Can God Relate?

Yesterday I heard a Christian apologist repeat the standard line that GOD OWES US ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, and that we have no right to expect any help from his end. Supposing he does decide to give us a second thought, shut-up and be grateful.  

When I was a child, I was forced to attend Sunday school. Behind the podium in gold letters were the words GOD IS LOVE. But isn't the standard definition of love To will the good of the other? Does it not involve relationship, reciprocity, and desire for the well-being of its recipient? Or nah?

The standard view reminds me of what Bill Cosby's father used to say to him as a child: 

How'd that turn out?

Such a distant and autocratic being is worthy of fear, but is he worthy of admiration? My own father was a bit like that: he was the boss and I was the employee. He was in no way abusive, but it wasn't as if I could go on strike for better working conditions. 

The main thing was to stay on his good side. Don't piss off the boss, and life will be easier. He didn't even have a lot of rules, or rather, just one: Do the right thing. In his own way, he appealed to the natural law, whereby we implicitly know right from wrong, so Don't be an idiot.

In a single conversation with my son, I reveal more about myself than my father did to me the whole time I knew him. Which is to say, I didn't really know him, except in the sense of being totally stable and reliable, which is not nothing. He was always there for me, like a chainlink backstop. I even knew he loved me, but there was no hugging or other PDAs. That was for Italians and other borderline people of color. 

Anyway, I agree that God owes us nothing, so long as we don't exist. In other words, he is under no obligation to create us. But once created, I think the creator creates a kind of obligation for himself. Analogously, I didn't have to create a child, but once he's here, is he not entitled to certain common courtesies? 

Jesus of course calls God Father, but what kind of father? In Roman society, the father was an absolute tyrant. Not only could he take his children out of the world, he often did, without so much as a second thought. Nor did he necessarily have to make another to replace the one taken out, because of the whole ephebophilia thing.

I say God doesn't have to create us, but once he does, he's *kind of* on the hook for some form of child support. This is implied in the book I'm reading, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective. 

You can even say God is immutable and impassive, at least until the moment he creates. Once he does, then he is very much involved, if only because of his immanence, for God cannot not be "in" his creation. After all, by definition he's everyplace, and this is certainly a place:

God is literally related to the world, unless one is prepared to say that God is literally not in relationship to the world.

It's one or the other. But in the Old Testament, this isn't even an issue, for

it assumes certain very specific matters regarding the God-world relationship: For example, that God can speak and people can hear, that genuine dialogue between God and people is possible.

Moreover, "this God of whom the Old Testament speaks has bound himself to the history of his people."

But to use the word "history" for God, unless it is to have an esoteric meaning, also entails change and contingency for God. 

This God "is not simply father; he is certain kind of father." And supposing we are created in his image, then "the human is seen in theomorphic terms, rather than God in anthropomorphic terms." In other words -- and this is something I've long suspected --

The "image of God" gives us permission to reverse the process and, by looking at the human, learn what God is like.  

Thus a good father is like God because God is like a good father, and why not?

Now, can we push this too far? Can't find out unless we try. But I suspect that one of the points of revelation is that it's trying to convey something new about God -- something different from the standard view of an absentee father or deadbeat dad at best and a tyrannical one at worst. 

Here is an example of pushing things as far as they can go:

The world is not only dependent on God; God is also dependent upon the world. The world is not only affected by God; God is affected by the world in both positive and negative ways. God is sovereign over the world, yet not unqualifiedly so, as considerable power and freedom have been given to creatures.

This means he is omniscient, but only up to a point, that point being his own irrevocable gift of freedom. Therefore,

God knows all there is to know about the world, yet there is a future which does not yet exist to be known even by God. God is Lord of time and history, yet God has chosen to be bound up in the time and history of the world and to be limited thereby. 

God is unchangeable with respect to the steadfastness of his love and his salvific will for all creatures, yet God does change in the light of what happens in the interaction between God and world.

I mean, c'mon. One must twist oneself into an exegetical pretzel to interpret the plain meaning of the Old Testament in any other way. Besides -- not to get ahead of the story -- but if the Incarnation isn't God getting involved in history, I don't know what is. 

Again, is there such a thing as a oneway relationship, and if so, is this a good thing? As mentioned above, my relationship with my father was a tad unilateral, but it would have been nice to know a little about what made him tick. But this was the case with all of my friends. Perhaps our fathers were traumatized by World War II, but being totally open about one's feelings was for mothers or homosexuals.

I'm a bit of an asocial recluse these days, but I used to be quite social from my late teens through my twenties. I had lots of friends, and yet we never revealed much about what was truly going on inside, since that was for women and homosexuals. I suppose we were just imitating our stoical fathers.

Although Fretheim doesn't mention Hartshorne, the first time I heard his description of God, I said That's for me. In other words, it clicked, in such a way that I can't not believe it. Basically, he says that God is not only First Cause but First Effect, albeit in a supereminent way, implying no privation or imperfection.

In addition to omnipotence and omniscience, he says God is omnipathos, meaning that he is supremely related to the world. He is not aloof or indifferent to his own creation but deeply involved with its joys and sufferings.

So, you're saying God is gay?

No, but it does raise a number of questions, for example,

What if the word "relationship" were taken with utter seriousness? What does it take for a relationship to be real? What does it mean for a relationship to have integrity as a relationship, which is presumably the only kind of relationship God could have, for God is certainly the supreme exemplification of what is entailed in relatedness? What does it mean for God to be faithful in a relationship which is real? Once having entered into such a relationship, is God bound to it, or no longer free to become unrelated?

If God is radically immutable and impassive, then these are meaningless questions. However, I think they're perfectly reasonable questions to ask of a reasonable God. More to follow...