The Future of God

Yesterday's post left off with the Bold Claim that "Israel's responses will contribute in a genuine way to the shaping not only of its own future, but to the future of God." 

I get why people don't like this idea, or where it leads, but --

Where does it lead?

Well, taken to the extreme, it leads to the idea that God exists, only not yet. In other words, he's busy evolving into himself, just like the restavus. In Hartshorne's process theology, "God is capable of surpassing himself by growing and changing in his knowledge and feeling for the world."

A superficially plausible proposition, but if God is only change, we've got problems, for example, the problem of an infinite regress. In other words, every effect, i.e., change, has a cause, but this can't go on forever, for we don't have all day. 

Process theology tries to eliminate this metaphysical oopsie with recourse to God's having a "primordial nature" and a "consequent nature," but a nature by definition doesn't change. 

Rather, I suggest a dynamic complementarity in God between Being and Beyond Being, more on which as we proceed. The point is that God does not and cannot "surpass himself," but is nevertheless a kind of "process of perfection" -- of one unsurpassable perfection to the next. Otherwise God would die of boredom.

I think -- 

You think?

Indeed, who cares what Bob thinks? The more important question is who thinks Bob, or in other words, what is the ground and principle of thinking itself? I declare that it is none other then the Father's ceaseless and always perfect generation of the Son-Logos, which is to say, from perfection to perfection, and why not? The point is that it is impossible to cleanse God of all verbs.

Of action words.

Correct. For example, just try reciting the Creed with none of the emboldened verbs: maker of heaven and earth, begotten Son, all things were made, came down from heaven, proceeds from the Father and the Son, spoken through the prophets, etc. 

Perhaps every noun is a verb, and vice versa.

Better yet, in God there are only nounverbs or verbnouns, i.e., a prior dynamic unity? A Wording Word? 

What is Creation itself but a Wording Word spoken in time? But our creation is just a vertical reflection of creation in divinas. In our creation there is progress and regress, but not in God's timeless creative act within the Godhead. 

Back to our book, the Suffering of God. There's that -ing again. I suppose we could turn it around and say the "Godding of suffer," but what an infelicitous phrase. Nevertheless, in the Incarnation, God "takes up" and transforms human suffering, or so we have heard from the wise.  

However, this book is about the Old Testament. In it, God says, for example, "If you thoroughly amend your ways and your doings," yada yada, "then I will cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever" (Jer. 7:5).

Curious language for an unchanging God, i.e., the conditional if and then mingled with the unconditional forever and ever. But this reminds me of what we said yesterday about God being a 5D chess master, that he will eventually prevail even if he allows a lot of immature and stupid moves from the human end:

For God, or anyone, to speak in terms of a possibility (or probability), suggests an awareness of at least one other possibility, but uncertainty as to which, in fact, will occur. If God knew, at the moment God delivered this word to Jeremiah..., what, in fact, did occur later..., then the word to the people is both pointless and a deception.

In other words, why tell people to straighten up and fly right if God already knows they have -- or haven't -- done so? For that matter, why even issue ten commandments if God has already commanded every possible outcome? Why pretend that there is a middleman -- i.e., man -- between God's will and what happens herebelow?

Again, this doesn't detract from God's omniscience, it's just that no one can know what is unknowable in principle:

Where the divine perspective exceeds the human may be said to lie in the ability to delineate all of the possibilities of the future, and the likelihood of their occurrence, in view of a thoroughgoing knowledge of the past and present.... For God the future is not something which is closed. God, too, moves into a future which is to some extent unknown.

Now, some will say this diminishes God's power and glory and majesty and all that. I say it infinitely magnifies God's power & glory & all that, because there is so much more to know and do! 

After all, in the standard view God only knows a single inevitable possibility, which isn't even a possibility, rather, a necessity. But in our view, he knows all of the infinite possibilities, which requires a God with a whole lot more computational power, not to mention the moment-to-moment adjustments to this infinite knowledge. 

Pretty, pretty impressive, I say: 

It is clear from the foregoing that God will take into consideration human thought and action in determining what God's own action will be. In other words, human response can contribute in a genuine way to the shaping of both God and Israel -- indeed, the world as well.

Indeed. There are more passages of this nature in the OT than I care to innumerate. Besides, I'm not a biblical scholar, just a guy with common sense. And I believe God has common sense. In fact, this is one of my standards in interpreting the Other Guy's theology.

Example.

Well, let's consider the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which means that God creates people he destines to hell. For me this fails to pass the smell test, let alone the common sense test. 

Back to the OT, "God takes Moses' contribution with utmost seriousness," i.e., his contribution to their dialogue. "God's acquiescence" to his arguments "indicates that God treats the conversation with Moses with integrity and honors the human insight as an important ingredient for the shaping of the future." 

One needn't take any particular OT conversation literally, but one must take literally the principle of divine-human con-versation, which means turning or flowing together, and this is indeed how the world turns and how we grow with the flow. 

We'll continue this conversation in the next post...