God's Problem Child

I do sometimes wonder why the blog has become less popular over the years. Perhaps it's because of posts like yesterday's, which are not exactly Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. Rather, there's something to offend everyone.

And besides, who are you to invent some new religion, or even introduce major innovations to the existing ones?

Not to be defensive, but first of all, the Bible is replete with examples of change and absence of foreknowledge in God -- of offers, tests, regrets, questions, discoveries, disappointments, bargaining, threats, warnings, conditional statements, etc., none of which are compatible with changelessness or a predetermined outcome.

You may say, "You don't get it, Bob. Those are just crude anthropomorphisms as a result of God's condescension to our level, an accommodation to our weakness." So, you're telling me that God condescends and accommodates without undergoing change? 

Besides, why not just create us with the capacity to understand? Why the baby talk? And to what end? In other words, what is the "real" message of these passages? Changelessness and determinism? That makes no sense at all. Rather, it's just confusing.

More aphoristic insights from Berdyaev. Or at least I'll try to reduce the indiscriminate spray of his firehose to something more pithy.

Man is the meeting-point of two worlds.

As mentioned yesterday, I like this guy because he tells me what I already think. Obviously we are the meeting point between two worlds. But how, and why? Does it mean we are two people in two worlds? No, that way lies dualism. Rather, a person is one, as is the cosmos, and we are conformed to it, at least potentially. 

In reality, this is a vertical and hierarchically structured cosmos, so we have access to all its levels, from matter (indeed, even the "submaterial" quantum realm) to God, and everything in between, e.g., the rational, conceptual, aesthetic, psychic, interpersonal, et al. Obviously, most of reality is immaterial, but that hardly makes it any less real. 

For Schuon, this hierarchical structure is a necessary consequence of God's Infinitude, AKA All Possibility. And I say Infinitude is the "active" dimension of the Absolute. I think it's just another way of saying that transcendence implies immanence, and vice versa. It is why God is simultaneously an infinite distance from us, and yet, closer than our jugular. Dávila gets it:

God is infinitely close and infinitely distant; one should not speak of Him as if He were at some intermediate distance.

Then again, he must be in those intermediate planes as well, for Reality is in each and every appearance. But in any event,

What a strange being -- divided and of double meaning, having the form of a king and that of a slave, a being at once free and in chains, powerful and weak, uniting in one being glory and worthlessness, the eternal with the corruptible! 

Well, someone's gotta do it. 

In his essence, man is a break in the world of nature, he cannot be contained within it. 

Here again, God is infinite and so are we. Or, we are infinitude in finitude, so to speak. But we can never contain or limit our own infinitude, rather, we always transcend ourselves, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Supposing we are God's image, then we too are a play of absolute and infinite, of change and changelessness.

Our consciousness "transcends the natural world and cannot be explained by it," so stop looking there for an explanation. Nor are we peripheral to the cosmic action, but right in the middle of it: man

knows himself to be at the absolute centre -- not of a given, closed planetary system, but of the whole of being, of all planes of being, of all worlds.

And don't let some tenured ape tell you otherwise. "Man, the microcosm, belongs to a higher, royal degree in the hierarchy of nature." Sure, we are fallen, so you might say we have abdicated the throne. But this is very different from saying we are born to be cosmic peasants toiling at the periphery of being, for

fallen man remains a microcosm and contains within himself all the ranks and all the powers of the world.

Or as Joyce put it, "Phall if you but will, rise you must." Death looks like the final fall, but not so fast, for "The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay." Like a resurrection of something? 

Christology is the only true anthropology.

Interesting. Could you say a little more?

The Christological revelation is also an anthropological revelation. And the task of humanity's religious consciousness is to reveal the Christological consciousness of man.

So, a two-way revelation, of God to man and of man to man. Is it also a revelation -- so to speak -- of man to God? Did man's rejection of Christ, not to mention the Crucifixion, come as a surprise? 

Or, going back to the beginning, was God surprised by the fall? If not, why the interrogation of Adam? Where are you? Who said you were naked? Have you eaten of that tree which I told you to leave alone? We will come back to this intriguing subject after we're finished dealing with Berdyaev. 

Now, as we never tire of pointing out, the very first thing we learn about God is that he creates. It's not only on page one, it's the first sentence, and I would argue the most important sentence in all of the Bible, because it is the first principle of which everything else is an entailment. And

Human nature is creative because it is the image and likeness of God the Creator.

In case you were wondering where all the creativity comes from.

Here's a passage that actually goes to the issue raised above as to whether God is ever surprised or caught off guard:

God awaits from man a free answer to His call, awaits answering love and creative participation in the conquest of the darkness of non-being. Man must manifest... the greatest exertion of his freedom, to accomplish what God expects of him.

Wait -- God waits? Expectantly? 

God never forces man, never sets a limit to man's freedom.... God expects man's participation in the work of world-creation. 

And if we are able to say Yes, we must be able to say No. God hopes for us to say Yes, for they say he wills for all men to be saved. But they also say that some men are not saved, so what gives? Why isn't God's will carried out with machine-like necessity? That's another post for future Bob, but we'll definitely get to it. 

Let's just say that man is God's oppositional problem child:

As a being belonging to two worlds and capable of overcoming himself, man is a contradictory and paradoxical being, comprehending within himself diametric opposites.

Sometimes he "may be not a divine-human phenomenon, but a beast-human -- that is, a complete denial of humanity." For examples, see History.

Why can't you be more like that nice boy Jesus?! (God).

Must stop now. Gotta take the wife to the airport.