Against Poetry

Do angels need to hide in the cupboard for my tea to taste good? Keep your chit chat—I have a bull's eye to hit. Perhaps these scenes are matryoshka dolls of hierarchical values, ranging from biology to culture. Metaphors and similes? Such devices are an impediment to my travels. I want language that is direct, taking me to fundamental reality. Why would I take the bus that runs late and stops at every other street corner, when I could take one that faces no interruption?

J. R. Lucas on God's Vulnerability

I came across this passage in the summer of 2022 while reading Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, edited by Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger. The original source is J. R. Lucas's book The Future: An Essay on God, Temporality, and Truth.

Love is not only creative, but vulnerable. If I care for somebody I can be hurt. God, on the Christian view, is highly passible and was hurt. Instead of the impassive Buddha untroubled by the tribulations of mortal existence, the Christians see God on a cross: instead of the Aristotelian ideal of a self-sufficient God who devotes His time to enjoying the contemplation of His own excellence, the Christians worship a God who shared the human condition and came among us.

Learning about Epistemology

I just finished reading A Confession by Leo Tolstoy (Jane Kentish translation) this afternoon. It is the first book I have read from him (though a short work, at only 60 pages).

I was first introduced to Tolstoy in Alexandre Christoyannopoulos's Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel, which I read in 2020. I was not left with a particularly positive impression of Tolstoy—let us just say that he is, well, a little bit iconoclastic.

But then, in 2022, I came across some quotations from A Confession in Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson and knew that I had to read this book at some point in my life. William Barrett also mentions A Confession in Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, another book I read later that year.

A Confession is autobiographical, depicting Tolstoy's struggle with finding meaning in life, as well as his difficulty accepting the theology of the Russian Orthodox Church. This work certainly gets my recommendation; here is just one passage that caught my attention: "I realized that my question as to what my life is, and the answer that it is an evil, was quite correct. The only mistake was that I had extended an answer that related only to myself to life as a whole."

Up next on my reading list is Theory of Knowledge by Keith Lehrer, which I acquired last April by using some in-store credit at Peryton Books. I never took a course in epistemology when I was an undergraduate student, so I am looking forward to being introduced to this branch of philosophy. Personally, I appreciate the retro cover of this 1990 publication. Some of the other interesting-looking titles from the Dimensions of Philosophy Series include Metaphysics by Peter van Inwagen and Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim.

A Speculative Schema for Describing God's Nature

What is God like?

God exists necessarily. Although a Bible verse like "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14) has been interpreted by some, such as Huldrych Zwingli,¹ to refer to God's necessary existence, Clark Pinnock says that this way of thinking misses the point: "What God is saying to Moses in this verse is not 'I exist' or even 'I will be present.' God is saying that he will be a faithful God for his people."² Faithfulness is an aspect of God's character, and the way Exodus 3:14 is worded makes it sound necessary. So, in addition to God's necessary existence, we may say that he has a necessary character.

What else can be said about what God is like? Not only does God exist and have a character, but he acts. These can be pictured as different qualities that God has. Existence is primary, character is secondary, and acts are tertiary.

Christians who accept classical theism will take issue with the schema presented here. A couple aspects of classical theism include that God is timeless and simple (divine simplicity). To say that God is timeless is to say that he "dwells in an eternal present that lacks a before and after."³ Divine simplicity is the idea that "God's essential attributes are both identical to one another, and identical to God's nature and existence."⁴ On this view, "God does not possess any properties."⁵

What I have suggested, on the contrary, is that God is composed of properties: existence, character, and acts. God has a prioritized existence, since he exists without being caused to do so. Having a character is impossible without first existing. One's acts also have a certain character to them, being either good or evil. Existence, character, and acts work quite naturally in relation to each other.

Are God's essential attributes identical to his nature and existence? This is tricky to evaluate. While I would be comfortable saying that God's existence and essential attributes (or "character," as I would put it) are both necessary (which could be taken to mean "identical"), some of the expressions of his character do not seem to be. For example, it is intuitive to believe that a personal God loves people individually. Love is certainly an essential attribute of God, but his loving me is not because I exist contingently rather than necessarily. It seems at least possible that I could not have existed. If I did not exist, God could not have loved me, but this would pose no threat to his essential attribute of love, which God could express in other ways. On the one hand, it sounds like I am agreeing with this aspect of divine simplicity because God's love seems to exist without it being expressed in particular contingent ways. On the other, God's existence is necessary, yet his essential attributes are capable of being expressed in contingent ways. If one is necessary and the other is contingent (at least, in part), the two cannot be identical.

As for timelessness, it is problematic if we are to also believe that God has accurate knowledge about our world, which is temporal. Richard Swinburne writes persuasively on this point:

And, how could God 'simultaneously' be aware of a temporal event 'as it happens', unless his awareness of it is simultaneous with it happening, and so how could he be aware at his one timeless moment of two events happening at different times, unless the two awareness are simultaneous with each other, and so the two events happening at different times would have to happen at the same time—which is logically impossible. How could God be aware of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE as it happens, and of its destruction by the Romans in 70 CE as it happens, when these two times are not simultaneous with each other?⁶

This has implications for God's character and acts. God's omniscience can be thought of as an aspect of his character. Furthermore, God's knowledge about the world informs how he acts. Not only is the notion that God has timeless knowledge confusing, but it looks as though it could not produce historical acts. This is puzzling if we are to believe that God acts in history, which is what would be happening if he genuinely interacted with a temporal world.

The three properties I have discussed in this post—existence, character, and acts—are the most basic ones I can think of at the moment, so I will stick to them. I am willing to change my mind about the accuracy of this schema should any objections come my way that I find convincing. The value of this schema is that it offers an alternative to some of the questionable elements of the classical theist model. I believe it also has the potential to offer an interesting way of conceptualizing the God-world relation. That, however, is a topic for another time.

Notes

1. Steven Nemes, Theology of the Manifest: Christianity Without Metaphysics (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023), 58.

2. Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 106.

3. R. T. Mullins, God and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 16.

4. Ibid., 17.

5. Ibid.

6. Richard Swinburne, "Causation, Time, and God's Omniscience," Topoi (2017), 36:682.

Qualified Monism and the Problem of Evil

Last year I read Theology of the Manifest: Christianity Without Metaphysics by Steven Nemes. It was a treat to read, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys philosophical theology. I appreciate Nemes's creative thinking and clear writing; as far as I can tell, he seems to be doing some of the more interesting work in this field.

One of my motivations for reading this work was to learn more about panentheism (or as Nemes puts it, "qualified monism"). His version of this perspective on the God-World relationship is as follows: God is the "absolute Life whose 'body' or visible exterior image of his inner life is the phenomenological World."¹ (Since Nemes capitalizes "World" in his book, I will do the same throughout this post for the sake of consistency. An exception is made in a quotation from another author, who does not capitalize the word.)

The term I wish to zero in on here is "phenomenological." The philosophical tools Nemes is working with here are those of phenomenology, which is a tradition that maintains there is "a strict correlation between appearance and being."² As well, the "phenomenological World" mentioned in the above definition for qualified monism refers to something different than the Earth or the entire cosmos; it instead refers to "the total 'environment' in which objects present themselves."³ The phenomenological World is not only made up of physical objects, but also ideas like geometric truths and possibilities such as danger.⁴

Having defined qualified monism, it is worth considering the implications this view has for the problem of evil, which is addressed in endnote 28 and section 9 of chapter 3. If the phenomenological World reflects God's inner life, and God is good, how are we to make sense of the evil that appears?

Let us begin with the endnote, where Nemes entertains the idea that God is the source of both good and evil. This is based on Isaiah 45:7–8,⁵ which says:

I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things. Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness; let the earth open, that salvation may spring up, and let it cause righteousness to sprout up also; I the Lord have created it.

However, this interpretation is questionable. As Gregory Boyd observes, "The context of this passage (see 45:1–6) is specifically about the future deliverance of the children of Israel out of Babylon; it is not concerned with God's cosmic creative activity."⁶

Moving on to section 9, here Nemes addresses the evidential problem of evil, which is concerned with gratuitous evil. This includes cases of evil that are alleged to have either no purpose whatsoever or where the evil outweighs the good purpose that the former is intended to serve. The idea of a perfectly good God, so the argument goes, does not seem to cohere with the existence of gratuitous evil, thus supporting the belief that God does not exist.⁷

Nemes makes a forceful point against this argument: "To say that an evil is gratuitous is to say that it is not justified by anything that comes before it, simultaneously with it, or after it in time,"⁸ which is an impossible perspective to obtain given a person's embodied nature in history.⁹ He then goes on to suggest that the reasons that God permits evil are a mystery because God's way of thinking are of a higher quality than that of a human. Furthermore, these "gratuitous" evils appear in the phenomenological World (which, remember, is God's body that reflects his inner life), so there is actually reason to doubt that any evil is gratuitous.¹⁰ It is not surprising that other minds with a penchant for monism come to similar conclusions. I think here of Spinoza, who wagered that evil is a byproduct of man's finite perspective; if he could see the World in its totality, the apparent evils would disappear, and man would realize that they serve a higher purpose in the final analysis.¹¹

While I appreciate the first point, I find the second unconvincing. Would it not be less hasty to remain agnostic as to whether or not any evils are gratuitous? If we cannot know that evils are gratuitous based on the fact that we do not have God's capacities for knowing such, we should not be able to know that there are no gratuitous evils either, as this knowledge would also seem to require a God's-eye perspective. The limitations of a temporal and embodied existence cut both ways.

It could also be argued that the main ingredient of phenomenology—that appearance and being are strongly correlated—also casts doubt on the notion that there is no such thing as gratuitous evil. Who can read "Rebellion" from The Brothers Karamazov, for example, and not be moved by Ivan's pathos as he speaks about the suffering of children? Some evils appear completely unnecessary and strike at the core of our being with their wickedness. Yet the higher-harmony metaphysics that Nemes advocates does not seem to be sensitive to this.

In his own words, "Despite all evil, the reality of God as the source of everything seen and unseen is never doubted or called into question in the Bible . . . [God's] inner life is constantly making itself manifest under the image of what appears in the World."¹²

Some material in Scripture renders this metaphysic suspect. Of course, the Bible contains tensions on several issues, but that does not mean that the parts that support monism should run roughshod over the sections that support dualism or pluralism. Take, for example, Matthew 12:22–28:

Then they brought to him [Jesus] a demoniac who was blind and mute; and he cured him, so that the one who had been mute could speak and see. All the crowds were amazed and said, ‘Can this be the Son of David?’ But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, ‘It is only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that this fellow casts out the demons.’ He knew what they were thinking and said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then will his kingdom stand? If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.

This does not sound like a World that perfectly represents God's inner life. Here Jesus makes a distinction between the Spirit of God and the kingdom of God on the one hand, and Satan and demons on the other. Passages about spiritual warfare, such as this one, make more sense on a dualistic or pluralistic basis than a monistic one. The scenery of the World does not mirror God's intentions with complete precision. As Gregory Boyd puts it,

While no orthodox first-century Jew or Christian ever doubted that there existed only one Creator, or that this Creator would reign supreme in the eschaton, it seems equally clear that the New Testament authors also never doubted that in this present world the Creator's will was not the only will that was being carried out. Wills, human and angelic, oppose God, and he must fight against them.¹³

As I compare Nemes's conception of the God-World relationship to Boyd's, I come away thinking that the latter is more cogent. Perhaps I will someday encounter a version of panentheism that I find compelling, but I am not ready to accept the "solution" to the problem of evil that qualified monism offers, nor the determinism that follows from it. Instead, I find the emphasis that a model for God like open theism places on spiritual conflict, free will, and the give-and-take relationship between God and the World to be more attractive.

Notes

1. Steven Nemes, Theology of the Manifest: Christianity Without Metaphysics (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023), 53.

2. Ibid., 15.

3. Ibid., 36.

4. Ibid., 36–37.

5. Ibid., 74–75.

6. Gregory A. Boyd, God At War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 149.

7. Nemes, Theology of the Manifest, 69.

8. Ibid., 70–71.

9. Ibid., 71.

10. Ibid., 72.

11. William Mander, "Pantheism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2023, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/.

12. Nemes, Theology of the Manifest, 69.

13. Boyd, God At War, 185.

Becoming a Christian, as Understood from Its Endpoint

Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg proposes that the meaning of history in its entirety must be understood from its endpoint, when God and the world are reconciled to one another. This meaning has yet to be revealed, as it awaits in the future, but it has been hinted at in the past through Jesus Christ, who acted in history as the Savior of the world.¹

Let us call this perspective the "end-of-history theory." If this is correct, might it help explain why some of Jesus's demands for his followers are so difficult?

Consider Luke 14:33: "So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions." I must admit that my constitution rails against such ascetism. I enjoy material things, especially music and books. Now, it could be argued that the class structure of the Roman Empire basically consisted of the rich and the poor and did not include a middle class,² thus making the text irrelevant to a middle-class person. But surely it cannot only be apparent to me that such a verse as this is worded quite strongly and contains no qualifications whatsoever. I think here of Kierkegaard: "Yes, it seems as if all this research and pondering and scrutinizing would draw God’s Word very close to us. Yet this interpreting and re-interpreting and scholarly research and new scholarly research is but a defense against it."³

Kierkegaard also writes: "For my part I do not call myself a 'Christian.'"⁴ He is not speaking here as an atheist; rather, Kierkegaard is placing more of an emphasis on becoming a Christian than being one. Being a Christian is an arduous goal that the individual strives toward and often fails to achieve, so it is more accurate to say that one is becoming a Christian than that one is one.

Back to Pannenberg's end-of-history theory and Jesus's strict demands. Maybe Christ's words so often sound coarse because we overlook the fact that he is anticipatory of the end. That is to say, Christ's demands are truly for the end and not the present. It is at the Final Judgement that the Christian will give up all their possessions, and in the meantime, they will become progressively less attached to their belongings.

Is this interpretation helpful, or does it lead one to the "cheap grace" that Bonhoeffer warned against and "the crowd" that Kierkegaard opposed?

Notes

1. For helpful summaries of Pannenberg's thought, see Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought (1^st edition, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 302–305 and Steffen Losel, "Wolfhart Pannenberg's Response to the Challenge of Religious Pluralism: The Anticipation of Divine Absoluteness.," Journal of Ecumenical Studies (1997), https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Wolfhart+Pannenberg%27s+response+to+the+challenge+of+religious...-a020513754.

2. Mark Allan Powell, Introducing the New Testament: A Historical, Literary, and Theological Survey (2^nd edition, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 31–32.

3. Søren Kierkegaard and Charles E. Moore (Editor), Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard (Walden: Plough Publishing House, 2014), 84.

4. Ibid., xii.