Mark P: Let's just add one more thought. It's to do with Love. There's something it seems to me that knows it's right to Love people despite their faults, how does this play into the whole thing? Does God choose to have compassion on us? Or can't he help but pity us?

Jeff: God can't help but pity us. God is not obligated by some standard of right. He simply IS a loving being. But He is also constrained by the ends of creation and the means which are best fitted to those ends. E.g., Thessalonians speaks of suffering to be fit for the Christ's kingdom. This is, I think, because God is trying to attain the purpose of creation without diverging from the original ideal mode (pre-Fall plan, i.e.) any more than is necessary. The propitiation is part of that process.

Moreover, the temporal end of creation (Christ's reign and glorification) necessarily entails eternal implications. Hence, it is preeminently fitting to perfect the redeemed. Why live forever with a being less than perfectly holy when there is a way to make them perfectly holy--i.e., the propitiation. To do so would be irrational.

Mark P: I think I'm left with two theological roots to take, and I can't quite work them out.

1) God's grace shown at the cross was purely and absolutely a sovereign choice, there was nothing in him, nothing in any one else that made one choice right or fitting over and above the other, God could equally as well have not done that and been just as happy. The prodigal son could have repented, and God could have found it in himself to turn his face away and said 'no, you don't deserve it, I'm not havin' ya back'

Jeff: If what I wrote above is correct, this option can not be true. There are ends that God is attaining that He is interested in attaining. That interest is due, ultimately, to the godhead's loving disposition and plurality. IOW, if the godhead were not a plurality of persons, this doesn't work, I think. Because then, the fact that there was a Fall from the original plan would have rendered the original end unattainable. It is the fact that there is another person who can propitiate for the Father so as to attain the original end in a fitting way (i.e., fitted to the kind of moral order our world is) that makes redemption possible at all.

It is this non-arbitrary fittingness that I think scripture is getting at when it talks of the requirement of propitition and justice. That fittingness is determined by the original pre-Fall plan. God, by nature, will accomplish His end as close to that originally intended way as He can. Hence, to just forgive Adam after telling him that he would die for sinning would be irrational. But the propitiation preserves the faithfulness of God (He said sin would bring death) and the rationality of the moral order. And if there was only one person in the godhead, this couldn't happen.

Mark P: (if anyone's going to make a distinction between Justice and Love as habit often makes me, you're going to have to argue for it...I'm not taking it just like that, I see them both in the end as placing value where value's due)

Jeff: I'm trying to argue that justice is a correlative requirement of the temporal end that God has proposed for our creation. IOW, insomuch as that end is a loving end (glorifying His son), rendering justice is necessarily a correlative mean in working out that end in a loving way--given the nature of the rational, moral order that entails it's necessity. Why is it necessary? Because apart from justice (=fitting consequences of volitional action), the moral order of our world would be irrational. But we are rational creatures and require rationality to know how to function benevolently.

As my favorite philosopher (Noah Porter) says, the moral order requires that it be adapted to the end of concurrent, harmonious action of all impulses of all sentient beings. Thus, sentient satisfaction is the ultimate goal of the universe. For our existence is necessary to the attainment of the sentient satisfaction of the godhead. And our sentient satisfaction is also necessary as a motivation to work unto that end. If our work in the kingdom was known to result in eternal torment, would we continue to volitionally choose that work? Such a state of affairs would be no moral order at all. It would be irrational. The end of the creation is harmonious, sentient satisfaction.

Mark P: 2) For some reason, welcoming the prodigal back through the cross was the good and right thing to do, even at great expense to God, there was something that meant that this wasn't pure decision but the scales were tipped as it were. Is the cross what God is like? Or is it what God chose to be like?

Jeff: The ultimate sentient satisfaction of the godhead is what tips those scales. God's sentient satisfaction is truly augmented by attaining the ends of creation--or at least it adds a novel mode of sentient satisfaction for the godhead.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 9/23/2006 8:54:43 PM (GMT-5)