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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/20/2005 12:45 PM (GMT -6) |   | Mephi: Your move, yo.
Tom: Oh, did you move? I couldn't tell. The board looks the same to me.
(How was that Selah Vie? Pretty good eh?)
Tom
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/20/2005 12:55 PM (GMT -6) | |
Selah: hmmm. how come I always thought it was the boyd thesis/piper antithesis/and (since both rely heavily on their belief in scripture!) we were still looking for the Hegelian synthesis?We were...but then...like the NT Wright conception of Jesus to 2nd Temple Judaism and the Bahá’u’lláh of the Babi Faith emergent from Islam, I heard the oracles of my forerunners only to discover... I am he. I am one who was to come to become a Messenger of the the Almighty in the form of a Southern-bred, still-growin, African-American, hip-hop head, armchair philsophical theologian, liberal-to-center script ure teacher, and bold proclaimer of the Reign of God in a world devoid of existential meaning for itself. Yeah... ***************************** Tom: You are one messed up brutha.I mean this sincerely when I say this... You...have...NO...idea how right you are about that.And yet, isn't it just God's modus operandi to use the unlikeliest people for God's purposes? Yeah... MuwhAHAHAHAHAHA!! 
Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/20/2005 1:04:33 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/20/2005 2:32 PM (GMT -6) | | Sorry for the length, but this might be it until I get back home.
Mephi: Pretty close. You were ON POINT as far as talking towards our inability to increase or decrease God's QUALITATIVE aesthetically satisfying experience of beauty via God's loving, life-sharing, interdependent sociality.
Tom: That looks like you just assumed the point of debate, namely, that God can’t contingently experience interdependent relations (that is, with us).
Mephi: Insofar as this forms the very CORE of God's aseity (which Doc's reconstruction of Hartshorne's system says it DOES)…
Tom: Doc’s reconstruction doesn’t say God is incapable of the contingent aesthetic satisfaction via interdependent relations with contingent reality. What he agrees with is that we cannot affect God’s own trinitarian interdependent (if we know enough about God to even call it interdependence) aesthetic satisfaction.
Mephi: Assuming a God/world relationship post-creation, this radical independence (which doesn't go away because it's a necessary characteristic of God)…
Tom: Agreed. What constitutes God’s own Trinitarian interdependent sociality doesn’t “go away.”
Mephi: …and God's unsurpassably intense qualitative "pinnacle" experience which grounds said independence…
Tom: God vis-à-vis God, agreed.
Mephi: …makes symmetrical, mutually-influential contribution towards each other's qualitative experience of loving, interdependent sociality utterly impossible.
Tom: I honestly don’t think so. And I don’t know what else to argue that I haven’t already said. It’ll have to wait until we light up that hooka on Doc’s back porch.
I think the ‘aesthetic satisfaction’ metaphor is messing you up, dude. In the words of the great Lotus Master, you’re conceiving of this oversimplistically, as an infinitely intense pitch against which everything else would be measured as boring, or like eating the universe’s best ice-cream, after which all others are tasteless.
Try a different metaphor (and “aesthetical satisfaction” is, after all, just a metaphor). Think of the perfectly intense love between a couple, expressed but not constituted by a child, that is, what obtains between the couple is not constituted by the child. But what obtains couple vis-à-vie (I’m that vis-à-vis thang now) child IS partly constituted by the child.
You seem to think that unless we impact God’s ‘godness’ we are personally and relationally insignificant to him. I’m squinting to see this, but the blinding light of God’s personal and loving embrace just keeps coming through. I can’t see anything else.
Mephi: As far as the "broadening the field of God's loving and relational experience,” this IS in the realm of the surpassable.
Tom: And God is ‘personally’ and ‘relationally’ extended therein, which you seem to me to be denying.
Mephi: God's contingent expression of God's unsupassably intense ad intra is the context where variety and complexity are enhanced or decreased by human activity. This is the water in the bowl from the "PAT" thing. This is why I said the following: With respect to being an aspect of God's contingent expression that God's experiences and appreciates, we are SUPERFLUOUS, YET SIGNIFICANT. This means, again, that we are "meaningful" to God, insofar as we can help God expand the complexity of his contigent experience of loving relationality…
Tom: Not much to disagree with as far as I can see. We are superfluous yet significant to God is meaningful so long as we are not superfluous and significant in the same sense. I don’t have a problem. We are superfluous to God’s appreciation of divine beauty. We are significant to God’s appreciate of contingent beauty. But in both God is personally and relationally both influencer and influenced. There is no logical reason I can see for, and some good reasons for arguing against, limiting God’s personal relationality to God’s appreciation of divine beauty. His appreciation of both divine and contingent beauty can be fully informed and constituted in mutually personal ways, the former by Trinitarian sociality and the latter by divine-world relationality.
If we really contribute to God’s appreciation of non-divine reality, and that contribution is libertarian, then it’s not the case that the world is ONLY “an expression of” God. Something in God is also an expression of the world! It has to be so if we affect anything at all in God.
C’est la vie de Dieu! Il est magnifique! Dieu est personnel et relationnel avec nous! Vous ne concordez pas Selah?
Mephi: So, God has two variations of beautiful experience. One (the subjective intensity) is UNSURPASSABLE. The second (the objective expression) is SURPASSABLE.
Tom: I don’t know what that means. God doesn’t experience the world subjectively? God’s appreciation of the world is not a subjective appreciation?
Mephi: Doing good...doing good...
Tom: I heard that’s what Leon Spinks was mumbling when Larry Holmes sent him to the canvas in the third round in 1981. Yooo!
Mephi: Here's the deal. For God to be personal is for God to be an experiential center of and contributer to creative synthesis and aesthetic appreciation.
Tom: I thought it just meant influencing and being influenced by another person. Gosh! (Just yankin your chain.)
Mephi: For God to be relational is for God to have the ability to experience and contribute to another person's creative synthesis and aesthetic appreciation. In this way, God is metaphysically NO DIFFERENT than any other "person who relates to other persons."
Tom: Not metaphysically no different “in any respect”; just metaphysically similar in some respects, that is, with respect to the ability to given and take relationally with other contingent persons. This doesn’t exhaust the ways in which God may be metaphysically DIFFERENT from us.
Mephi: It is not being claimed here that God's personhood or ability to be relate to other persons are "unsurpassable" in and of themselves. Just like no one is saying that God's ability to love (which emerges from both) is "unsurpassable." We are saying that God's QUALITATIVE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY via loving sociality is "unsurpassable." These are different things. It could be argued that God's qualitative experience of God's OWN personhood and ability to relate cannot be improved upon...that that's WAY different from saying that God cannot relate to other persons. In short, there IS no sense of being "unsurpassably personal" or possessing "unsurpassable ability to relate." These qualities are either possessed or they are not.
Tom: Come back to this paragraph again when you get a chance ‘cause it’s late and there are several sharp turns in the road I don’t wanna mess up.
Mephi: THIS, my friend, is why I say that "loving interaction" is possible! It is very possible for God, as a person, to contribute to human qualitative experiences of love. It is very possible for a human being to, via their loving activity, contribute to God's appreciation of subjective aim alignment. Both parties are person and both parties are relating.
Tom: So now God DOES lovingly interact with us? For us this means God contributes to our “qualitative experiences of love.” But notice (in your words) that for God this means that we contribute to “God’s appreciation of subjective aim alignment” and not “God’s experience of love.” I don’t see how this is “loving interaction.”
Mephi: This should not be a problem then. As I've explained, using the process categories, both God and human beings have personhood and the ability to relate to one another.
Tom: No Mephi. Come on. I must have worded my analogy poorly if you came away thinking we agree. If you agree with me on my objection (the analogy about my wife), you can’t then say we don’t contribute to God’s experience of love. Believe me, we are not agreeing here.
Mephi: Love has different manifestations depending upon it's context. Love can demonstrate itself as rejoicing, wrath, mourning or sorrow, frustration, or even righteous anger. It's ALL love, but it's love contextualized.
Tom: It’s “love’s experience being determined by context.”
Mephi: When we contribute to God's contigent expression via our alignment or misalignment to God's subjective aims, WE CREATE VARIOUS CONTEXTS. This is how we contribute "meaningfully" to God's experience of God's own love as well as non-God reality.
Tom: I think I see where you’re headed and am going to disagree in an important way.
Mephi: Analogy. Imagine a house with a bright white light inside of it with 100 windows. The light shines out from the house, of course. Let's say that we have transparent window glass of different colors like red, blue, yellow, etc. To the extent that we put those different colored window glasses up, the light shining out of it will take on that tinge. If we were to replace all 100 windows with red glass, the light shining out would be red. If we were to replace all 100 windows with orange glass, the light shining out would be orange. And so on.
Tom: Here it comes.
Mephi: Bright light: God's love
Uncolored window pane: perfect alignment with God's subjective aim
Shaded window pane: imperfect alignment with God's subjective aim
See, there are CONTEXTS to consider here. In God's ad intra context, there is no "friction" to impede or "bring down" God's positive aesthetic experience of loving sociality. Thus the ad intra life of God is characterized by the EPITOME of joy, peace, happiness, tranquility, etc. Whereas the ad extra sociality of God DOES have "friction" that "brings down" God's positive aesthetic experience of loving sociality.
Tom: Two things: (1) Dude, this is what I’VE been saying. But it’s unintelligible if you make it (as you do) unilateral. It’s interdependent. God’s positive aesthetic experience is dependent upon contingent choices to relate. (2) Stop using impersonal analogies. We’re talking about persons in relation, right? Keep it to that. If it doesn’t work with persons, then it doesn’t illustrate the point. Suppose God opens the windows and starts talking to people passing by, urging them to come in, pleading with them, crying and shouting out his loving offer. Some come in. That makes him (him, God, the real flux capacitor) happy. He feels this happiness. We cause him to feel it. Other tells God to go to hell and flip him the bird. That makes him (him, God, the real flux capacitor) sad. He feels this sadness. We cause him to feel it.
Mephi: Now the issue I have (and one I think the Church has wrestled with FOREVER) is this: How does God's inner life of PERFECT JOY AND HAPPINESS relate to God's expressed social experience of deep pain and suffering? I would agree with Greg that there's no contradiction in saying that God can be eternally satisfied in the inner life and suffer on the outer life too. Naturally, it seems, much of the Church tradition relativized the "outer life" of God in light of the inner. It doesn't make either experience LESS REAL. It just says that one experience is MORE CENTRAL to God's general emotional tenor than the other. I don't see anything wrong with this. Actually, I feel this is pretty intuitive.
Tom: Then the discussion is over and we can shut this thread down, because THAT is precisely what I’VE been screaming out. But I don’t see how you hold this and also continue to argue God’s personal relations with us and not “interdependent.”
Mephi: There is a SIGNIFICANT difference between saying that God empathizes or sympathizes fully with our pain...and saying that God always provides an appropriate loving RESPONSE to existential situations when relating to others, as God aesthetically appreciates those situations fully.
Tom: I see no difference.
Mephi: The former requires interdependency, the latter does not...though both are PERSONAL, RELATIONAL expressions.
Tom: Dude, this is wrongheaded. When God responds to the human cry for help we don’t understand “personal” and “relational” in “God responds personally and relationally” as the unilateral assessment of and response to non-divine reality on the part of God. We take it to mean human suffering affects God, affects his field of experience, affects his friggin flux-capacitor, and solicits from his loving heart a response of compassion. That’s what I call ‘interdependence’. Now, maybe you think that’s what you just described. But in my view you didn’t. God being moved to compassion by our situation and responding loving toward our condition is interdependent. When we reject his loving offers we affect him, we drag down his appreciation of contingent beauty.
I have to stop. Totally exhausted. I'm super busy the next couple of days. I can check back once or twice to see if Selah Vie's French has improved, but then I fly back home on Sunday! Anybody wanna pick me up at the airport (7 PM) and drive me to Coon Rapids?
Tom
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/20/2005 3:49 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
We take it to mean human suffering affects God, affects his field of experience, affects his friggin flux-capacitor, and solicits from his loving heart a response of compassion. That’s what I call ‘interdependence’
1) I've never said that God couldn't have a mutually-influential relationship with God in any respects. I'd whole heartedly agree with what you've said above here. Actually, the entire idea of non-God realities being able to contribute to divine contingent expressive experience is TACITLY speaking about interdependent roles.
2) What I'm describing as mutually-influential, interdependent love relationality deals fundamentally with the ability to affect another person's qualitative experience of beauty via loving sociality. In other words, the ONLY WAY that I would consider two people in a mutually-influential, interdependent love relationship is if it was truly the case that, for each person in the relationship, their individual quality of beautiful experience via loving sociatity inextricably RELIED UPON the level of quality of beautiful experience via love for all other persons in the relationship.
This is why I don't like the marriage analogy. It won't fit. Why? Because interdependence exists within the family dynamic such that, if healthy, EVERYONE'S qualitative state of beautiful experience via loving sociality is wholly RELIANT on the states of everyone else! The mother won't fully feel the joy of unsurpassable beautiful experience in love while either her husband or her child are NOT feeling their full joy of beautiful experience. The father won't fully feel the joy of unsurpassable beautiful experience in love while either his wife or child are NOT feeling their full joy of beautiful experience. The child won't fully feel the joy of unsurpassable beautiful experience in love while either of his parents are NOT feeling their full joy of beautiful experience.
Just like Doc said in the book, it is NEVER the case that human beings can be full in and of themselves. He says that "...all humans need other humans to be full within themselves." Human beings are independent enough for personal distinction but essential DEPENDENT on one another as well. This is the foundation for BASELINE interdependency! And in interdepedent, mutually-influential love relationships, a "zenith" experience of loving sociality cannot happen for ANY person unless it happens for ALL persons in the relationship!
Really think about it, Tom. If you wanted complete interdependency in your family, could YOU achieve a "zenith" level of happy, delightful, and satisfied in loving sociality if any of your children COULD NOT, for whatever reason, acheive their "zenith" level??
NO, you couldn't.
Again, it's just like the Body of Christ analogy. If ANY members of the Body are hurting, theoretically, we are ALL hurting. The Body doesn't stop "hurting" until EVERY MEMBER of the BODY is free from pain!
Now, when we are talking about a God who's necessary ad intra existence (which is the locus of the "zenith"-level experience) is WHOLLY INDEPENDENT from all possible contingent beings...we are talking about a being who's unsurpassably intense qualitative state of beautiful experience via loving sociality metaphysically cannot be affected in any way. It can genuinely be the case that human beings, regardless of how they may try or want to do it, CANNOT affect God's qualitative beautiful experience via loving sociality.
This means, Tom, that God absolutely, positively, undoubtedly CAN NOT engage in mutually-influential, interdependent loving relationality where each party's qualitative state of beautiful experience via loving sociality is RELIANT upon the qualitative states of ALL OTHER PARTIES.
Hint: Hartshorne would say that it MUST be the case that God's qualitative state of beautiful experience is inextricably RELIANT upon the qualitative states of beautiful experience from ALL sentient creatures in the universe! This is why there was a necessary God/world relationship with his thing. He negated any POSSIBILITY for divine aseity in his worldview. Doc reconstructed things and brought in the idea of God's self-sufficieny and self-existence. The issues we are talking about are the RESULT.
WHAT does this TELL you, man???
*************
PS: If you're serious about needing the ride, I'll see what I can do. It's Aki's birthday weekend and I told her I'd spend the whole weekend with her. But I think I could get some leniency if you really needed the ride. Just give me a call when you get in the States...and I'll see what's up! Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/20/2005 3:52:12 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/20/2005 5:10 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Ever get SO tired you CAN’T sleep? Yeah, that’s me. Mind’s racing. Body is dead. Haven’t been able to sleep all week here in Belgium.
Mephi: This is why I don't like the marriage analogy. It won't fit. Why? Because interdependence exists within the family dynamic such that, if healthy, EVERYONE'S qualitative state of beautiful experience via loving sociality is wholly RELIANT on the states of everyone else! The mother won't fully feel the joy of unsurpassable beautiful experience in love while either her husband or her child are NOT feeling their full joy of beautiful experience.
Tom: We may be getting down to the nitty-gritty here, because in my view the mother’s experience of joy is always relative to some relationship. Her joy relative to her child will fluctuate in interdependence with that child, but this doesn’t logically entail the same fluctuation in her joy of relative to her interdependence upon, say, her husband. The intensity of one can, conceivably, be unsurpassable while the other be suffering. True, there is a family dynamic where what each is seeking FROM THE FAMILY relies upon all other in the family. But one individual in the family need be dependent upon all others in the family for all the intensity of his joy and satisfaction. With God, all we’re saying is that the trintarian interdependence is necessarily unsurpassable. But that’s one set of relations. God’s relationship with us is contingent, and may (as in fact it is) be crummy at times and wonderful and other times without ever impinging upon other relations God may have (viz., his own trinitarian relations).
Mephi: Just like Doc said in the book, it is NEVER the case that human beings can be full in and of themselves.
Tom: Humans, yes.
Mephi: Doc says that "...all humans need other humans to be full within themselves." Human beings are independent enough for personal distinction but essentially DEPENDENT on one another as well. This is the foundation for BASELINE interdependency! And in interdepedent, mutually-influential love relationships, a "zenith" experience of loving sociality cannot happen for ANY person unless it happens for ALL persons in the relationship!
Tom: In THE relationship? Which relationship? That’s the point. I’m not in your relationship with God. You’re not in my relationship with my Dad. With God, that zenith DOES happen for all persons in the relationship, the Trinitarian relationship. None of us are a part of THAT relationship, so its interdependence doesn’t include us. But God’s relationship to us? That’s an entirely different relationship, and you and I just disagree that the former relations (Trinitarian) rule out God’s being interdependent in some OTHER relationship.
Mephi: Really think about it, Tom. If you wanted complete interdependency in your family, could YOU achieve a "zenith" level of happy, delightful, and satisfied in loving sociality if any of your children COULD NOT, for whatever reason, acheive their "zenith" level?? NO, you couldn't.
Tom: I don’t WANT “complete” interdependency in my family. Who wants THAT? I don’t want (and work hard to avoid) my relationship with Anita being dependent upon what happens between me and my kids. Right? Well, that’s how I’m working it at least. Likewise, I don’t think God wants “complete” interdependence between the triune relations and us. We agree that’s quite impossible. And I don’t need that either. But I want God to be on some level interdependent with ME and that’s a different relationship with its own scope of interdependence.
Mephi: Now, when we are talking about a God who's necessary ad intra existence (which is the locus of the "zenith"-level experience) is WHOLLY INDEPENDENT from all possible contingent beings...we are talking about a being who's unsurpassably intense qualitative state of beautiful experience via loving sociality metaphysically cannot be affected in any way. It can genuinely be the case that human beings, regardless of how they may try or want to do it, CANNOT affect God's qualitative beautiful experience via loving sociality. This means, Tom, that God absolutely, positively, undoubtedly CAN NOT engage in mutually-influential, interdependent loving relationality where each party's qualitative state of beautiful experience via loving sociality is RELIANT upon the qualitative states of ALL OTHER PARTIES.
Tom: Ugh. It’s too late and I can no longer think. Got class in the morning.
Mephi: I see it now. It's all gonna come down to what's the ultimate source for the unsurpassable intensity of divine beautiful experience loving sociality:
God's experience of God's PARTICULAR kind of self-love,
OR
God's experience of love PER SE, via the IDEAL potentiality of love becoming ACTUAL.
Tom's going for the former, I'm going for the latter. We'll see. I'll hit Doc up on this one. It's the make or break question.
Tom: You might be right here Mephi. As tired as I am I’m not sure I’m reading those options rightly. But if you’re opting for the second choice, how is it you AFFIRM aseity? If the ultimate source for God’s unsurpassable experience of loving sociality is God’s experience of love via the actualization of some potential, then how can God’s aseity amount to necessarily unsurpassable satisfaction?
Nite nite,
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 10/20/2005 5:16:46 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Starkman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 10/20/2005 6:29 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Here's the post I did over on the Theism & Ultimate Meaning and Significance thread, which I think got totally lost because the attention is now on the Meph to the Witness Stand. I've edited the original post to be more clear and to adjust a few thoughts.
There are, perhaps a few, or even a lot, of things God has not (yet) experienced and cannot experience until He creates the environment in order to experience these things. To say, then, that God is self-satisified only means to say that when it comes to God, He doesn't have to create in order to find "more" of a fuller, higher or better expression and enjoyment of love and beauty, as if He were incomplete or imperfect in love and beauty if He did not create. That He did, and does, create means that IN RELATIONSHIP TO THAT CREATION He will experience what He otherwise would not have experienced. This does not add "more" to what God already experiences in and of Himself with regard to who and what He is. "More" is not extra stuff that was lacking before God experienced this "more" stuff, anymore than an open future becoming known by God is not "more" stuff added to God's omniscience which then makes Him complete or perfect.
God's relationship with Himself is necessary. His relationship with contingency is not—it is not true that creation is "necessary," even if we were to say that God's aseity was in question—God's ad intra is affected by His relationship with contigencies; regardless, God wouldn't still not HAVE to create. He could simply choose to go without.
As soon as God creates (particularly a sentient being made in His own image), God opens the door for a relationship other than within His Trinitarian self. Two distinct existences (ontologies, if you will) now exist: one being the self-satisfied Divine existence (God in relationship within Trinitarian concreteness) the other being the non-Divine contingence (God in relationship with that non-divine contingence). The concentration of that relationship is now other than with God Himself. Two worlds, so to speak, exist. The contingent world is worth something because it is begotten by the One who is of the epitome in worth and value. The contingent creation is worth something, because it was created by a (Good) being who put the worth into the creation.
it is ONLY between that creation and Creator where relationship is expressed. It is not at the core of either's essential being. God's necessary internal ad intra is not affected; the contingent creation's ad intra is not affected.
Using the marriage example...
I am who I am, regardless of who I marry. My essential core—all of who and what I am—is appreciated by myself for what I am. All of who and what I am cannot be added to or subtracted from, whether I marry or not. Thus, all of who and what I am can be (and should be) appreciated fully, with or without the marriage relationship. Marriage, therefore, cannot add to or subtract from the essentials of who and what I am as a person. NEVERTHELESS, I am still able to relate to and be affected by another outside of who and what I am. When "another" is brought into the game, a whole other world is created, one in whose ontology does not involved addition to or subtraction from either party's core being; however, the dynamics of what takes place between these two parties is only enabled by means of expression of who and what the parties each are. This expression in no way adds to or subtracts from either party's essential core. But without the core, there is no way to relate, for there is nothing there to relate with.
So, I can marry and find in my partner many aspects of relationship that are of deep and significate AS REGARDS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN US, and not as regards to who and what I am and how I enjoy who and what I am or how the other party enjoys who and what he or she is.
Within the Godhead, there is eternal connection; for this is how God exists. This connectedness can never be altered. It's value is not affected by anything outside. It's contents are undisturbed for who and what the Godhead is. But when the Godhead creates and expresses something of Itself with it's creation, the result is its own entity of value and worth.
In view of this, we do influence God's level of happiness in the same way He influences our happiness INSOFAR AS WE KEEP THE PLACE OF INFLUENCE WITHIN THIS PARTICULAR BI-DIRECTIONAL RELATIONSHIP AND NOT WITH REGARD TO GOD'S NECESSARY ESSENTIAL SELF-COMPLETENESS OR THE CREATION'S CORE. In other words, just because God can be completely self-fulfilled within Himself does not mean He cannot know and experience pain and sorrow as it regards that which is outside Himself (incarnation), but this doesn't change who and what God is. It doesn't add or subtract from that; it adds or subtracts from the relationship that is CREATED by two beings expressing who and what they are. On the other side of the coin, creation is completely insignificant ONLY as it relates to the core essential necessary existence of who and what God is, but that's a different ball game in which we are not invited to participate anyway. Indeed, we cannot participate in it.
Finally, in regard to our meaningfulness, it is NOT found by our relating to and within the core of who and what God is. That is a self-contained, self-running, ad intra affair. It is also (and get this, please) the same FOR ME! In other words, if God Himself were to tell me that I am of no value and have no worth, I could not believe Him; for I am made in His image; I have to be of worth. Plain and simple. There's nothing that can add to or subtract that (as I exist at this moment). My meaningfulness is a given whether I like it or not. Were God to say differently (and that could never be by virture of my having been made in His image—God's committed. and. nothing can change that!), it simply would not be the truth. Now, in that I do not possess my core necessarily, I may find that my sense of temporal worth causes me depression, but this can never happen within the Godhead.
Again, to use the marriage example, It'd be like saying that if my wife cannot affect who and what I am at core—the person to whom I relate to as myself and solely by myself—than my wife's life is meaningless to me and hers is meaningless. Doc's preached that God does God the way God does God, and we do ourselves the way we do ourselves. Our spouses become part this process of how we do ourselves, yet Doc was clear to state that our spouses do not become us nor do we become them; we retain our individuality—that core that cannot be infringed upon by another. That individuality for God is the essential perfection of completeness of love and beauty. That individuality in us is our core. We simply do not HAVE to have significance defined by how far we penetrate the Divince essence of love and beauty as it constitutes God.
Here's something Meph said earlier in this thread:
I make a significant separation between loving interaction and mutually-influential love relationality. The two are NOT the same thing. The perichoretic nature of the Trinity is the PERFECT example of mutually-influential love relationality. Healthy marriage and parenting are IMPERFECT examples of the same. Both of these things are mutually-influential because there is undeniable and utter INTERDEPENDENCY with respect to how each party is related to the other parties. Interdependency demands a level of DEPENDENCY. In other words, for genuine interdependency to occur, there must be some level upon which there is unconditioned RELIANCE upon others. Human beings, being what we are, are interdependent beings (regardless of how we try to act) because of the way we RELY on our environment and others around us.
Now, taken to love relationships, love relationships are mutually-influential when the degree to which each person in the love relationship experiences a certain level of beauty (in the form of love) that RELIES ON the level of beauty experience (again, love) of others in the relationship. What this means is that there is an interdependence such that ONE persons happiness or unhappiness necessarily AFFECTS every other person. Like the Body of Christ analogy. If it is the case that one person in a loving interaction in no way RELIES ON anyone else's level of beautiful love experience for their own beautiful love experience to be maximized, interdependency does NOT exist. Therefore, mutually-influential love relationship does not exist.
The interdependence is ONLY AS IT CONCERNS THE RELATIONSHIP. There is NOT, however, any increase, decrease or any other affect and effect upon the essence and core of either person in the relationship. Relationships simply do not affect the essence of who and what we are. We may THINK they do, but we are all too well protected from this danger, whether we think we are or not. Protection from disturbance to this reality of who and what we are is what maintains our individuality and, I believe, our having been made in His image.
Starkman
My teacher used to say that whenever he read Scripture, he would always ask the question, "What does this have to say about the character of God?" Working off his thinking, as I read Scripture, I have come to ask, "What does this have to say about the heart and passion of God's desire for relationship for us? | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/21/2005 12:23 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Violin: Je ne comprend pas.
Tom: Au contraire ma soeur! Vous comprenez très beaucoup!
Violin: Is this discussion going between two extremes of relatability and aseity: In one corner being the Thomist view (absolute immutability)--the relation between God & world means can have NO impact on God, only on Mankind; in the other corner being the Process view (non-immutability)--that the relation between God & world means can have FULL impact on God and on Mankind?
Tom: Yes, that seems to be the basic thing. On the one hand the classical God is unilaterally related to the world as cause is to effect and that’s it; nothing conditional about God or God's experience in any sense of the word. On the other hand, way out on the end of the finger tips, is process theology, which says the relationship between the world is entirely interdependent. The world is in God and God is in the world. The question then becomes, is ‘aseity’ (God’s existing as God independent of any world), a piece of left over drift wood from the classical package that we ought to toss out with other parts of that package we've already tossed out, or can we hang on to aseity AND divine-human interdependence where it counts (more on that below) and be the middle point between classical and process theists?
I guess it depends on just what one takes ‘aseity’ to involve, what one takes the ‘personal inter-relatedness’ of our relationship to God to involve, and whether it makes sense to say both are true. That’s where we’ve been.
Violin: I remember Alan mentioned thinking about God's aseity in a categorical sense, not a contingent sense. I'm trying to figure that out... perhaps you all can go off on that???
Tom: Ah oui! Alan a un intellect puissant!
Well, Alan—being the intelligent brain he is—would agree with me (!) in believing in divine aseity: God is not dependent for his existence upon anything outside himself. But I also want to affirm that God is now truly dependent upon me for some things—not his existence per se, but his experience and enjoyment of loving relationality with respect to me (though not with respect to himself). Mephi is challenging this distinction. He says it’s contradictory to affirm God’s aseity on the one hand and God’s dependence upon me for loving relationality on the other. Why? Because for Mephi ‘aseity’ IS “unsurpassable loving relationality.” That’s precisely what constitutes God’s independence of the world. God is—necessarily—by definition, independent of us, relationally maxed out in terms of love, the enjoyment of love, the experience of love, the satisfaction of love’s beauty, etc. So while Mephi will agree that God CAN be dependent upon us in SOME respects, he wants to say God can’t be dependent (that is, inter-related with us) in the respect most Christians want to affirm, namely, with respect to LOVING RELATIONALITY. God doesn’t need us for that and actually CAN’T experience us in such terms since he is necessarily already maxed out in relationally loving terms. So if you want to continue believing that you AFFECT God’s appreciation of loving relationality AT ALL, in ANY terms, Mephi says you have to dump ‘aseity’. God can’t exist independently of some world. The God-world relationship is a necessary one. But if you instead want to hang on to ‘aseity’ (God’s independence of the world), then you have to abandon altogether the notion that we AFFECT God in the very manner in which we (apparently) crave to. If we got meaning or significance for our lives from the idea that we DO affect God this way, that we engage God in loving inter-dependent relationships, then we’re screwed, cause in THAT sense our existence is meaningless. We have to get our meaning and significance in life some other way. Process theologians reject aseity and affirm maximal interdependence between God and the world. Mephi affirms aseity and rejects loving relationality between God and us. Doc (and I and Selah and Starkman and every other RIGHT person) affirms that both are possible.
That’s it. Make sense?
Tom
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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/21/2005 3:36 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom, you are brilliant. He summarizes my view PERFECTLY.
Mephi is challenging this distinction. He says it’s contradictory to affirm God’s aseity on the one hand and God’s dependence upon me for loving relationality on the other. Why? Because for Mephi ‘aseity’ IS “unsurpassable loving relationality.” That’s precisely what constitutes God’s independence of the world. God is—necessarily—by definition, independent of us, relationally maxed out in terms of love, the enjoyment of love, the experience of love, the satisfaction of love’s beauty, etc. So while Mephi will agree that God CAN be dependent upon us in SOME respects, he wants to say God can’t be dependent (that is, inter-related with us) in the respect most Christians want to affirm, namely, with respect to LOVING RELATIONALITY. God doesn’t need us for that and actually CAN’T experience us in such terms since he is necessarily already maxed out in relationally loving terms. So if you want to continue believing that you AFFECT God’s appreciation of loving relationality AT ALL, in ANY terms, Mephi says you have to dump ‘aseity’. God can’t exist independently of some world. The God-world relationship is a necessary one. But if you instead want to hang on to ‘aseity’ (God’s independence of the world), then you have to abandon altogether the notion that we AFFECT God in the very manner in which we (apparently) crave to. If we got meaning or significance for our lives from the idea that we DO affect God this way, that we engage God in loving inter-dependent relationships, then we’re screwed, cause in THAT sense our existence is meaningless. We have to get our meaning and significance in life some other way.
It takes brains to think things out, but it takes MORE brains to say complex ideas in a succinct, understandable way. My hat is OFF to you, sir!
By the way, I talked to Doc about this last night. For about an hour. It seems he WILL side with you. He kept using the damn marriage analogy. He really wants to affirm that we DO affect God's heart on a deep level (Like I didn't see THAT coming...yeah) One important thing, though. He pretty much RELATIVIZES the ideas in the dissertation to do so. When I kept telling him what he said in Trinity and Process and what it logically entailed, it was "well, that was written over 12 years ago, ya know. Things change." and THAT kind of stuff. Grrrrr. I love him much, but he is such an "F". The cool thing was that it seemed that he could understand how I would get my conception from the STRAIGHT INTERPRETATION of the process categories and terms. He felt I was leaning to heavily on the "aesthetic satisfaction" thing (Well, uh, YEAH!)
So, in the end, I suppose all we ended up doing is agreeing to disagree. I can't help thinking, however, that this was more a thing of WILL for Doc than straight up deduction from the process categories per the reconstruction. Doc's pastoral heart overrides the logician/philosophical theologian every time. It's happened more than once with us. I hate when this happens.  Oh well.
So, Tom, I will sum up like this. Believe what you want. I don't mean that in a blaze way. It seems like there's no clear cut way to slam dunk this either way. So...do you.
Me? I'll stick with my position. I can't and won't knock the logic of the formal trinitarian reconstuction. Again, I believe that there can be loving, personal interaction between God and human beings. I just DON'T believe that we can affect the QUALITATITIVE subjective intensity of God's beautiful experience of love...whereas God can and does increase ours all the time. We cannot provide God with a "deeper" experience of loving sociality, but he can with us. Again, this is NOT to say that God in NO WAY can appreciate our loving activity as such. It is to say that we cannot help "the ULTIMATE LOVER" to another level of loving or appreciating love. But God, by God's grace, takes us from glory to glory in deeper dimensions in OUR ability to love.
Thus, I don't believe that God has symmetrical, mutually-influential, interdependent love relationships with us. We are meaningful to God in some ways ways, and we are meaningLESS to God in some ways. I have no problem with meaninglessness. So, I think that's it. The new Qoheleth/SK/Boyd/Edwards/Piper/Sartre/Camus amalgam ,  Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/21/2005 5:18:17 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Violin for God
Luke, I am your father. --Nooooooooo!!!!!
Date Joined Dec 2004
Total Posts : 690
| Posted 10/21/2005 4:40 PM (GMT -6) | | Ok, woo hoo! Je comprend un peux maintenant! C'est tres bien!
Then I'm wondering this too: are we hitting a mathematical speed bump? I mean, if we're thinking of this in terms of "infinite" immutability vs. "absolute zero" immutability, should we talk about the concept of "infinity"?
One thing Alan had also mentioned last night, (which I think helps clarify a few things) is that with infinity, you can also have sets of infinite numbers, such as an infinite even numbered set, and infinite odd number set, an infinite multiples-of-three set, and (my addition) perhaps an infinite number of infinite sets!
(Now here's me trying to tie all this together...) So all in all, the concept of infinity is not limited to ONE set of infinite numbers. True, infinity plus infinity equals infinity, but infinite-x plus infinite-y equals infinite-x plus infinite-y, right? Infinite-x plus infinite-y does not equal (simply) infinity. The categories as such can't be mixed together like mixing a little yellow paint and a little blue paint to make green paint. It's been eons since I had a math class, so bear with me.
So my question is, what are the grounds for mixing the paint?
The other question is, is Mephi inadvertantly arguing against a strawman? He seems to be arguing against a position that we don't hold, namely the Thomist position. The aseity issue seems to be forced into an "all or nothing", which is oversimplifing the categories: in what way is God untouchable and in what way is God touchable. These are two separate categories like infinite-x and infinite-y WITHIN ONE infinite being.
Dem's me thoughts. 
If you're going to be skeptical, be fair and be skeptical of skepticism.Post Edited (Violin for God) : 10/21/2005 4:44:24 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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selah
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1210
| Posted 10/21/2005 8:20 PM (GMT -6) | | Ici je suis Tom. Subitement j'AIME parler le français avec vous! C'est évident.
Merci de mettre meph directement. Commencez des préparations pour la ruée suivante de pensées. volez soigneusement vers votre maison!
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/22/2005 3:11 AM (GMT -6) | | C'est la vie: de peut-être très bons penseurs comme le Docteur et Tom gagnent la perspective en évaluant des choses avec le coeur et l'intellect / l'expérience ET la connaissance.
Tom: I was thinking this also. Why is it a weakness of Doc's that his theology should be influenced by 'feelings' ('feeling' in the sense of looking for the 'existential fit' so to speak)? I count that as a strength. Obviously I can't have an existential fit with what I know to be flat out self-contradictory or illogical. But so long as I can make sense of God's really being affected by us, why would admitting the 'existential fit' as evidence be a 'weakness'? That's part of your assessment of Doc I don't get, Mephi.
Tom
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/22/2005 4:01 AM (GMT -6) | | Mephi: God (who is defined by unsurpassably intense beautiful experience via loving relationality) can possess aseity (with utter independence from other beings following as an implication) as a necessary characteristic...
and, at the same time...
God can truly be reliant upon creaturely moral activity for the enhancement of God's qualitative experience of loving relationality.
This is what Tom, Selah, and Doc are saying. I honestly can't see how to make sense of the claim.
Tom: Let me show you a statement of yours which appears to ME as senseless as the above appears to you:
“God's suffering is a novel CONTINGENT EXPRESSIVE FORM of God's ad intra loving sociality that God can aesthetically appreciate as beauty. No doubt. But it never affects God's qualitative experience of beauty.”
It makes zero sense to me to say, as you do, that:
(A) God’s “aesthetic satisfaction of beauty” is unaffected by the contingent world
AND
(B) God’s “appreciation of the contingent beauty” is affected by the world.
I don’t know where to locate (B) if not IN God’s one body of experience. But this is not to locate (B) in (A). It’s to recognize some sort of diversity to God’s one body of experience, denying that his experience is uniformily necessary.
But I have no idea what you mean if God’s qualitative appreciation of beauty is not affected by suffering. None whatsoever. Where’s God DO his appreciating of contingent beauty? Does he feel this appreciation? Does the experience of it possess an intensity of some sort? Is not ANY appreciation of something a qualitative appreciation of that something. Of course it is. That’s what ‘appreciate’ means: to evaluate the significance of an object vis-à-vis one’s values.
You’re only answer so far has been “Well, God appreciates our love as a contingent expression of his unsurpassable satisfaction.” But it’s not ONLY an ‘expression OF him’, that’s the thing. It’s also an ‘expression OF us IN HIM’. That’s what it means for God to “appreciate the beauty of our love of him.” So the appreciation he feels is, logically speaking, determined partly by us. It’s certainly loving and personal for us. And I don’t know how to say it’s “appreciated” by God if it’s not experienced personally by God. How else would anything be “appreciated” by God?
But to say “God appreciates contingent beauty” AND “God appreciation of beauty is unsurpassable and so shut off from all contingency”? What the hell (pardon my French!) does THAT mean? God’s got one value-appreciator we said. Right? On your view it’s maxed out by Godself. So what can “appreciate” mean when you say God appreciates the beauty of our worship or suffers the ugliness of our sin? Where’s that happen IN GOD and how is it “appreciation” or “suffering” if it DOESN’T contribute to God’s appreciation of beauty (albeit contingent beauty)?
Now, the only way I can make sense of affirming both (and I’ll take the long road to processing this like the good “P” that I am) is to say something like God’s value appreciator is “infinite-with-respect-to,” that is, infinite with respect to all that is actual, or infinite sans-creation in every sense necessary for a necessary mode of existence and infinite post-creation in every sense necessary for a contingent mode of existence. God’s value-appreciator spans both the necessary and contingent poles in God, his ‘person’ and ‘passions’ are to be found in both, and genuine sociality happens on both levels—the necessary unsurpassably ‘Godness’-constituting Trinitarian “Yahoo! I’m unsurpassably satisfied” AND the contingent and surpassable ‘non-Godness-constituting’ “Yahoo I’m being worshipped by Mephi” and “Ouch I’m being crucified” of God’s experience of the world. The former (the necessary) affects the latter (because God takes the initiative in bringing into existence a world not needed with respect to constituting God’s existence as a necessary being) but the latter in God cannot affect the former (what is contingent about God’s experience cannot determine what is necessary about God’s experience).
So let’s just admit God’s contingent appreciation of the world INTO God’s one body of experience. You agree with this I think. I think it’s possible and I also think God’s able to genuinely appreciate our worship (even if it doesn’t give God the same existential “Yahoo!” that he gets from himself). God can tell the difference, and it’s because his necessary aesthetic satisfaction IS LOVE that we are NOT meaningless, that he is able to appreciate my worship as beautiful to him on a personal level. I don’t know what other conclusion to draw from the words “appreciate” and “beauty.”
Tom
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