(lex orendi lex credendi)

Since [love] is what comprises God's essential existence, it stands that God's self-revelation and reflection in God's contingent expression will DEMONSTRATE that!

Not ALL of God's glory is seen by (or even VISIBLE to) humanity...
But ALL humans have experienced the LOVE of God in some way.

P1. Anything that is self-limited by God is not necessary.

P2. Glory is self-limited by God. (He can throttle down his glory)

C. Glory is not necessary.

 

P1. Anything that is self-limited by God is not necessary.

P2. Love is NOT self-limited by God.  (He's full-throttle all the time)

C. Love is necessary.

Post Edited (Corey) : 10/4/2006 7:26:10 PM (GMT-5)

Meph: 1) What if the continuance of the project is ultimately motivated by the Father's desire to glorify Himself? Would that be a problem? and if so, why?

Jeff: I would say it's only problematic if the Father is an essentially loving being who increases His own sentient satisfaction at the expense of gratuitous suffering for others--this seems contradictory. If the suffering is inevitable, though, it's not totally gratuitous. That's what I'm trying to account for. And as long as the Father's motive for creation is disinterested (because it is to glorify Christ), we can have suffering (which seems in all other respects gratuitous) that indirectly glorifies the Father. To me this completely resolves the theodicy issue. The plurality of the godhead allows for that total disinterested-ness which can result in glorification for all--even creatures!!

Meph: 2) I'm wondering. Do you not think we can articulate ANY possible situations where God uses human suffering as a direct means to stemming a potentially GREATER amount of human suffering? I definitely think we can do this. The Carlie situation we discussed just this kind of thing.

Jeff: I think it's possible. I just think by postulating that Christ's glory is the primary reason why suffering is allowed to continue, we can tighten up our theodicy a bit. Then, given that suffering must be allowed to continue to maximize the glory of Christ's temporal reign, the Carlie situation is completely unproblematic, to me. It's a bit problematic to me, otherwise. Cause if creatures are the primary reason for allowing suffering to continue, then, it seems (superficially, at least) that God does not love all with equal perfectness in the Carlie situations--since He has the sheer power to prevent them.

Meph: 3) I don't see how making everything rooks in relationship to Christ helps anything, theodicy-wise. If someone is struggling with seeing suffering of innocents being direct means of God's self-glorification, then it won't help to just say:

Oh...well, it's NOT for the Father himself (so it's not self-centered interest here) or for other creatures (so it's not inconsistent with what we can imagine[???])...it's all for Christ...so everything's ok.

Jeff: It helps me in just the sense I explained above. It keeps me from having to conceptualize a perfect love for all creatures playing out differently even in cases of gratuitous evil. If it only played out differently because of LFW choices, no problem. It's that differential suffering which has nothing to do with one's LFW choices that makes perfect love more difficult to explain to me. The way I'm arguing it, these differential, gratuitous sufferings are necessary to attain Christ's glory (didn't Christ, himself, say that "offenses are necessary"), so they have nothing to do with the perfectness of God's love for the creature. They are tragic, but inevitable, given the primary purpose of creation--Christ's glorification. 

But they are not FOR (in the sense of intended) the Father's glory. They only contribute to His glory as an indirect side-effect--not as a volitional effect. The Father's greatest pleasure would result if they did NOT occur. And maybe the Father's glory would be smaller without them. But His overall pleasure would be greater without them. For glory is not the only pleasure God can experience.

Meph: This won't work. Not really. There are some forms of suffering that seem to people are SO destructive that to associate God with it causally in any way would cause them problems. Even if one were to locate the ultimate reason as direct means of glorification of the Son. I see your concern, but I don't think that it actually makes that much of a difference when things shake all the way out.

Jeff: I agree. I think most people who are troubled by natural evil will not do the difficult analysis to even see where we're coming from. Natural suffering just seems to inexplicable to some folks. It did for me until recently.

Meph: I really think that sometimes we are so caught up in what we feel are pain-filled situations that we cannot even IMAGINE God possibly using them as direct means to God's glorification. (I am speaking FROM EXPERIENCE of doing this time and time again!)

Jeff: It's interesting. If you go back and look at some of my first posts on this forum, you'll see that I was arguing that the only way to explain the continuance of evil was to somehow contribute to God's glory (Tom opposed me all the way, and rightly I think). At that time, I was like Mark Porter and others who find it difficult to see justice and love as correlative. But once I accepted that they must be, I finally came to this position that I'm now arguing. And it is this position that makes UR seem the most plausible to me.

But once we allow for any truly gratuitous evil as directly contributing to the Father's glory (i.e., sentient satisfaction), I think we're right back to the possibility that eternal death is also contributory to the Father's glory. I think what I'm arguing gets us past the argument from degree--like "ultimate harm." This kind of degree-argument seems to imply that some gratuitous harm is OK to God so long as it's not ultimate. But how would that be perfect love? It seems to me that perfect love cannot get ANY satisfaction (glory/aesthetics/etc) from gratuitous suffering. What's more, it seemed to imply that one creature's well-being was worth the gratuitous suffering of another. I just choose to get past this kind of reasoning so long as I can conceive of a way around it. And that's what I think my argument does.

Meph: Let's think about this.  The reason why theodicy is such a big deal is because we CONTINUALLY eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil!  In some way, we are trying to JUDGE whether or not what God does is worthy of our appreciation and justification.  We are not merely trying to conceptualize a  possible state of affairs to articulate what's going on.  And we are DEFINITELY not just trying to place ourselves in an humble posture before God saying something like "Lord, thou knowst...and that's enough."

Jeff: I was prepared, before coming upon my current argument, to live with eternal death if I had to. I was prepared years ago to live with eternal torment if I had to. But as I learned ways to explain things differently, and yet coherently, I moved towards UR. So, sure, I'm judging God in the mere sense that that's what theodicy is about. But only because we're judging what the implications are of the divine nature, as we conceive of it.

And I do that for apologetic purposes--not because I would have rejected God had I remained convinced that ET was true or that God deemed gratuitous suffering as worth it for His glory. I wanted to defend God, my Redeemer, in any way I could. And in that pursuit, I think I've found a way to posit UR coherently--and this is the best apologetic of all, is it not?

In summary, let me word it this way. If creatures are the primary object of God's love in creation, then wouldn't perfect love for creatures be equal love for creatures? And wouldn't equal love for creatures play out equally in experience and effect for creatures except in those cases where LFW choices conditions the experience of God's love? I think it would. Therefore, differential, gratuitous suffering would be problematic for me in explaining God's perfect and equal love for creatures, given that God is powerful enough to prevent it.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 10/5/2006 7:37:51 PM (GMT-5)

Both GOD'S maximal glorification and OUR ultimate satisfaction are achieved through loving communion with God in Christ.  Through communion with God in Christ, we become by grace what the loving, triune God is by nature.

• God is most glorified and we are most satisfied in love