A Feeling God: A Just God
Ty,
One of the most moving things I've ever read, and one of the most helpful things, is your post on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The personification of God in that post was moving because it depicted a God with deep emotion for the hurting, not just a deity who is so pure that he "must" vomit impurities from his mouth (that passage is a favorite of preachers in Oklahoma).
Thank you, Rush. I can't conceive of a completely immutable (unaffected and unchanging) God [though Dr. Highfield, from Pepperdine explained it in a way that makes it a legitimate belief, I just don't happen to agree with his Neo-Platonic foundations]. Part of the reason that I can't buy in is that if God were to escape the price for creating the world, he would be evil, having brought humanity into existence to suffer from the laws of nature that he created, while avoiding the consequences for those laws with impunity. Some might say that, since God never broke those laws, he should not be subject to their consequences, but that is also true of the thousands of children who suffer starvation and abuse, yet are granted no such freedom from the consequences of a broken world.
If someone wants to argue that these children are judged for the sin of Adam, I must respond that would further implicate God in the unfairness since, "One who justifies the wicked and one who condemns the righteous are both alike: an abomination to the Lord (Prov 17.15)." The Lord would then be condemning the innocent to bear the punishment of the wicked, yet he himself would escape all consequence; if God cannot make the destructions wrought by natural law (natural desasters, cancer et al) fair (for some reason that it may not be possible for the human mind to fully grasp), then God, by choosing to subject himself to the consequence, mitigates the unfairness of natural law. Otherwise, God is unjust, and that is unthinkable.
If someone says that Jesus is all the payment God needed for this injustice, then God was unjust from the death of the first innocent child until Christ; I cannot accept God as being unjust for a moment, so I cannot adhere to that belief either.Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I missed some great logical problem or some fact that would make my argument fall flat, but until I find a better argument, I'll believe that God feels because I cannot imagine a just God who does not.
posted by Unknown at
12:03 PM
3 Comments:
If God is unfeeling than the book of Amos (along with most of the minor Prophets) means nothing.
If God is unfeeling then how could a man who let his passions run close to the surface (David) be a "Man after God's own heart"?
If God felt nothing than Solomon of the Proverbs would the one closest to him, not David of the Psalms who's poetry sings out to us over two thousand years later.
Ty, just for clarification, you said, "Part of the reason that I can't buy in is that if God were to escape the price for creating the world, he would be evil, having brought humanity into existence to suffer from the laws of nature that he created, while avoiding the consequences for those laws with impunity."
I'm sure this is too simplistic a handling of what you're actually saying, but are you saying that because God "feels bad" about human suffering that this solves the problem of natural evil? If I've misunderstood you, I don't intend to commit the straw man fallacy.
However, I'll go ahead with my critique of what I thought you might be saying. It seems rather obvious that God is passionate. There's a reason we call Christ's crucifixion "The Passion." This is the greatest suffering consequence of creating a world with the possibility of real evil/love.
Sin often and usually hurts people who didn't commit that particular sin but are merely victims of other s' sins. But these children are suffering "because of" Adam's sin. If sin hadn't entered the world, suffering would have been much, much, less.
But suffering still would have existed if only due to the laws of nature, decay, 2nd law of thermodynamics, etc. Even without moral suffering, I would argue that Adam and Eve suffered to some extent before the fall. Eve suffered increased pain in childbearing, for example. I don't think there is good evidence to think that Adam and Eve didn't have fully functioning nervous systems that could register pain. Some pain is protective.
Now, that's not necessarily the kind of suffering you're talking about here. I just wanted to make the distinction between suffering as the result of committed moral wrong and suffering as the result of living in a physical world.
But in order for our free moral agency to have any significance, God chose to create the world in such a way that we could freely choose to do evil and for the consequences of those choices to play out.
I happen to think that evil could be much worse than it is. But that's for another time.
Blessings Ty,
Travis
Okay, so this is a bit rushed, but:
Yes, God had to make the world a place where consequences had to play out, even if innocent people are caught by them in order to give people real choices, and real choices are necessary to create a world where there can be real love.
No, I'm not saying that this solves the problem, but it does help to create a picture of God which does not look so villainous. The picture you end up with is of a God who has to do what he has to do to keep the world running, but is not laughing on the sidelines when the bad stuff happens.
And no, I'm not saying that God just "feels bad" about human suffering, unless you mean "feels bad," like a mother who loses her infant children, which sure looks a lot worse than death to me (I may speak lightly of it, but when I've been to the limits of pain, where I, quite literally, could not process any more pain, where I shocked the doctors by remaining conscious, but I'd sign up for that, and with a smile, to protect my nephew).
I'm saying that God is intimately involved in human suffering, that God must somehow be included in the cycle of suffering. I'm saying that unless God had the capacity to feel in a way that is more real than you and I do, he would be less than us.
Now, I certainly doubt that God can be involved in the same way we are (the ancients seem to have gotten that right): if God hurt in the same way that we hurt, he could be coerced, his choices would be twisted by the pain etc. But, as far as I can see at the moment, a heartless God would not only be against God's portrayal of himself in scripture, it would make him less than God (less than good), and would put him in the bizarre situation of being the only innocent who is ontologically exempt from suffering, in a world where he created the rules, which sounds like a bit of a problem to me.
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