The Creator God and the Created God

Yesterday we mentioned a metaphysical ancestor named Adam Clarke (1760-1832) who argued that radical immutability on God's part means no freedom or meaning on our part -- that if "God is the only operator," then created beings are but gears in a vast God Machine. 

In God's eternity, this post has already been written and you've already read it.

In that case, at least it should be easy enough to write.

That's a good point. Why is anything difficult if it happens inevitably? Clarke recognizes that

Without contingency, there would be no free agency, and that would leave God as the sole actor, making him "the author of all the evil and sin that are in the world" (Rice).

Honestly, how does one avoid this conclusion? 

If God predetermines everything, and his determinations are all necessarily right, then nothing the creatures do is wrong.

Nor could there be any distinctions between "vice and virtue, praise and blame, merit and demerit, guilt and innocence..." God's immutability is our ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card: instead of the devil made me do it, God did.  

I guess it's the whole notionof contingency in God that people object to. But if there are contingencies down here, it is logically necessary that "God's knowledge of contingencies must itself be contingent." 

I'm obviously aware of the traditional view that says God's all-determining will can somehow be reconciled with our genuine freedom, but I don't -- can't -- buy it, for it is as unintelligible as a square circle. 

Why even does God give us commands? It makes no sense whatsoever, and are we supposed to believe in a nonsense God? Or is that determined too? 

Here's another reasonable fellow named Lorenzo McCabe (1817-1897) who "insisted that free actions are of necessity contingent." That is at once a bold statement and plain common sense:

How could contingent events be known before they occur? Absolute divine foreknowledge excludes all contingency.... Remove all notion of contingency from God, and we are left with a God who is "immovably fixed," locked in "the iceberg of indifference," in short, a God who is not, in any meaningful sense, a personal... being.

The Iceberg of Indifference is very much like Einstein's block universe, in which the passage of time is but an illusion because everything has already happened. But "a truly personal God is one whose experience involves temporality," which, for some reason, is regarded as a metaphysical boo boo of the highest order by those in charge of these things. 

Why do that hate time?

It goes back to the idea that a perfect being cannot undergo change, because the change would result in more or less perfection. 

First of all, I don't think you can deduce the nature of God by placing an arbitrary limit on what he can or cannot do, but who says you can't engage in perfect change forever? God doesn't surpass Godself, but surely it must be fun to try?

I say if God is not involved in time, then it is the trad-man who has placed an indefensible limit on his infinitude, not me. But in any event,

Just as omnipotence is "circumscribed by the possible," "omniscience must be limited by the knowable," and this excludes future contingencies.

God cannot do the impossible -- e.g., make a square circle -- or know the unknowable -- e.g., the final number of pi. 

We've written before about how genuine creation is necessarily a risky isness, and McCabe agrees that

creation was a "pure venture" on God's part, a great and fair experiment. While God's purposes must ultimately prevail, just how this will happen is "unfixed, undetermined, and therefore uncertain."  

This certainly makes things more interesting and spicy, for both us and for God:

What God ultimately wants is is a kingdom of "co-creators, co-causes, co-originators, and co-eternal with himself in the realm of the contingent." 

Which is nice. It not only gives our life a meaning and a telos, "but takes nothing away from God," rather, "significantly enriches our picture of God," so it's a win-win for the bothovus:

The view that God is actively engaged in the world, responding and reacting to the actions and decisions of humans, provides us a far more personal picture of God than the one that absolute foreknowledge requires.

This is not a smaller God, but a much bigger one. 

Now, yesterday's post alluded to an esoteric open theology, which we are in the process of discovering. But our old friend Lequier hints at such a vision with the outrageous claim that 

Since God's creatures have a genuine effect on God, there is a qualified sense in which the Creator himself is created.

(?!). In other words -- or words rather -- how do we work that one out? For starters, how about with recourse to Eckhart's distinction between God and Godhead? Review this for us, willya' Gemini?

For Eckhart, "God" typically refers to the personal God, the Creator, the God we encounter in religious practice and scripture. This is the God who acts in the world, loves, judges, and is the object of our worship and prayer. 

God is understood with attributes such as goodness, wisdom, power, and love. These are the ways we can conceive of and relate to the divine. 

God is seen as active, involved in creation, redemption, and the unfolding of history.

Now, this God is distinct from Eckhart's Godhead which is

the ultimate ground of all being, lying beyond our comprehension and any specific attributes. It is the source from which the personal God and all of creation emanate. 

The Godhead is beyond being and non-being, beyond good and evil, beyond all distinctions that our intellect can grasp. It is a "nothingness" in the sense of being empty of all created characteristics and limitations, not in the sense of absolute non-existence. 

It is utterly ineffable; no words or concepts can adequately describe it. Eckhart often emphasized the silence and mystery surrounding the Godhead. He famously said, "Everything within the Godhead is unity, and of that there is nothing to be spoken."  

The Godhead is passive and unmoving. It does not act or create in the way that "God" does. It is the silent, still source from which all activity flows. Eckhart stated, "God works, the Godhead does not work; for it has nothing to do." 

Which is more than enough to give me something to chew on for the next 22 hours or so.