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JEE
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2004
Total Posts : 1466
| Posted 10/30/2005 1:26 AM (GMT -6) |   | |
The recent discussion over God's inner emotional life reminded me of the following article I came across a few years back.
- God Who Suffers, The >- by Dennis Ngien, preaching associate at First Alliance Church of Metro-Toronto. The author examines the notion of impassibility and what it means for God's love.
Anyway, FWIW.
Blessings,
John
And I say to myself...what a wonderful world...
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/30/2005 2:34 AM (GMT -6) | | What amazes me about stuff like this is that we'd rather rely on anecdotes and sentimental ideas about what God's vulnerability means for us...than to think about how the very core theological beliefs that we often assert end up contradicting this.
We want our theological cake...even as we eat it!
We want God to be "God all by himself" having aseity and fullness within Godself...but never really working out how that may affect God's ability to FULLY SYMPATHIZE or EMPATHIZE with any created world. We want God to be the sovereign God such that the "mountains bow down and the seas roar at the sound of His name"...but never really think about how that relates to creaturely efficacy and theodicy (at least not until later).
The writers of the Old Testament had no problem drawing together contradictory metaphysical claims about God. That God truly controlled all natural phenomena and knew the future exhaustively...while at the same time, genuinely being surprised by thing. What to we do when we try to bring such a complex set of works like the Bible together?? I believe that this will ever be one of the main issues between biblical theology and systematics. At any rate, I'm like this. You cannot take one end of the stick without picking up the other. If a person wants God that is completely, FULLY sympathetic and/or empathetic with every moment of their pain in the core of God's being, then fine. No problem with me. But don't presume to tell me, then, that that same God is a necessary being who consists of divine delight and glory. And don't presume to tell me that God is totally self-suffient and self-existent to the point that God literally needs NOTHING and NO ONE else. The process theists like Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Cobb see these things clearly and don't flinch in saying the same thing. Can't have it both ways. All I ask for is a little consistency. Is that really so much to ask? Heh. 
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/30/2005 1:37:41 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/30/2005 3:54 AM (GMT -6) | | One more thing...
If anyone can show me where I've either said that God doesn't have passions or that God doesn't display deep, genuine passion towards us in God's contingent expression to us...I'll give em' 50 bucks.
With Doc, I agree that the incarnation, life, passion, and death of Christ EXPRESSES the unsurpassable intensity of the QUALITY of God's love. The Cross is how perfect loving sociality expresses itself, when the situation calls for it!
Again, I have not said, nor will I say, that God doesn't have or express genuine emotion. What I am trying to do is take VERY SERIOUSLY what it means to say that God is the self-sufficient, self-existent, necessary FULLNESS of love, life, and light within Godself and how that interacts with the subjectively-felt pain and pleasure of sentient creatures.
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/30/2005 4:24 AM (GMT -6) | | What is terribly annoying to me is the whole business about theologians speaking of divine empathic relationality being a quinessential element of whether or not God is worthy of worship. I can't see how someone can truly understand what "GRACE" really means and say this.
So...if I'm starving, naked, and bleeding...and a person who has NO REAL REASON to stop for me at all, but freely chooses to graciously and lovingly engage with me, and decides to get me abundant food, medical care, and clothing, fulfilling every need I could ever have, by bringing me into their house with their children, loving me with the same love they love their own children...
...should I be ticked off if I felt that this person didn't or couldn't fully empathize with my pain???
"Hey! You weren't really "with me" when I went through all my hell before. You didn't get off your a$$ to help me before. At least not that I saw. So what you're doing all this stuff for me NOW?? And what does any of this matter if you can't feel the depths of my pain, from the inside?"
This seems problematic to me.
There's a very, VERY marked difference between an all-too-human patronizing paternalism and the divine bestowal of loving grace. For God to accomplish placing Creation IN CHRIST by way of the Cross and defeat of sin should be sufficient to show this. Hopefully, we aren't seeing God's trinification of Creation through Christ as equivalent to some aloof, paternalistic act by a "Mr. Drummand" type figure!
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/30/2005 4:24:27 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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JEE
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2004
Total Posts : 1466
| Posted 10/30/2005 12:33 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/30/2005 2:10 PM (GMT -6) | | 
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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Lee Merrill
booted
Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 723
| Posted 10/31/2005 8:10 PM (GMT -6) | | JEE said...
I did think Ngien's quotes of Bonhoeffer, Luther, Moltmann, & C.S. Lewis added a lot of weight to his basic thesis. I also think his references to Christ's incarnation & suffering as proof that God can and does suffer were powerfully persuasive...
I would certainly agree! (Glad to agree in this forum, by the way)
D.A. Carson has some good thoughts on this, too:
"... at its best impassibility is trying to avoid a picture of a God who is changeable, given over to mood swings, dependent upon his creatures."
Yet he continues:
"It is no answer to espouse a form of impassibility that denies that God has an emotional life and that insists that all of the biblical evidence to the contrary is nothing more than anthropopathism. The price is too heavy. You may then rest in God's sovereignty, but you can no longer rejoice in his love. You may rejoice only in a linguistic expression that is an accommodation of some reality of which we cannot conceive, couched in the anthropopathism of love." (D.A. Carson, "The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God" )
Or here is some John Flavel:
"Whatever my distresses are in number or degree, they are all known, even to the least circumstance, by Christ my head: he looks down from heaven upon all my afflictions, and understands them more fully than I that feel them. 'Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee' (Psalm 38:9). He not only knows them, but feels them: 'We have not a high-priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities' (Hebrews 4:15). In all your afflictions he is afflicted; tender sympathy cannot but flow from such intimate union; therefore, in Matthew 25:35, he saith, I was a hungered, I was athirst, I was naked." (John Flavel)
Blessings,
Lee
==================================================
"Even now we seem to have dim glimpses into regions
from which we receive no word to bring away" (George MacDonald)Post Edited (Lee Merrill) : 10/31/2005 7:35:01 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/31/2005 10:28 PM (GMT -6) | | Yo.
I'm game.
God suffers.
Terribly.
Profusely.
God empathizes.
Totally.
Completely.
Cool.
I guess.
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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selah
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1210
| Posted 11/1/2005 5:25 AM (GMT -6) | | Lee,
"It is no answer to espouse a form of impassibility that denies that God has an emotional life and that insists that all of the biblical evidence to the contrary is nothing more than anthropopathism. The price is too heavy. You may then rest in God's sovereignty, but you can no longer rejoice in his love. You may rejoice only in a linguistic expression that is an accommodation of some reality of which we cannot conceive, couched in the anthropopathism of love." (D.A. Carson, "The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God" )
Love that quote from Carson, but doesn't he go on to suggest that God's love is conditional ...based on our obedience? If I'm remembering correctly, THAT's why the doctrine of the love of God is so "difficult" right?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MephEternal said...Yo. I'm game. God suffers. Terribly. Profusely. God empathizes. Totally. Completely. Cool. I guess.
Hi Meph,
I don't get it. Are you kidding, serious, giving up/giving in...what?
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/1/2005 8:55 AM (GMT -6) | | Selah:
I don't get it. Are you kidding, serious, giving up/giving in...what?
I'm like this. If people want to believe like the author of the essay at the the beginning of this thread, they can go ahead. Fine by me. People are going to believe what they want anyways, ya know?
******************************
Brandon:
One of THE MAIN ATTRACTIONS to Openness is that God was "rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief..." It is in knowing that God sends his Spirit to "come along beside us." This was and still is a big attraction to me.
Yes. I think it would help for people to understand how much openness cosmology and the ideas that God graciously allows us to impact him and shares God's inner life with us AT ALL...are LIGHT-YEARS beyond the utterly impassible God of early Christian belief.
The newest mantra:
God graciously FINDS us meaningful when God doesn't need to do it and we, in ourselves, can't do it.
"Hmm. Why not? What the hell. Let's try it."
--God
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