God and Character

[mindlight]

If you write a novel or a film script then your characters are crucial to the success of that. The ultimate Playwright and Novelist, in all creation, is of course God Himself. He created us in His image and gave us gifts like rationality, moral sense, creativity, and the drive and determination to cultivate and govern this world. We are purposeful and free beings who to a considerable extent write our own scripts within the Big Play that God Himself has determined.

No human character has ever been perfect except Jesus and Adam and Eve before the Fall in their state of innocence. Though you might argue that Enoch, Elijah, and Moses have become this as they have become heavenly citizens.

In the governance of the universe, what role does character play?

Specifically:

1) Does God find some characters more interesting and useful for His grand purpose than others? e.g. Prophets or Apostles He chose to achieve grand purposes compared to you or me?

2) When God allows the termination of one man's family tree but allows the continuation of another do you think it is in part to save that one special character that He has in mind centuries down the line?

3) Can characters make themselves boring to God by sin or dead patterns of behavior? So God is more likely to listen to someone He can have a great conversation with like King David for example. This despite David having murdered, committed adultery, and various other bad things. Was this because David was continually seeking new ways to praise God and in humility seeking Him with all his heart? David was interesting to God but Pharisees who thought they knew it all were just pedants and bores to Him?

4) If I want God's attention how can I make my character more interesting and fun to Him?

5) Do we all have preset parts in His grand play? Some are created for noble purposes and others for profane ones? Some are born to be the bad guys: the mass-murdering psychopaths and dictators and others to be the saints that transform the world.

EDIT: Spelling mistakes

 

[Petros2015]

5) Do we all have preset parts in His grand play?

I have a feeling you can audition for any part at any time. Characters were more interesting though based on where He was or wasn't. Peter, for example - how interesting was he before Christ said "Come, follow me"?

 

[St_Worm2]

4) If I want God's attention how can I make my character more interesting and fun to Him?

Hello Mindlight, since God was already aware of all that you would do and say, and who/what you would become before you were born .. e.g. Psalm 139:16, I believe that you are already as interesting to Him as you are ever going to be

Question, do you love your children because of what they do, or do to entertain you, or do you love them simply because of who they are to you, your children? So it is with our Abba (loving, heavenly Father), who loves us as human beings, not as human doings, simply because we are His children (not because of what we do and/or can do for Him).

BTW, I believe that the Bible answers your question #4 in the Psalms, but it may not be in the way that you were expecting.

Psalm 37
4 Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.
​

He doesn't want you to 'delight Him' in some way to get the things that you think that you want from Him (if such a thing was possible), rather, He wants you to "delight yourself" in Him instead

God's love for us, as well the relationship that He desires to have with us, is never based upon our establishing some kind of quid pro quo with Him, as His love, Godly love (agape), that is, is never self-seeking in any way.

(BTW, if we had to delight Him in order to get Him to bless us and give us our heart's desire, wouldn't that make Him some sort of Cosmic Sugar-Daddy? )

God bless you!

--David
p.s. - as for interesting Bible characters, consider one of my favorites (who I believe must be one of God's too), Lazarus. He was one of the men that the Lord Jesus tells us about in Luke 16 (see Luke 16:19-31).

 

[Bob Crowley]

2) When God allows the termination of one man's family tree but allows the continuation of another do you think it is in part to save that one special character that He has in mind centuries down the line?

I don't think so. Christ had no children, and not a single word was said in the Bible about the children of the apostles as far as I know. We don't know a thing about them. The Catholic church has a policy of having unmarried priest (in the latin rite) so whatever positive character traits they might have are lost to the family line.

We don't know how God works. In some respects the question the OP is asking verges on the well worn argument about predestination and free will. We don't know the answer to that either.

John Newton who wrote "Amazing Grace" was involved in the slave trade at one stage, and living a very unholy life. Yet God lifted him out of the gutter and did some amazing work, despite his character defects. A lot of his ship mates went down with the ships - no second chance for them.

God is the arbiter. But it's not the same as an author writing a book - those characters are entirely the author's creation, and they don't have an ounce of free will. That's not the case with God creating us. He might have eternity to think about us and our character, but we also have the option of accepting or rejecting Him no matter how long and hard He thinks about our characters.

God might have had a lot of time for David, but his family line didn't leave an outstanding legacy. One son Absalom turned against him, and while Solomon initially had a gift of wisdom, he blew it by marrying too many foreign women and imposing severe taxes on the population. Solomon had Adonijah executed, one of his half brothers. Amnon raped Tamar, Absalom's sister.

If Joseph and / or Mary were descended from David, I doubt if the genetic line did them any favours.

 

[Mark Quayle]

If you write a novel or a film script then your characters are crucial to the success of that. The ultimate Playwrite and Novelist, in all creation, is of course God Himself. He created us in His image and gave us gifts like rationality, moral sense, creativity, and the drive and determination to cultivate and govern this world. We are purposeful and free beings who to a considerable extent write our own scripts within the Big Play that God Himself has determined.

No human character has ever been perfect except Jesus and Adam and Eve before the Fall in their state of innocence. Though you might argue that Enoch, Elijah, and Moses have become this as they have become heavenly citizens.

In the governance of the universe, what role does character play?

Specifically:

1) Does God find some characters more interesting and useful for His grand purpose than others? e.g. Prophets or Apostles He chose to achieve grand purposes compared to you or me?

2) When God allows the termination of one man's family tree but allows the continuation of another do you think it is in part to save that one special character that He has in mind centuries down the line?

3) Can characters make themselves boring to God by sin or dead patterns of behavior? So God is more likely to listen to someone He can have a great conversation with like King David for example. This despite David having murdered, committed adultery, and various other bad things. Was this because David was continually seeking new ways to praise God and in humility seeking Him with all his heart? David was interesting to God but Pharisees who thought they knew it all were just pedants and bores to Him?

4) If I want God's attention how can I make my character more interesting and fun to Him?

5) Do we all have preset parts in His grand play? Some are created for noble purposes and others for profane ones? Some are born to be the bad guys: the mass-murdering psychopaths and dictators and others to be the saints that transform the world.

In my usual 'scornful fashion', (that is to say, "Forgive me, but..."), your whole post sounds like we are the ones who determine what God must only react to. But I mean you no disrespect; it simply galls me that Christendom must ask such questions. GOD is the primary mover, here. Your #5 is the closest to the facts, but even it asks something that we should already assume to be true. It refers to the Romans 9 description of the potter and the clay. There, Paul puts in parenthesis a smaller discourse of what he, too, seems to think people should already know concerning God and man, into a larger argument concerning Jews and Gentiles.

We do have the promises and descriptions of what we are made for. God created not just the innocent Adam and Eve, he also created the final product— his Bride, the Body of Christ, composed of specific members, not a Frankenstein monster, but perfect in every way, and endowed with a personhood above even the Angels. He chose each member before the foundation of the world, not out of some pool of generic possibles, but specifically made for the location and function of each one. He and each person he has chosen, in the end, are the only ones who know the special name he has for each one, and each one is precious. There is no generic sound to that.

Again, we are not the ones who initiate anything.

 

[The Liturgist]

I myself object to the premise on different grounds, in that I believe God, being infinitely loving, cannot be likened to a cosmic playright. We are not created to amuse Him but created in His image to love Him and participate in His uncreated energies, enjoying each other as a loving parent and their children enjoy each others’ company another now and ever and unto the ages of ages, world without end.

To use another analogy, God is not like Alfred Nitchcock or even Gene Roddenberry, as loving a man as Roddenberry was (Roddenberry was a baptized Christian whose faith lapsed into secularism, but I find it not unreasonable to pray for his soul; he was also a hero, a pilot on the flight crew of a Pan Am Clipper which crash landed in the Sahara in the late 1940s, who ensured the safety of the passengers despite sustaining an injury to his back which would cause him ever increasing pain for the rest of his life), but rather among TV personalities most like Mr. Rogers, who only wrote the characters in the Land of Make Believe, but otherwise spent his time on the air visiting with children and interesting people in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He was also an ordained minister in the PCUSA who was specially ordained for purposes of childrens’ television, and his show is a paradise compared to the loud, obnoxious violence that historically has dominated childrens’ entertainment in every decade. His love for the people around him was sincere.

To express it better, Mr. Rogers made himself, or from a Calvinist point of view that @Mark Quayle can hopefully endorse, was caused by God to more closely resemble Him; through the Calvinist doctrine I think @hedrick referred to as sanctification or the Patristic doctrine of theosis, rebranded by Wesley as entire sanctification, over the course of Mr. Rogers life the tarnished divine image was partially restored so that he more closely reflected the light of God. Also as a Presbyterian one would assume he was a Calvinist, so that should be a +1 for Mark and Hedrick. He is on my list of favorite 20th century Calvinists along with Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and Rev. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral.

 

[mindlight]

I have a feeling you can audition for any part at any time. Characters were more interesting though based on where He was or wasn't. Peter, for example - how interesting was he before Christ said "Come, follow me"?

Yes, our relationship with Jesus defines us and develops us into the truly interesting people we were always meant to be. The preamble to meeting Jesus is important though and God was not absent when Peter learned to fish and became a leader of his immediate group of fishermen.

Can someone simply choose to be an apostle or a prophet? I think auditioning is limited to some extent by the actual gifts we have and have chosen to develop. I may decide to become a great musician right now but I have little talent for it and it may take me years to even master the basics.

 

[mindlight]

Hello Mindlight, since God was already aware of all that you would do and say, and who/what you would become before you were born .. e.g. Psalm 139:16, I believe that you are already as interesting to Him as you are ever going to be

Question, do you love your children because of what they do, or do to entertain you, or do you love them simply because of who they are to you, your children? So it is with our Abba (loving, heavenly Father), who loves us as human beings, not as human doings, simply because we are His children (not because of what we do and/or can do for Him).

BTW, I believe that the Bible answers your question #4 in the Psalms, but it may not be in the way that you were expecting.

Psalm 37
4 Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.
​

He doesn't want you to 'delight Him' in some way to get the things that you think that you want from Him (if such a thing was possible), rather, He wants you to "delight yourself" in Him instead

God's love for us, as well the relationship that He desires to have with us, is never based upon our establishing some kind of quid pro quo with Him, as His love, Godly love (agape), that is, is never self-seeking in any way.

(BTW, if we had to delight Him in order to get Him to bless us and give us our heart's desire, wouldn't that make Him some sort of Cosmic Sugar-Daddy? )

God bless you!

--David
p.s. - as for interesting Bible characters, consider one of my favorites (who I believe must be one of God's too), Lazarus. He was one of the men that the Lord Jesus tells us about in Luke 16 (see Luke 16:19-31).

Yes, we are human beings, not doings, loved by God as a Father loves his child. But a father looks upon his children interested in what they will do with their lives. They do not have to earn his favor but he can be delighted or indeed disappointed with their choices. We delight ourselves in Him and that focus is the healthy one rather than simply presenting a shopping list to him every time we meet. But does he not also delight in us and he gives us jobs where we have a degree of autonomy and he is genuinely interested in the choices we will make:

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. Gen 2:19-20

 

[mindlight]

I don't think so. Christ had no children, and not a single word was said in the Bible about the children of the apostles as far as I know. We don't know a thing about them. The Catholic church has a policy of having unmarried priest (in the latin rite) so whatever positive character traits they might have are lost to the family line.

We don't know how God works. In some respects the question the OP is asking verges on the well worn argument about predestination and free will. We don't know the answer to that either.

John Newton who wrote "Amazing Grace" was involved in the slave trade at one stage, and living a very unholy life. Yet God lifted him out of the gutter and did some amazing work, despite his character defects. A lot of his ship mates went down with the ships - no second chance for them.

God is the arbiter. But it's not the same as an author writing a book - those characters are entirely the author's creation, and they don't have an ounce of free will. That's not the case with God creating us. He might have eternity to think about us and our character, but we also have the option of accepting or rejecting Him no matter how long and hard He thinks about our characters.

God might have had a lot of time for David, but his family line didn't leave an outstanding legacy. One son Absalom turned against him, and while Solomon initially had a gift of wisdom, he blew it by marrying too many foreign women and imposing severe taxes on the population. Solomon had Adonijah executed, one of his half brothers. Amnon raped Tamar, Absalom's sister.

If Joseph and / or Mary were descended from David, I doubt if the genetic line did them any favours.

The genetic line is not so much important for the inheritance of traits in the consideration of character but rather of the fact of existence. Joseph or Mary would not exist were it not for the fact that Davids's line was preserved. Indeed this was required for the incarnation also. In the curse on Eve it was anticipated that her seed would crush the serpent and in David, a man after God's own heart, God could see a glimpse of His own Son.

Regarding how authors see their own characters. Many suggest that they take on a life of their own.

Majority of authors 'hear' their characters speak, finds study

Today we live in an age where characters and role-play are the filters through which many people see reality. People make decisions about going to church by whether it will be fun and connect them to interesting people. That may sound shallow to many of us but when your whole world is built on the interaction of personalities that is what becomes real. We come to church with our friends to be with our friends and not just to worship God. Many today are ignorant of who God is as a character and just how attractive He is as a personality. More people tune into social media stars who share their lives online than attend church in many places. These people are interested in the drama, color, and context of their lives. They sell the character. With the advent of the Metaverse, we are now talking about people adopting play surrogate characters and diving into an interactive virtual universe where they play the role of a hero, Wiseman, saint, warrior, poet, or whatever even though they are not like that in real life. Here on Christian forums many of us have online personas that have a degree of importance to us. I have been on this site for 19 years for example and it is a place I come to discuss ideas. My mindlight personality is an important part of me but very different from the guy who makes the family meal or mows the lawn, or indeed my job role. I guess eventually it will get deleted, hijacked, or simply stop when I die but until then this character is a part of me.

 

[mindlight]

In my usual 'scornful fashion', (that is to say, "Forgive me, but..."), your whole post sounds like we are the ones who determine what God must only react to. But I mean you no disrespect; it simply galls me that Christendom must ask such questions. GOD is the primary mover, here. Your #5 is the closest to the facts, but even it asks something that we should already assume to be true. It refers to the Romans 9 description of the potter and the clay. There, Paul puts in parenthesis a smaller discourse of what he, too, seems to think people should already know concerning God and man, into a larger argument concerning Jews and Gentiles.

We do have the promises and descriptions of what we are made for. God created not just the innocent Adam and Eve, he also created the final product— his Bride, the Body of Christ, composed of specific members, not a Frankenstein monster, but perfect in every way, and endowed with a personhood above even the Angels. He chose each member before the foundation of the world, not out of some pool of generic possibles, but specifically made for the location and function of each one. He and each person he has chosen, in the end, are the only ones who know the special name he has for each one, and each one is precious. There is no generic sound to that.

Again, we are not the ones who initiate anything.

Interesting but...

You seem to have read the determinist stance into this thread and dismissed the freewill one. By phrasing this in terms of character interaction I was trying to avoid this and approach it from a fresh perspective that allowed for both.

An author creates his characters and they would not exist without him and the book in which he places them. He designs the moment they appear in his book and the moment they leave it. So much is predetermined by the plot and purpose the author has in mind for them. But as I shared earlier most authors give a license to their characters such that they hear their voices, they trust them with new challenges only to be disappointed or delighted by their responses. The best characters are not mere puppets in the drama, they begin to take on a life of their own. Our choices matter and our actions demonstrate those choices. Your perspective seems to be an excuse for passivity and fatalism. If it is all written beforehand by the author then why bother?

God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would name them. Jesus was surprised by the faith of the centurion in Capernaum. Jesus was amazed by the unbelief of those who had known him all their lives in Nazareth.

 

[mindlight]

I myself object to the premise on different grounds, in that I believe God, being infinitely loving, cannot be likened to a cosmic playright. We are not created to amuse Him but created in His image to love Him and participate in His uncreated energies, enjoying each other as a loving parent and their children enjoy each others’ company another now and ever and unto the ages of ages, world without end.

To use another analogy, God is not like Alfred Nitchcock or even Gene Roddenberry, as loving a man as Roddenberry was (Roddenberry was a baptized Christian whose faith lapsed into secularism, but I find it not unreasonable to pray for his soul; he was also a hero, a pilot on the flight crew of a Pan Am Clipper which crash landed in the Sahara in the late 1940s, who ensured the safety of the passengers despite sustaining an injury to his back which would cause him ever increasing pain for the rest of his life), but rather among TV personalities most like Mr. Rogers, who only wrote the characters in the Land of Make Believe, but otherwise spent his time on the air visiting with children and interesting people in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He was also an ordained minister in the PCUSA who was specially ordained for purposes of childrens’ television, and his show is a paradise compared to the loud, obnoxious violence that historically has dominated childrens’ entertainment in every decade. His love for the people around him was sincere.

To express it better, Mr. Rogers made himself, or from a Calvinist point of view that @Mark Quayle can hopefully endorse, was caused by God to more closely resemble Him; through the Calvinist doctrine I think @hedrick referred to as sanctification or the Patristic doctrine of theosis, rebranded by Wesley as entire sanctification, over the course of Mr. Rogers life the tarnished divine image was partially restored so that he more closely reflected the light of God. Also as a Presbyterian one would assume he was a Calvinist, so that should be a +1 for Mark and Hedrick. He is on my list of favorite 20th century Calvinists along with Dr. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and Rev. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral.

I think we can make God smile, I believe we can delight or disappoint Him with our actions. The connection of Father with the child is a permanent one for those of us who trust in Him. But our characters are formed in times of distance AND nearness to Him. They are formed by the choices we make which can sometimes surprise Him though not in a way that overthrows his foreknowledge of all things. This life knocks off the rough edges of many who desire to become more like Jesus. Those who move in alternate directions are ultimately handed over to their sins. This is not all predetermined though some things are set, like the time of our birth and death. But character is something we take with us into the afterlife also and at Easter time, believing in the resurrection, we hope in that eternal future with God. How we shone in this life is something that will echo in eternity (to paraphrase General Maximus from Gladiator ( a character who probably never existed but whose words resonated))

 

[Gottservant]

I just want to say, I found your post really intriguing - it created for me more questions than answers - and I am fascinated with the idea (that God foreknew our character, before we found ourselves acting in his "play").

In the governance of the universe, what role does character play?

To give you something to think on, I think character is what remains constant in God, while everything else in life changes.

That doesn't do your OP justice, in some ways, but I want to think more about it, myself.

 

[The Liturgist]

I think we can make God smile, I believe we can delight or disappoint Him with our actions. The connection of Father with the child is a permanent one for those of us who trust in Him. But our characters are formed in times of distance AND nearness to Him. They are formed by the choices we make which can sometimes surprise Him though not in a way that overthrows his foreknowledge of all things. This life knocks off the rough edges of many who desire to become more like Jesus. Those who move in alternate directions are ultimately handed over to their sins. This is not all predetermined though some things are set, like the time of our birth and death. But character is something we take with us into the afterlife also and at Easter time, believing in the resurrection, we hope in that eternal future with God. How we shone in this life is something that will echo in eternity (to paraphrase General Maximus from Gladiator ( a character who probably never existed but whose words resonated))

God is infinitely loving and also immutable so except via communicatio idiomatum from the assumed humanity of God the Son which is hypostatically united with His divinity without change, confusion, separation or division, we can’t make God literally smile outside of that specific context. Rather, when we do that which is pleasing to God, we are in alignment with His uncreated energies and receive His love and blessings, whereas if we engage in unrepentant evil and misotheism, those same divine energies become a consuming fire of divine wrath. But God does not become pleased or angry except through communicatio idiomatum, which is interesting because in hypostatically uniting with us God in the person of the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ, can access the entirety of human experience.

I myself believe, based on the faith of the early church, in free will, but I believe based on experience that Calvinisism and Arminian-Patristic soteriology cannot either be definitely shown using sola scriptura. Too many Protestants have tried and failed to win that battle. However, Pelagianism can be shown false based on scripture. Otherwise it comes down to whether or not one accepts the Consensus Patrum or believes that Calvin perfected a scholastic theological tradition based on Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury and St. Augustine of Hippo which interprets St. Paul in a particularly convincing way.

 

[Mark Quayle]

You seem to have read the determinist stance into this thread and dismissed the freewill one. By phrasing this in terms of character interaction I was trying to avoid this and approach it from a fresh perspective that allowed for both.

That would depend on your use of the term, "freewill". I do not deny real, responsible choice. I only deny that God has not planned all this. Precisely ALL of it is by his will.

An author creates his characters and they would not exist without him and the book in which he places them. He designs the moment they appear in his book and the moment they leave it. So much is predetermined by the plot and purpose the author has in mind for them. But as I shared earlier most authors give a license to their characters such that they hear their voices, they trust them with new challenges only to be disappointed or delighted by their responses. The best characters are not mere puppets in the drama, they begin to take on a life of their own. Our choices matter and our actions demonstrate those choices. Your perspective seems to be an excuse for passivity and fatalism. If it is all written beforehand by the author then why bother?

It is written by the author, but played out by the characters, just as the author wrote it. To put it in real terms, we are no more real and alive, compared to God our creator, than characters in a book are compared to the author. While we, in whom the Holy Spirit is our regeneration, have become alive, we still live in a vapor compared to the solid reality we will see, when the sons of God are revealed, when we finally see God as he is.

God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would name them. Jesus was surprised by the faith of the centurion in Capernaum. Jesus was amazed by the unbelief of those who had known him all their lives in Nazareth.

So, to your understanding, God learns? There are things he does not know?

 

[The Liturgist]

Can someone simply choose to be an apostle or a prophet?

No.

Now, that being said, in addition to experiencing miraculous healings from the Eucharist, and of a relative from Holy Unction (the anointing of the sick with oil) I have encountered a Coptic Orthodox monastic who may be clairvoyant, and also met an Eastern Orthodox monastic of the Athonite Tradition who I believe had the gift of tongues insofar as he and I were able to communicate despite the lack of a common language, and who was reported to be a prophet by many.

However, it must be stressed (and I think my Eastern Orthodox friends @HTacianas and/or @prodromos and my Coptic friends @dzheremi and @Pavel Mosko can confirm this) a cardinal rule of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox monasticism going back to the Desert Fathers and I think St. Anthony the Great is that an Orthodox monk or hermit does not seek out spiritual gifts or spirirtual experiences, such as the gift of prophecy. Doing so is considered to be an almost surefire way of falling into demonic deception.

This is attested to in books like the Philokalia edited by Saints Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth, and The Arena by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, and by numerous writings of Orthodox monastics over the centuries. I am pretty sure at least some version of this lesson is in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Indeed I know of an Orthodox monk who would nighlty pray that he never saw any kind of vision, because he did not feel worthy of it, he did not want to risk being deceived demonically, and it was something he absolutely did not want to have to deal with, and I believe his prayers were granted (I think he reposed some years agp; I think he was either an Athonite or a Russian monastic).

 

[The Liturgist]

God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would name them. Jesus was surprised by the faith of the centurion in Capernaum. Jesus was amazed by the unbelief of those who had known him all their lives in Nazareth.

Aside from the objection to the idea that God is toying with us, there are numerous theological problems with this, including but not limited to:

• Open Theism, or some variation thereof, or otherwise a denial of the omniscience of God which is declared in the Bible.
• Likewise, the denial of divine immutability, another Biblical doctrine.
• Misinterpretation of intentional anthropomorphology (attribution of human behaviors and characteristics, known as anthropomorphism, to God Himself).
• The omniscience of God means that He knows eternally outside of time, which He created, what Adam would name the animals, and all other things.
• The invisibility and incomprehensibility of God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in His divine nature (how would a purely spiritual, boundless entity smile or frown in response to our actions?).
• A misunderstanding of the hypostatic union and the full humanity of Jesus Christ. As I said in post no. 13 of this self same thread, our savior, whose crucifixion most Western Christians and some Orthodox are commemorating today, and the remainder who commemorate it (as all should) will do so next Friday, our Lord is fully human and is humanity is in a state of hypostatic union with the Divine Nature, but only through communicatio idiomatum can you attribute human attributes to God, in the person of the Incarnate Word, such as being born of a woman and dying on the Cross, but communicatio idiomatum is a two way street. Chalcedonian, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Christology all agree Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, and his divinity and humanity are united without change, confusion, separation or division. It would introduce a division between the human and divine natures to say our Lord was literally surprised by the Centurion’s faith, or to claim that he was amazed by the unbelief of the people in Nazareth, because omniscience, a property of the Divine Nature, is communicated via hypostatic union to the Human Nature, just as human emotional responses are communicated to the Divine Nature.
• These assertions are also not supported by the Gospel text. It does not say that our Lord was amazed by the people of Nazareth.

These points should be uncontroversial among Christians regardless of denomination, because these doctrines are either Biblical or present in all three doctrinally justifiable models of Christology, which nearly all Christian churches agree with. I expect all my friends and colleagues in this thread can validate this assertion.

I can provide you, if you PM me, with some excellent English language books and online theological resources which I believe will help you. Please forgive me if this post or my other replies come across as hostile. I am the worst of sinners, and I only want to help you gain an improved knowledge of theology and Christology.

May God bless you @mindlight on this Good Friday, the memorial on the Gregorian Calendar for the passion of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ.

 

[mindlight]

I just want to say, I found your post really intriguing - it created for me more questions than answers - and I am fascinated with the idea (that God foreknew our character, before we found ourselves acting in his "play").



To give you something to think on, I think character is what remains constant in God, while everything else in life changes.

That doesn't do your OP justice, in some ways, but I want to think more about it, myself.

Thanks. God writes the play in which we act and knows how we will freely play our parts. This does not diminish his joy in us as his faithful servants.

The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love. Psalm 147:11

God's character does not change. Clearly, there is a lot of darkness and indeed brokenness in worldly characters, however. Does the fixed version look anything like the broken one? That said there are stories of love, stories that give true reasons for joy, and stories of goodness, courage, and compassion that all endure through the ages and there are saints that model the Christ-like character traits we aspire to. As we are perfected in Christ we grow to be the person that we were always meant to be. Those perfect character traits are founded on his grace and mercy and endure I believe into the life to come. Though maybe in the perspective of the Divine glory, that we will then experience, we will find ourselves growing in new and wonderful directions.

 

[mindlight]

God is infinitely loving and also immutable so except via communicatio idiomatum from the assumed humanity of God the Son which is hypostatically united with His divinity without change, confusion, separation or division, we can’t make God literally smile outside of that specific context. Rather, when we do that which is pleasing to God, we are in alignment with His uncreated energies and receive His love and blessings, whereas if we engage in unrepentant evil and misotheism, those same divine energies become a consuming fire of divine wrath. But God does not become pleased or angry except through communicatio idiomatum, which is interesting because in hypostatically uniting with us God in the person of the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ, can access the entirety of human experience.

I myself believe, based on the faith of the early church, in free will, but I believe based on experience that Calvinisism and Arminian-Patristic soteriology cannot either be definitely shown using sola scriptura. Too many Protestants have tried and failed to win that battle. However, Pelagianism can be shown false based on scripture. Otherwise it comes down to whether or not one accepts the Consensus Patrum or believes that Calvin perfected a scholastic theological tradition based on Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury and St. Augustine of Hippo which interprets St. Paul in a particularly convincing way.

Interesting, so the attribution of human emotions, laughter, or indeed smiles to God must link through the incarnation. He is both the Playwright and the Star Actor in his play. I tend to hang loose on the free will-determinism debates as I think there is truth on both sides. When you consider God modeled free will in Christ yet wrote the script that he followed I think you see the heart of how the church relates to God also.

 

[mindlight]

That would depend on your use of the term, "freewill". I do not deny real, responsible choice. I only deny that God has not planned all this. Precisely ALL of it is by his will.

The way you say it sounds fatalistic to me

It is written by the author, but played out by the characters, just as the author wrote it. To put it in real terms, we are no more real and alive, compared to God our creator, than characters in a book are compared to the author. While we, in whom the Holy Spirit is our regeneration, have become alive, we still live in a vapor compared to the solid reality we will see, when the sons of God are revealed, when we finally see God as he is.

Yes, we only have glimpses of glory now. But the historical Jesus was as real as a man gets and after the resurrection was met by those who knew him also. It was possible to see in Christ there and then what godly character looked like and in a humanly and historically understandable way.

So, to your understanding, God learns? There are things he does not know?

In the two Jesus examples I quoted and the more famous one about Jesus not knowing the date of his return you could suggest this was because he had not yet ascended back to the Father and away from the self-limiting associated with his mission. But the naming of the animals suggests that there were a lot of possibilities of what those animals could be called. God was probably aware of every single one of them but he was still expectant and interested to hear which ones Adam chose for these creatures.

 

[mindlight]

No.

Now, that being said, in addition to experiencing miraculous healings from the Eucharist, and of a relative from Holy Unction (the anointing of the sick with oil) I have encountered a Coptic Orthodox monastic who may be clairvoyant, and also met an Eastern Orthodox monastic of the Athonite Tradition who I believe had the gift of tongues insofar as he and I were able to communicate despite the lack of a common language, and who was reported to be a prophet by many.

However, it must be stressed (and I think my Eastern Orthodox friends @HTacianas and/or @prodromos and my Coptic friends @dzheremi and @Pavel Mosko can confirm this) a cardinal rule of Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox monasticism going back to the Desert Fathers and I think St. Anthony the Great is that an Orthodox monk or hermit does not seek out spiritual gifts or spirirtual experiences, such as the gift of prophecy. Doing so is considered to be an almost surefire way of falling into demonic deception.

This is attested to in books like the Philokalia edited by Saints Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth, and The Arena by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, and by numerous writings of Orthodox monastics over the centuries. I am pretty sure at least some version of this lesson is in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Indeed I know of an Orthodox monk who would nighlty pray that he never saw any kind of vision, because he did not feel worthy of it, he did not want to risk being deceived demonically, and it was something he absolutely did not want to have to deal with, and I believe his prayers were granted (I think he reposed some years agp; I think he was either an Athonite or a Russian monastic).

I believe it is a different thing to pray, act or speak with love in your heart and a desire to help than to attempt to magnify yourself by the gifts you acquire. Simon the Magician tried to buy the gifts and was condemned for it. But those who seek them in humility to help others may or may not be granted them. Some people just find themselves burning with messages they have to share and want to understand better by the act of sharing. If they do this to make money out of the process, or to magnify themselves, then I tend to suspect their motives.