{"id":656,"date":"2014-10-01T20:41:09","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T19:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=656"},"modified":"2014-10-04T17:34:39","modified_gmt":"2014-10-04T16:34:39","slug":"the-impossible-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=656","title":{"rendered":"The impossible God"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jason Michaeli at Tamed Cynic has just put up a post entitled “Liberalism’s Dogmatic Wasting Disease: God Does Not Change, God Does Not Suffer, and God Is Not Affected (By You)”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quoting David Bentley Hart, he states that God has three particular qualities, saying:-<\/p>\n

“Apatheia: the attribute of God, held by the ancients, in which God, as perfect within himself and possessing all possibilities as actualities, is unaffected by objects outside of himself.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Impassible: the ancient doctrine that God,\u00a0as perfect within himself and possessing all possibilities as actualities, does not suffer due to the actions of another.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Immutable: the ancient belief that God, as eternal and existing outside of creation, does not change.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

So then\u2026God does not change- not ever- and God is not changed- by us.”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

His target, it seems to me, is not Liberalism as such, but very much all of the Process theologians and to a significant extent followers of Jurgen Moltmann (writer of “The Crucified God” inter alia). Liberalism, after all, merely demands that you do not take scripture as literal when it doesn’t have to be, that you seek to place it in its historical context and genre and that you accept that it is not necessarily the last word, but displays a progression which can still be progressing today; it is not actually necessary that you abandon these three ideas about God. I don’t know if he’s ever read Caputo, but Caputo’s “weak call” God would be so foreign to this concept as to attract even more force of words than appears in that article…<\/p>\n

But he has a point that since the second century, Christian theologians have been deeply immersed in Platonic philosophy, and until relatively recently theology was done against that background. He has a considerable tradition behind him.<\/p>\n

So, where does that leave those of us to stand who think that God is characterised by love, or who look to a relationship with God?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, nowhere. You can’t have apathetic love, and you can’t have a relationship with someone who is totally unaffected by you. You might as well suggest that Alpha Centauri loves you, or that you have a personal relationship with gravity. Or vice versa. Granted, in the case of gravity you are at least affected by it, but it is a vastly impersonal force – and that, I suggest, is what the “ancients” were getting at with their description of these qualities of God. You can see Alpha Centauri (given a decent telescope) which isn’t the case for gravity, which indeed might take that out of the running as a simile, but it is similarly extremely far removed from you. That was another quality of God on which the “ancients” were keen.<\/p>\n

Who were these “ancients? The short answer is, Plato and his successors in Greek philosophy. Not, however, Abraham and his successors in Hebrew story; their experience was not of an impassible, distant, apathetic God, though on occasion ( for instance in some of the Psalms) they say things which might be interpreted as impassibility or immutability. However, the Hebrew scriptures also tell us of a God who sometimes changes his mind (on occasion, as with for one example Moses, or another Abraham, as a result of human argument), a God who cares deeply for his people, and a God who in the very early part of Genesis can be surprised by his creation. Also, of course, God is seen throughout the Hebrew scriptures as getting angry at the antics of his people, and if that isn’t “being changed”, I don’t know what is.<\/p>\n

Then we have the New Testament, and Jesus (the image of the invisible God) who lives with the disciples, feels for the disciples, is frequently exasperated by them and almost always exasperated by the religiously smug. And who dies, enduring an exceptionally painful death. Not, according to the Philosophers, being affected, suffering or being changed… assuming, that is, that there is anything in the statement in Colossians 1:15.<\/p>\n

To be fair, there is a touch of this going on in the Fourth Gospel. I’m pretty confident from comparing that gospel, and in particular the first chapter, with the work of Philo of Alexandria<\/a>, that the writer was “thinking Greek”, and particularly thinking Greek philosophy. Philo was a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher and theologian of the first half of the first century, notable for an attempted harmonisation of Platonic philosophy with the Hebrew Scriptures. Judaism of the time may have accepted Philo (he was a noted leader in Alexandria), but subsequently has more or less disavowed him as being the next best thing to Christian – and, indeed, some Church Fathers tried to paint Philo as having been a very early Christian, which he was almost certainly not.\u00a0 In moving in a different direction from Philo, they were reacting against a Greek (“Hellenising”) influence which Judaism had been feeling for a long time, and which perhaps was best countered in the successful Maccabean revolt which managed to re-establish an independent Israel for a relatively short time just before the birth of Christ. Indeed, it was not until the middle ages when Judaism started playing with Greek philosophy again, in the writings of Moses Maimonedes. Other than the Fourth Gospel, the New Testament writers do not, to my mind, see God as thoroughly the God of the Philosophers, even the pseudo-Pauline writer of Colossians.<\/p>\n

Taking scripture generally, therefore, what I see is not a picture of the God of the Philosophers. In fact, that God ends up barely, if at all, distinguishable from the God of the Deists. I don’t think Plato and Scripture can be successfully harmonised (actually, I don’t think Plato can be harmonised with reality, but that’s another story). Rev. Michaeli sees a grandeur in that God; I don’t, I see that God as being reduced to a power of nature.<\/p>\n

The God I see in scripture, the God I experience, is not Deist, is not Platonic, is not apathetic, impassible and immutable, he is involved, caring, feeling, loving, responding – in other words, like the Jesus who was his image. To me, in truth, a picture of an apathetic God is a pathetic picture, not so much impassible as impossible.<\/p>\n

And no, I can’t come up with something for “immutable” which doesn’t stretch the language too far for comfort. Suggestions warmly appreciated!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Michaeli at Tamed Cynic has just put up a post entitled “Liberalism’s Dogmatic Wasting Disease: God Does Not Change, God Does Not Suffer, and God Is Not Affected (By You)”. Quoting David Bentley Hart, he states that God has three particular qualities, saying:- “Apatheia: the attribute of God, held by the ancients, in which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,8,3,18,12,6,4],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible-study","tag-biblical-history","tag-christianity","tag-judaism","tag-philosophy","tag-spirituality","tag-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":664,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions\/664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}