God and Character

[mindlight]

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.

I clarified what I meant in a later post and accept the essential point about communicatio idiomatum. Your points are well made though thanks.

And he was amazed at their unbelief. - Mark 6:6

In what form do you believe that God walked in the garden of Eden?

 

[The Liturgist]

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.

I am not really comfortable with the idea of God as a playwright.

 

[mindlight]

I am not really comfortable with the idea of God as a playwright.

Nor should you be it is far from a perfect fit. Our Sovereign Lord is the Creator and Sustainer of all reality. But the youth of this generation live in world of social media stars and Netflix. This is a world of characters, plots, and plays, and God is filtered to them through this. The Thread is an attempt to explore that in much the same way as people in the past have explored views of Jesus as:

1) revolutionary - Liberation Theology
2) hippy - Jesus movement
3) Warrior Monk- templars
etc, etc, etc

 

[The Liturgist]

I clarified what I meant in a later post and accept the essential point about communicatio idiomatum. Your points are well made though thanks.

And he was amazed at their unbelief. - Mark 6:6

In what form do you believe that God walked in the garden of Eden?

I don’t know, but it could have been in the person of Jesus Christ. Being omnipotent, and eternal, time has no meaning for our Lord after the ascension. I think most theophanies in the Old Testament, and all that are visual, are either God the Son or God the Holy Spirit. God the Father has only ever been heard; to paraphrase our Lord Jesus Christ, no one has seen the Father at any time except through Christ who revealed Him. Conversely, we don’t know if the Spirit speaks verbally. So perhaps at the Burning Bush Moses heard the Father and saw the Spirit. That bush is still alive, by the way, at St. Catharine’s Monastery in Sinai, which has one of the most important libraries and collections of sacred icons in the world, including the 5th century icon of Christ Pantocrator and a fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus (the rest was stolen from them by a European adventurer and is mostly in the possession of the British Library.

 

[Mark Quayle]

The way you say it sounds fatalistic to me

Only because you are used to a worldview where somehow things happen independent of purpose or specific causation. A game for your mind: We can be sure that what will happen, will indeed happen, and, that that is all that will happen. For all of history, we have no evidence that anything else ever happened, so why should we consider it possible that something other than what will happen, can happen?

But perhaps more convincingly is the logic of a few statements built upon each other: God is First Cause. I hope you can admit to that. He is first cause, or he is not God. And there can be no other first cause, or he is not quite first cause (I no, I did not say there are not other causes —just no other first causes). We then, are not first causes. Therefore, we are not independent of causation. So, either God caused some to be better than others in that they made better choices, or they choose better choices by Chance. But Chance can cause nothing. It is self-contradictory to say that chance determines anything.

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.

It is natural to look at the notion of this life being a vapor with a certain degree of scorn. I do too, and I agree this life is indeed real. The Bible uses the idea of "vapor" only to describe the superiority and solidity/ finality of the next life. Christ did indeed die here. We do indeed make real decisions, with real, even eternal, results. But Christ was glorified and so will we be.

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.

Jesus was God, but he did not know the day. Is that hard to accept, that Christ was on this earth as subservient to his Father, yet was himself also God? But consider that Christ also, is subservient to his Father in heaven, and sits at his right hand, yet is still God. I don't see the Spirit of God, who is subservient to both, sitting on the Father's left hand, yet he too is God. It is not impossible that God the Father is the only one who knows the day and the hour, because even if that is so, God still knows.

The naming of the animals is no more convincing an example than many others, some even more convincing, that sound like God doesn't know certain things, or that there are possibilities that deny predetermined future. I don't want to get into a battle over the meaning and use of certain specific words and language and rhetoric, nor about God condescending to speak to our limited understanding, but just understand, that if he does not know all things, he is not God. First Cause is not subject to any principle from outside himself.