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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 9/25/2003 6:29 PM (GMT -6) |   | Tom made a wonderful post. Really. It was just great!
I would "mine" this one sentence a bit more though:
quote:
Certainly, it's contradictory to assert that God is immutable or timeless with respect to the manner in which he is personal with us.
1. I think that it is proper to Christological soteriology to mention that our relationship with God is one where it is WE who are changed.
2. I also think it proper, immediatly after that, to say that while God is immutable, God does, in Christ, suffer. (And THERE is where not putting God in a time-box really helps. It is important that we can affirm a statement like: "Before the foundaions of the world there was a Cross in the heart of God." We should embrace that without trying to work out the mechanics along the lines of linear time.)
3. God's being personal with us is something that requires us to reflect on what our personhood IS. ("the manner in which he is personal with us.") THAT relationship is different than a relationship between two humans. Marriage is a "mystery" that reflects our relationship with God--and unique in that respect of relationships we can have. Our personhood is something of the nature that the incarnation was a completion and not something un-natural. Our relationship with God is something best seen in the Incarnation itself, where the two different natures were united without mixture or confusion in one hypostasis. And our relationship with God is by the Spirit in Christ. Even the unregenerate have a relationship, as the Spirit indwells all of creation.
4. Where I 'back off" big-time is when someone says that the creation affects God. Contrary, God creates and sustains creation. And his will preceeded the creation. (No, not some strawman's "blueprint.") God's will is active; yet he draws in our cooperation. But all is within him, and through him and to him.
So, honorman, I'll keep concerned.
But Tom's post was wonderful. Good job!!!! | | Back to Top | | |
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Ochuk
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 102
| Posted 9/26/2003 7:40 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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aquinas
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2003
Total Posts : 36
| Posted 9/26/2003 4:13 PM (GMT -6) | | TGB,
You said,
"Geisler is a critic of the OV, but he doesn't argue that God is "temporal." He argues that God is both temporal and atemporal."
I think I can safely say that Geisler does not argue that God is temporal. If you have a place that you think he specifically argues for this, let me know. If I can't respond, I can ask him next time I see him. Then I can get back to you.
If we allow pious feelings to decree what nature should be, we are bound to wrong nature, for how could we find in piety a principle of self-restriction? In theology, as in any other science, the main question is not to be pious, but to be right. For there is nothing pious in being wrong about God! --Etienne Gilson | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 9/26/2003 8:35 PM (GMT -6) | | aquinas: I think I can safely say that Geisler does not argue that God is temporal. If you have a place that you think he specifically argues for this, let me know. If I can't respond, I can ask him next time I see him. Then I can get back to you.
Tom: He obviously doesn't argue God is MERELY temporal, but on his website (in his response to Boyd in the "Articles" section) he agrees that inasmuch as God can and does act in time God experiences the flow of time. That seemed to suggest to me that Geisler agrees that God is in this respect temporal, but that God is not limited to this, so that God is BOTH temporal and timeless.
But you might be right. Being an Aquinas scholar (so I understand), Geisler probably goes the same route, which (so I understand) means God's acts in time do not constitute an experience of time. God remains absolutely untouched by time.
Tom | | Back to Top | | |
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PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 9/27/2003 7:15 PM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by GregBoyd
[POW: Where I 'back off" big-time is when someone says that the creation affects God.
Doc: What is wrong with creation affecting God? How can God genuinely love us if we don’t affect him? How can we have an interpersonal relationship with God if we can’t affect God? How can Scripture depict prayer as changing God’s mind, of our rebellion breaking God’s heart, and of our sin leading Christ to become a man and die on the cross, if we don’t "affect God"? I think Aquinas was brilliant when he worked out the full implications of this Aristotelian model of unaffected perfection when he concluded "the relationship between God and the world is real to the world but NOT TO GOD." For if the creation doesn’t affect God at all, how could God’s relationship to it be real?
What you "back off" of big-time I plunge headfirst into super big time!!! To me, one of the most glorious aspects of the biblical narrative is that CREATION AFFECTS GOD – to the core of his heart!
Doc
Personally I think you just took an oportunity to grandstand your emotions in this post.
For SURE, you didn't catch up with my response to Tom's post. What you say of Aristotle is certainly NOT what I think. So your 'response' just isn't a response; its a soap box.
You ignored/criticized me for not holding to what I said: "It is important that we can affirm a statement like: 'Before the foundaions of the world there was a Cross in the heart of God.'"
1. You ask: What is wrong with creation affecting God?
quote:
af·fect
tr.v. af·fect·ed, af·fect·ing, af·fects
To have an influence on or effect a change in
Our sin did NOT change God's love for us. He loved us before we sinned, and that love is unchanged.
2. You ask: How can God genuinely love us if we don’t affect him?
Perichoresis is a coinherence of love among the Persons of the One Triune God. God's love is ecstatic. And in Christ, by the Spirit God draws us to participate in the Trinitarian love shared by the Father, His Son, and the Spirit. God is the source of that love. And His love is unfathomable. The love that we reeive does not need prompting from us. God loved us even before he made us!
3. You ask: How can we have an interpersonal relationship with God if we can’t affect God?
One of the important truths in Christianity, it that WE have nothing to bring to God but these two things: our selves, and our participation in and with God's grace. The Lutherans have a very good grasp on the first; and the Orthodox on both the first and the second. We don't have to "effect a change in" (dictionary definition above of "affect") God. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes on Him shall not perish but have ever lasting live." (John 3:16)
How we can have an interpersonal relationship is this: that our being created as persons is the relative "image" of God in us, that reflects the perfect Image that the Son is of the Father. The Fathar's love and the Son's participation in it are perfect. They perichoretically share in it. They do not "change." "Change" is not necessary for their participation in love to be personal. And WE can participate in their love, in Christ by the Spirit without God changing. In fact, by participating in it we move towards the dynamic stillness of God's love. Eternal life.
"Eternal life" is a seeming contradiction. And you have said that you don't like any number of traditional couplets that the church has used over the centuries to express what is undefinable. But that would be just sad if you never come to embrace this kind of language.
Eternal life grows and does not cease to be what it is. Dynamic stillness is just my attempt to put that same thought into other words. Perfection of our nature as God created us to become, and yet not ceasing to grow. That seems very strongly to be the intuition of the Saints over the centuries regarding our destiny of loving communion with God.
4. You said: For if the creation doesn’t affect God at all, how could God’s relationship to it be real?
"If creation does not 'effect a change in' (dictionary) God ... how could God’s relationship to it be real?"
Were creation accomplished by something other than what the Church has insisted on -- creation ex nihilo -- THEN your question would have merit. BUT, creation was not accomplished by taking something preexisting and then forming it. And God's relationship to creation is not a symmetrical one. It is not reciprocal. God is Creator. And that creation is BY HIS WORD. That is highly, distincly PERSONAL. The Word "spoken in the beginning" is none other than God the Son. In love we were known before our creation.
The point is, that a contemporary emotional-based definition of God's love takes away from God as Creator. And while it can pretend to be more personal -- by charging at the windmills of an impersonal Greek deity -- it is distracted from the eternally loving, dyamically personal "Creator of the heavens, the earth, the sea and all that is in them" (a common liturgical beginning). The Liturgy, in the meriads of forms it takes, begins by declaring that God is Creator, and is present, and ends by glorifying the Trinity.
The Trinity preserves both the Personal nature of God, and God's unity as Love. God's dynamic love is revealed to us in the Trinity. And we experience it in the Incarnate Son.
The Son fulfilled all righteousness, but not to satisfy personal animosity by the Father towards us. Christ willingly suffered for our sins to "become sin" for us, that the body and mind that he raised from the dead would be "like us in every way"--except having his own sins needing healing.
God loves and loved us before we sinned, after, and after our salvation. God's love doesn't change. God's salvation in Christ does not show us an evolution of God's love. It reveals to us a little bit of the fabric of that love, and of God's love as it is incarnate also in our creation.
God's love is also present in the Church. We are Christ's incarnate Body by the Spirit. And Christ sends the Spirit to us in the Church that we too may, just like Christ, bear the Spirit within us. Taht indwelling is not a mere external resting upon. (O.T.) We can share in the kingdom of the Spirit. In Christ we can share in the perichoresis of God's unchanging and dynamic love.
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GO CUBS!
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