomiros’ very popular lecture, The River of Fire.

The position militates against a great deal of the revelation though. In fact, Jesus Himself spoke more about Gehenna than any other figure in the Scriptures. Certainly it is true that when we speak of God’s wrath, anger, jealousy, etc., we are speaking by analogy. God, again, is not subject to passions. But the analogy would not exist, indeed, He would not have used these descriptions of Himself, were there not a core of shared meaning. Thus, in the apophatic tradition of Orthodox theology, we understand that God’s anger is not precisely the anger we have, but that it denotes His attitude toward sin and rebellion.

But Fr. George Morelli, following the modern trend (one shared by liberal Protestantism), to make God good and loving while denying His hatred for sin, His Divine wrath against the rebellion of His creature, and His eternal justice which will cause some to be told to depart into outer darkness, has preached for us a truncated Gospel.

Jesus Christ is the Truth, and anything that seeks to emphasise some of His attributes at the expense of others serves not the Truth, but a lie; a lie that makes our Lord less than what He Is.

And a lie is never so dangerous as when salvation is at stake.

...oh, and this person doesn't hate Edwards, she's just angry that he painted such an ugly picture of God

Post Edited (selah) : 9/4/2006 12:54:56 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (MephEternal) : 9/4/2006 9:36:08 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (MephEternal) : 9/4/2006 9:33:16 AM (GMT-5)