I May Be Wrong, But I'm Sincere

If you believe in a God that doesn't exist, does this make you a theist or an atheist? After all, there's only one God, so who or what are you worshipping if not that one? Yourself? In other words, your own imaginary projected qualities? 

There is form and there is substance, and the former can never literally "be" the latter. Our representations of God are always a form, although some forms are more adequate than others. 

One might think of God as pure gold, or gold as such, while our forms are only various shapes or trinkets of gold; or, God is pure light that is colored as a result of being refracted through the human container.

For example, one of these forms contributed to the division of the eastern and western churches, that is, the filioque, i.e., whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone. Thus, someone is apparently worshipping a "false God," or at least believes a falsehood about God. 

Probably the only way around such fraternal disputes -- which range from the trifling to the essential -- is a radical apophaticism whereby we can only say what God isn't. This approach may not be right, but at least it's never wrong.  

Schuon posits the idea of a "human margin" situated on the edge, so to speak, of revelation, allowing for ethnic, cultural, historical, and linguistic differences. We all have a "point of view," simply by virtue of being finite persons, not to mention the uniquely particular person we are. 

Schuon suggests that our sincerity toward God can compensate for a dodgy theology. For example, there have been saints who weren't great theologians, and likewise great theologians who weren't saints, so sanctity (or sanctification) seems to be an independent variable. 

Or to put it another way, you can get everything right and still be wrong, insofar as you forget the one thing needful, which, in Christianity, is charity:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Looked at this way, any theological form is simply a means to the end of an interior transformation and renewal of the person. It reminds me of the Zen saying that the purpose of the boat is to cross the river -- a means to the end, not the end itself.  

What does this have to do with our recent subject, which has to do with the question of God's immutability? Well, supposing one person sincerely believes God is immutable, while another -- that would be me -- sincerely believes otherwise, where's the harm so long as we both get across the river? 

Of course, there's a point at which the human margin shades off into subjectivism, relativism, and religious indifferentism. Again, revealed forms aren't gold as such, but are still golden. But some forms aren't gold at all, these being totally manmade ones. Could a manmade religion, or even no religion at all, result in sanctity? I suppose it's possible but not likely. 

For example, stoicism is making a comeback these days, apparently appealing to folks who sincerely want to be better people but who cannot believe in the Judeo-Christian God. So long as it actually makes them better, who am I to complain? 

Of course, the contemporary stoic is embedded in Christian culture whose values he takes for granted. One of the greatest stoics of them all, Seneca, was a spinmeister for the monstrous Nero. Likewise, there's a lot of wisdom in Marcus Aurelius, but this didn't stop him from carrying out brutal military campaigns, persecuting Christians, or taking slavery for granted.

Let's get back to our main event -- which indeed claims that God is a kind of event, and not the wholly impassive motionless mover. Hartshorne has a very useful way of thinking about this, even if I reject his overall theology. 

Basically, he says that thinking about ultimate reality inevitably gives rise to antinomies such as time and eternity, absolute and relative, actual and potential, permanence and change, one and many, immanence and transcendence, et al. "One decides in each case which member of the pair is good or admirable and then attributes it... to deity, while wholly denying the contrasting term":

One pole of each contrary is regarded as more excellent than the other, so that the supremely excellent being cannot be described by the other and inferior pole.  

Thus, immutability good, change bad; absolute good, relative bad; eternity good, temporality bad. 

The dilemma, however, is artificial; for it is produced by the assumption that the highest form of reality is to be indicated by separating or purifying one pole of the ultimate contrasts from the other pole.

But God is pretty, pretty big, and "one would think that the supreme excellence must somehow be able to integrate all the complexity there is into itself as one spiritual whole." 

Hartshorne posits a "Law of Polarity" whereby "ultimate contraries are correlatives, mutually interdependent, so that nothing real can be described by the wholly one-sided assertion of simplicity, being, actuality and the like, each in a 'pure' form," divorced from its complementary partner.

Now, you know how I feel about the subject: the harmonious integration of these ultimate complementarities is none other than the Trinity, which, for example, is the quintessence of Absolute Relativity, or of substance-in-relation. It is likewise "unchanging change," or "absolute potential," which is to say, Infinitude (AKA All Possibility). 

For Hartshorne, "being becomes, or becoming is -- being and becoming must somehow form a single reality." Again, what is the Trinity but that single reality whereby Being becomes and Becoming Is?

I'll give you a break and stop for now, but we'll continue playfully chasing our tale tomorrow, because this vision still requires a lot of fine-tuning in order to avoid slipping beyond the human margin and into the idiosyncratic, the presumptuous, and the manmade (which I believe Hartshorne ended up doing).