A good post on theism/atheism (follow the links for more discussion).
I like seeing William James’s “The Will to Believe” name-checked, as it was pretty formative in my own thinking about this stuff.
Category: Theology & Faith
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More on God and temporality
In his Gifford Lectures, published as The Faith of a Physicist, John Polkinghorne considers the relation of God to time, calling it one of the “most puzzling, and most pressing, of general questions about God” (p. 59):
It is clear that there must be an eternal pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot be subject to fluctuation if he is worthy of being called divine. Emphasis on this alone would lead us to a static picture of God, but could that be true if the nature of love is relatedness and that to which God relates, namely his creation, is itself subject to radical change? (p. 59)
Polkinghorne considers the traditional response that all moments of time are eternally present to God and this explains how God can be related to each of them. This response, Polkinghorne says, is motivated by a belief that saying God is affected by time would imply change in God and would, under a particular understanding of divine perfection, jeopardize the divine excellence. However, Polkinghorne replies that we can coherently develop a “dynamic” idea of perfection “which resides, not in the absence of change, but in perfect appropriateness in relation to each successive moment. It is the perfection of music rather than the perfection of a statue” (p. 59).
Another argument sometimes offered for taking an eternal, “static” view of God is that, only if creation is “eternally present” to God can God exercise providential care for creation:
Only if in his eternity he knows simultaneously that tomorrow I shall pray for a particular outcome and that today my friend is making a decision relevant to that outcome, can he really be a God capable of responding to prayer in influencing that decision. […] Only a God who sees all that was, and is, and is to come, “at once,” is able to produce the best for his creation. (p. 60)
Polkinghorne responds that this rests on a false picture both of God’s providential care and of time. First, he denies that God is the all-determining force that seems implied by some traditional views of God. Instead, he approvingly cites Arthur Peacocke’s phrase that God is an “Improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity” who is capable of responding to any contingent event that occurs. Second, Polkinghorne wonders if the “block universe” (as William James called it) is even a coherent understanding of time. It seems to presuppose a deterministic “Laplacian” view of time and causality, but this is neither the world humans experience nor, Polkinghorne contends, the view revealed by modern science.
If temporality is genuine feature of the world, rather than just appearance, Polkinghorne suggests, God’s knowing temporal events “in eternity” would not be knowing them as they really are. This would imply a deficit in God’s knowledge, which would mean that God is not omniscient. The processes of reality are a real aspect of the created order, and knowing them truly means knowing them as processes. If God is unrelated to time, it seems, God’s knowledge of us and our world would be like our knowledge of historical figures, not the relatedness we have to existing flesh-and-blood people.
Polkinghorne concludes: “I am pesuaded that in addition to God’s eternal nature we shall have to take seriously that he has a relation to time which makes him immanent within it, as well as eternally transcendent of it” (p. 61). This is similar to the position I tentatively endorsed in the last post. To me, the most compelling consideration is that, if God is truly related to the creation and to the creatures in it, there must be some aspect of God that is temporal, or involved in time.
I realize there’s always a great deal of speculation any time you start talking about God’s nature, so I’m not claiming to have reached any definitive conclusion here. Here’s a post I wrote a while back discussing Keith Ward’s incorporation of certain “Hegelian” insights into his theology. Here’s an interesting lecture from Wolfhart Pannenberg. Here’s an article from philosopher William Lane Craig.
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God, time, and finitude
Marvin asks: “Is God subject to time or not?”
I’m not sure if this is right, but I take this as a stand-in for the cluster of issues grouped around the question of whether God can be affected by finite, temporal being, or whether we should continue to think of God–with the classic tradition–in terms of apatheia.
In the classical tradition, derived in part from Plato and Aristotle, God is thought of as actus purus–pure act–with no unrealized potentiality. If this is the case, then God cannot change, much less be changed by anything “external” to God, simply because there is no un-actualized potential in God to be realized. God is perfection and any change (per impossible) would be for the worse anyway. It’s generally thought that the Fathers and the Scholastics followed classical philosophy on this score (though, I understand there’s some debate about this point, as you’d expect, since the Fathers were grappling with the paradox of the God-Man).
The 20th century saw a re-thinking of this classic conception of God, driven by a few different sources. One was the widespread sense that classical metaphysics was no longer tenable, and that we needed a new ontology that was more “relational” and less “static.” This is where process thought–stemming from the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne and developed by an entire school of thought–comes in. Process thought tends to re-configure the idea of God as exerting a persuasive influence on creation and being affected in turn by what happens in creation.
Another impetus for reconsidering the traditional concept of God came from post-Holocaust theologizing about the problem of evil, which led in some quarters to a renewed emphasis on the Incarnation, and particularly the Passion, of Christ as a revelation of the divine nature. Like process theology, this sometimes involved a re-evaluation of the notion of divine omnipotence; God was no longer seen as the controller and determiner of events that occurred in the world, but as the “fellow sufferer who understands,” to use Whitehead’s term. Feminist and other liberationist theologies often concur with this revision of the God-concept, as they often argue that the God of classical theism exhibits stereotypical “male” qualities of control and domination.
Given that there’s no way to do justice to this issue in a blog post (even were I competent to do so!), I will cop to having been influenced by at least some of these streams of thought. The most compelling arguments to me are those that take the Incarnation as their point of departure: if the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are the best representation, or revelation, we have of what God is like, then we may need to re-think our concepts of power and divinity quite radically. Additionally, if God genuinely enters into relationship with creatures, then it’s hard to see how God can avoid being “affected by finite, temporal reality in some way.”
That said, I think some of the revisionist theologians go too far and aren’t sufficiently attuned to the biblical promises of God’s ultimate victory over evil, suffering, and death. Divinity isn’t just expressed in weakness and solidarity with suffering–though I take it that’s part of the truth of the Incarnation–it’s also expressed in the triumph of the Resurrection and in the final victory over the forces that mar God’s good creation. In other words, God isn’t captive to the forces of evil nor will God be prevented by the recalcitrance of creation from realizing God’s purposes (a possibility suggested by some of the more radical forms of process theology). I think this means that God’s power is more than the persuasive and attractive power of love. Or maybe it would be better to say that God’s love has a power that is sufficient to overcome that which opposes it (which is part of what makes it different from creaturely love).
I’m attracted to the view of Keith Ward, who’s accepted some of the insights of 20th century revisionist theology but still has one foot solidly in the camp of classical metaphysics. Ward suggests that God’s eternal nature is pure bliss and perfection, and yet, because God chose to create a world that was other than God, there is an aspect of God’s being that is affected by what happens in the world. Further, in the Incarnation, God enters into the world’s travail in a uniquely intimate way. Nevertheless, God is affected by the world only because God freely chooses to enter into realtionship with finite being, and the ultimate triumph of God’s purposes isn’t in doubt. This view seeks to uphold both God’s involvement with the world and his transcendence.
Like I said, this just scratches the surface and probably raises thorny metaphysical issues. I’m just jealous that Marvin gets to take a whole seminar on this stuff. Hopefully we’ll get regular blog reports.
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Recent musical discovery — Wovenhand
From the department of man does not live by heavy metal alone: Wovenhand (or “Woven Hand” as I sometimes see it written) started off as a side project for David Eugene Edwards, the front man for the alt-countryish group 16 Horsepower. But they broke up and Wovenhand now seems to be his full-time project.
Anyhoo, the sound is kind of hard to describe–I’ve seen it referred to as “gothic roots music.” Musically, Wovenhand incoporates traditional country, folk, some Native American, and electronic rock elements. Edwards’ lyrics and vocal performance bring to mind a twisted rockabilly, apocalyptic Old Testament prophet, the kind of character that wouldn’t be out of place in a David Lynch movie. By all accounts, he’s a serious Christian and takes his inspiration in equal measure from God’s grace and man’s depravity.
You can listen to several tracks at their MySpace page.
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Girard on war and apocalyptic
Via bls comes this review of a new book by Rene Girard (not yet translated into English, it appears) wherein Girard critiques Von Clausewitz’s On War and discusses the prospects for humanity’s self-annihilation.
Girard turns to the Revelation of John, the apocalyptic passages in the Epistles, as well as the “little apocalypse” of Mark 13 and its parallels. Christ said he did not come to bring peace. It is, says Girard, the “old world he came to destroy.” And this by kicking out from underneath our legs the crutch of the scapegoat. Sacrificial violence now becomes ineffective, because God in Christ has submitted to it and broken its power to deceive by creating numinous but idolatrous peace through sacrifice. Our age is only the witness and locus of the intensification of violence, free-floating because it is no longer able to make peace at all. Now that technology is reducing dramatically the “friction” that restrained total war, and politics has lost its control over the means of war, as terrorism becomes the warfare of choice for all concerned, absolute war as realistic planetary catastrophe looms. The destruction of the environment is the mimetic double of this escalation to war’s ultimate extreme. What the apocalyptic literature predicts is that the preaching of the Gospel by the Church will fail to convert enough to stop the process.
Sounds cheery!
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MLK was unserious
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Saved by theology
So, today at church I was roped in to assisting with communion at the last minute, something I’ve never done before. I was distributing the wine, which we do by pouring it from a chalice into tiny plastic cups that people take from a tray on their way to the altar rail. However, if, for whatever reason, they prefer to receive grape juice instead of wine, they take pre-filled cups from the tray.
I was a bit uncertain and nervous, trying to avoid spilling the Savior’s blood all over the place and whatnot, and forgot to say “the blood of Christ shed for you” when passing by some of the people with the grape juice-filled cups. This caused me to worry that somehow I’d “invalidated” their reception of communion, until our vicar reminded me that, in any event, receiving in one kind is sufficient. A good example of how sound theology can make up for human incompetence–mine in this case.
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Hmmm…
Via Derek:
You’re St. Justin Martyr!
You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers.
Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!
A Thinking Reed 