by Brian C. Moore, Ph.D.
The subtitle of David Bentley Hart’s first meditation which seeks the God revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ: “the moral meaning of creatio ex nihilo.” It is worth noting that this is a Christian innovation. Creation in Genesis does not explicitly contemplate a metaphysical nothing. Bulgakov makes salient remarks upon God as Creator. God is uniquely beyond questions of freedom and necessity as they are posed for finite creatures. God does not need creation in order to realize potency. God does not act from lack. Yet it is equally mistaken to surmise that the creation is extrinsic to God’s identity. Philip Sherrard often writes of the iconicity of creation, of its theophanic quality. Christ as the head of divine-humanity acts to bring the cosmos to divinized perfection. “It is true, as St. Maximos puts it, Christ is ever wishing to perform the miracle of His Incarnation in all things. But this does not imply any incompletion in Christ. It implies incompletion in the present state of creation” (Human Image: World Image, p. 124). Hart recollects the centrality of Gregory of Nyssa’s insight that creatio ex nihilo goes beyond cosmological and metaphysical claims to assert eschatological affirmations that fundamentally disclose the God who has called creatures into existence. “In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness” (That All Shall Be Saved, p. 68). No other assertion in Hart’s entire book is as important. This is the key interpretive stance upon which all else rests. Hart then further explains that within “this eternal teleology” it is the final judgment that “brings all things to their true conclusion” (p. 69). Any crude conceptions of judgment as retributive or the mere handing out of evaluations as to merit or fault misses the role judgment plays as that which enacts the flourishing of the creation God has always intended.
Several things happen here that bother the theologians. Those Thomists more Aristotelian than Christian may firmly declare the role of final causality in drawing creatures to the divine, yet the divinity of the Stagirite, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus recognized, might be off serenely paring his nails whilst beings dazzled by divine beauty yearn for union. Hart returns us to Job who in questioning justice and suffering is asking God to disclose himself (and as the poet Czeslaw Milosz declared, the whirlwind is not enough!) “Precisely because God does not determine himself in creation – precisely because there is no dialectical necessity binding him to time or chaos, no need to shape his identity in the refining fires of history – in creating he reveals himself truly” (p. 72). To which, Max Scheler might respond that “if we attempt, starting from the knowledge of the world, to deduce the existence of God, the presence in the world of even a single worm writhing in pain would be a decisive counter-argument to such a deduction” (quoted in S.L. Frank, The Meaning of Life, p. 49). Of course, folks over the centuries have become inured to such suffering and frequently dismiss it. Aquinas contemplates a resurrected cosmos of rational agents and minerals, leaving the abundant lives and suffering of the beasts and vegetation as “outside history” as any Hegelian could hope for. At this point, one can expect a hand raised and an objection about secondary causality to be stated – and this will ultimately be tied to the further objection that God may rationally order moral agents towards union with divinity, but that the integrity of creaturely freedom precludes determining that choice. I call this the “not even God can” assertion. This will be addressed later, but the commitment to a certain conception of rational agency and freedom along with callousness towards much of the cosmos is worth remark. But Hart says that “every evil that time comprises, natural or moral (which is, in this context, a largely worthless distinction, since human nature is a natural phenomenon) is an arraignment of God’s goodness” (p. 72). Granting that Incarnation, Resurrection, Triune revelation is all a proleptic “answer” to human perplexity, one remains mired in a world of horrors. Hart concludes the initial stage of reflection upon God’s identity with grim oration: “every death of a child, every chance calamity, every act of malice; everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel; and until the end of all things, no answer has been given” (p. 73). Though what I wrote just now is not quite correct. Hart does not end precisely with those words. Rather, he adverts to the daring of St. Paul who could not rest easy with the thought that God might be capricious, that the divinity should contemplate creatures called from the nothing only to be vessels of wrath.
What follows is a diatribe against the idolatry of “the broad mainstream.” Augustine lamenting Origen’s tender-heartedness; Pascal, “assuring us that our existence is explicable only in the light of a belief in the eternal and condign torment of babies who die before reaching the baptismal font,” Calvin “telling us that hell is copiously populated with infants not a cubit long” (p. 76) and so on. Hart shakes his head at such hyperbolic moral confusion, at “incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions … the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned” (p. 78). Though, of course, most folks might agree that this is a bridge too far and plausibly indicate that there are still those who sink into monstrous wickedness, Hitler and Genghis Khan, serial killers, torturers, and pedophiles, sinners we find so repugnant it is not hard to wish them recompense for the horrors of their acts, to exile them from bliss. (And really, as George MacDonald explained, they will surely pay the last farthing. No one is spared love’s reckoning.) That there are insidious acts of malice and gratuitous cruelty so common they are not noticed, that we frequently torture ourselves and each other invisible to public censure, well, that is somehow more tolerable, we are sinners, after all.
“Not even God can” means that, yes, God desires creatures to freely choose communion with the Good. Only, sadly, the price for such freedom is not just the capacity to err, but the possibility of irremediable failure. If God wants creatures to choose love and life (and of course he does,) then God must allow for the chance that some will refuse eternally. What can one do? So when a sober, realist philosopher quotes Aquinas when Thomas states that “many good things would disappear if God did not allow some evil to exist” – (and this is undoubtedly true and entirely commendable if taken in a penultimate sense directed towards the world not yet brought to perfection) – what is apparently intended is the kind of accommodation to death Hart found endemic under the rubric of religion in his fine article “Death, Final Judgment, and the Meaning of Life,” included in the excellent collection The Hidden and the Manifest. But do not fret if you lack that estimable volume. Hart relentlessly hammers this crucial theme in his meditation on God. “This is the price of creation, it would seem. God, on this view, has `made a bargain’ with a natural evil. He has willed the tragedy, not just as a transient dissonance within creation’s goodness, leading ultimately to a soul’s correction, but as that irreducible quantum of eternal loss” (p.83). In short, the utterly tedious, pragmatic, taken for granted exchange whereby the living purchase a moment of existence at the cost of another’s death that marks the fallen world is inscribed as part and parcel of the gospel. Apart from the radical forgetting of the Eucharist as a complete rejection and subversion of such a “natural” mode of existence, bargaining brought into the eschatological elicits a query about the economy of such transactions. “What would the mystery of God becoming man in order to effect a merely partial rescue of created order truly be, as compared to the far deeper mystery of a worthless man becoming the suffering god upon whose perpetual holocaust the entire order of creation finally depends?” (p. 85). The overt triumph of celestial bliss turns out to run on an infernal engine – “is hell not then the innermost secret of heaven, its sacrificial heart?” (p. 83)
What is exasperating is that this casual expediency is somehow thought an adequate response to the logic of creatio ex nihilo. It is as if the constraints settled upon a demiurge were somehow implicitly made acceptable for the Christian understanding of God. But the very point of creatio ex nihilo, to pedantically repeat what is apparently not self-evident, is that there are no such constraints. But let us pretend that God is, in fact, chained to limits that require at least the palimpsest of sacrificial economy, even if like a lucky gambler, no losses are actually incurred. The same proponent of imperfect liberty made paradigmatic for human beings and thus an intrinsic constraint upon what God can accomplish asserts that God does not create out of any necessity. The aseity of divine plenitude is not increased an iota by creation. Hence, God is not compelled to create by this view, yet God does create. The sage announcement that “not even God can” appears to accept without argument that a good God could conceivably entertain such a creation at the cost of risking at the very least the possibility of eternal damnation (or, for a minority faction, the annihilation of those who “refuse God”). One should test the eschatological imagination that is operative. On one side, the poison of necessary losses, of some residue of evil, is allowed to perdure into the eschaton. On the other, perhaps divine madness, an ecstatic holy joy that is alive with mirth because life does not bargain with death. It may appear childish to the realist, those upholders of the necessary repudiated by Shestov, rejected by Christos Yannaras in his short monograph Against Religion, winsomely countered by “that little girl, hope” in Péguy’s great poem, but as Balthasar emphasized, to such children belong the kingdom of God.
Let us play out the Triune logic that grounds the specific logic of creation. The generosity of divine Fatherhood is always already the gift of everything to the Son with nothing held back. And the gift is not held in suspense. There is no period of tragic questioning. No, love in its fullness is not simply the gift with a kind of pagan magnanimity that doesn’t care if the gift is accepted or not. The gift is not yet fully gift without receptivity which inevitably entails a return of love. (There is nothing here of calculation, of the gift as establishment of prestige and the onus of obligation as Mauss inferred in antique customs.) The Son receives the gift and joyfully requites Love. But go further: this is no enclosed garden, an idyll of two. It is a plenitude of resourceful surprise. The Father knows himself in the Son, the Son knows the Father in the gift, mutual delight is expansive, other directed, the creative Spirit who plumbs the adventurous depths of the known but ever to be discovered infinite Event that is the act of Esse. It is only existence understood as mere survival, a register of bare, univocal “thereness,” the thin gruel of the miser’s “hyparxeolatry” that does not know existence is infinite, reciprocal love, the living out of divine gift. (Hart unleashes this metaphysical metaphor early on page twenty. He is always good for at least a few uncommon silvered verbal bullets, a joy to vates everywhere and something less to the dour thrift of Anglo-American analytic philosophers, but we say this just in passing.) Theology content with a generosity that thinks everything is given when it is still possible for the gift to end in ruin is culpably lacking in appreciation for what is fitting for divine Fatherhood. The gift is not fully given until received in gratitude and offered in reciprocal delight. Hart is entirely correct when he concludes, “if he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare” (p. 91).
In The Enigma of Evil, Christos Yannaras writes that “generations of human beings, which means hundreds of millions of personal existences, have been born and are being born leading their lives and departing from life under the shadow of a distorted, repellent version of the Church’s gospel” (p. 77). Hundreds of millions of personal existences might very well look like tradition, but the truth of the Spirit is not determined by plebiscite, no matter how venerable. Against “self-interested goals, animosities fueled by egocentric fanaticism, psychological compensations for insecurity,” Yannaras juxtaposes the voice of Isaac of Nineveh who cries out “Do not call God just, for his justice is not discernible in what pertains to you.” Judgment, indeed, begins to look rather sketchy with God. Isaac continues, “And if David calls him just and upright, his son revealed to us that rather he is good and kind. For he is good to the wicked and impious.” It makes one rage to see the vile prosper, especially when the anawim, God’s poor, so often bear the brunt of mundane violence and institutional neglect. Sophists of every stripe game the system and live in luxury whilst the seeker after wisdom is frequently condemned to wretched penury, loneliness, the incapacity to give succor when the beloved falls ill and dies. Much of the vehemence that animates traditionalists is not savage insensitivity, but groaning protest that the ledgers acknowledge the cruelty and rank injustice of our experience in this world. It’s a mistake to simply chastise folks for revulsion at what is despicable to the point of horror. But the kindness spoken of by the Syrian is not worldly success, but an eschatological promise of universal well-being. The justice of God is not a cold, forensic commutation of penal sentence. It is healing, gift, illumination, and, yes, vengeance, but not as men understand the word. If Isaac is representative of a saintly majority or appears an eccentric is not probative. What matters is whether or not he speaks from within the intimacy of God’s care. Yannaras declares “this is one of the examples of the ecclesial mode of questioning or denouncing the juridical associations/influences that the (necessarily time-bound) language of the evangelical and apostolic texts can elicit” (p. 92). A crucial move is made here. Where the fragile ego may seek refuge in authority and denounce any mode of life that actuality locates freedom in the leap into divine existence, one is drawn by the beauty of the infinite beyond a form of rote repetition of moralistic literalisms. Hence, Yannaras concludes, “It is an example and indication that even in the ‘most sacred’ texts (the most respected because of their historical proximity as witnesses to the event of the epiphany of God) are not turned into idols within the Church” (pp. 92-93). Likewise, when Hart avers that the Book of Revelation is possibly an arcane text of figurative code by a Jewish Christian who believed in keeping the law of Moses (pp. 106ff,) the essential matter lies not in a specific reading of biblical texts, but in the way a particular mode of interpretation fosters or militates against participation in the life of Christ. Hart is careful to indicate the clarity of universalism in the Pauline texts and the ambiguity of other New Testament verses with the caveat that no New Testament passage unequivocally teaches eternal damnation if read with sufficient scrutiny for context and intention. While exegesis is certainly important, it is not proof against equivocity or craven obeisance to authority or forms of understanding that subtly resist the dynamism of the Spirit. The latter requires a deft creativity able to discern the architectonics of biblical genre, the loadbearing points in scripture, the sinuous, mystery-bearing shape of a narrative that ever refuses closure into a pious “just so.” One shall nearly always be able to find sufficient textual evidence to fuel various sides of disputed controversies. The Arians were adept at quoting scripture, too. Ecclesial experience is greater than historical conditions and communal expectations that gave birth to scriptural witness. Even as the Spirit instructs and nurtures by such means, God is not constrained by the spiritual limitations of prophets, priests, and sages. Of course, those who think of the Bible as a datum of univocal facts will refuse all this as existential recklessness. If one can rely upon an entirely objective and comprehensive accounting of relevant facts, Christians might then merely calculate. Faith is almost nugatory once one has accepted the initial conditions of possibility. Discernment is then merely differentiating between those who “accept the facts” and those who “prevaricate” by saying “do not call God just.”
Though perhaps, as the provocative quote from Shestov that I began this review with suggests, there is more reason in irrational beasts than in the wisdom of say, Job’s counselors. In that aboriginal naming that is the ecstatic opening of the logoi towards the Father’s call, the rise from nothing into that insatiable joy that alone is the good creation God always serenely intends, remarks a coincidence between final judgment and creation’s journey into the nuptial banquet of the eighth day. So Hart declares, “the judgment of the cross is a verdict upon the violence and cruelty of human order and human history, and Easter the verdict upon creation as conceived in God’s eternal counsels” (p. 104). Hart conjectures that the Johannine gospel is a kind of “second reflection upon the person of Christ” (p. 127). Like Bulgakov and Balthasar before him, Hart sees in the fourth gospel an eschatological perspicuity that puts in question simplistic responses to quandaries over time and eternity. Balthasar’s emphasis on the Triduum of the Passion is turned in Hart’s evaluation into the ultimate preterist interpretation of apocalypse – “its language seems irresistibly to point toward a collapse of the distinction between the final judgment of all things and the judgment endured by Christ on Calvary, or between the life of the Age to come and the life that is made immediately present in the risen Christ” (p. 127). Hart stipulates that he does not assert an erasure of history as it were, but the eschatological horizon is hard to construe within the limits of finite conceptions. It is both proleptic and realized, and insofar as it is a trajectory of victory “hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never fully come to rest” (p. 129). In Paschal light, the denunciations of Capernaum worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, the threat of the worm that shall not die, the entire panoply of dire rhetoric ascribed to Christ and made to serve as revelatory of irrevocable eternal destinies and the imperfect conclusion of God’s salvific intent appear as akin to the parables that so confused the apostles themselves who understood little to nothing before Easter and the subsequent widening of their imagination that accompanied Pentecost. Do not think the parables simple stories for simple men. They are not dumbed down moral messages meant to be understood by the uneducated. Probably only modern day enlightened intellectuals are foolish enough to believe something so obviously wrong. Likewise, Hart acknowledges that while Christ used “all sorts of imagery regarding final judgment,” “it is absurd to treat any of the New Testament’s eschatological language as containing, even in nuce, some sort of exact dogmatic definition of the literal conditions of the world to come” (p. 119). That sort of itchy curiosity is very natural to the human race, as is impatience, and a desire to turn the ineffable and that which exceeds our attempts to master by finite technique and mental conception into a dogmatic possession. The intertestamental period offered numerous exotic forays into angelic realms and the like. In contrast, Hart asserts that Christ’s language offers “an intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct” (p. 119). So why disorient? Perhaps because the God delights in mirth and surprise. Perhaps because fallen men are so narrow, dim, and heartless, an apophatic reserve is necessary, keeping open a space for an ever increasing analogic ladder to inexpressible flourishing.
(Go to “Judging Judgment Rightly”)
* * *
Dr Moore has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Dallas. He has been a contributor to Eclectic Orthodoxy since before the beginning of time. There is, it must be said, no truth to the rumor that he comes from a family of Druids or that he will drink only plum wine, though it is possibly true that he prefers cats to humans, allowing for exceptions. He is the author of the recently published tale of Noah and the ark, Beneath the Silent Heavens.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
Tell me more. I’m liking my way of thinking even better in your version.
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The notion of God’s will as a “wanting” or “desiring” seems quite out of place, except as a metaphor that easily misleads. Insofar as one is not a “monopolytheist” it cannot be true that God wants something to happen, anymore than an image of God discursively reasoning about whether or not to create the world, weighing the costs, could be literally true. William Hasker and company may believe that God watches what happens in the world, hoping for this or that, or that he is saddened when we sin or suffer, or that he furrowed his brow an an extensive cost-benefit analysis before beginning of time…
For those not in the neo-theist school, however, God does not reason discursively, his knowledge does not have us as a direct object. He has but one intellectual act which is no different whether or not we exist. God is no different whether or not the world exists. He neither needs nor wants anything.
Nor is it exactly the case that for St. Thomas the possibility of sin is what secures freedom. It is the possibility of understanding multiple courses of action without being determined to any one of them that is the condition for freedom, and — as an unfortunate and indirect consequence, involves the possibility of sin (at least at certain stages). The possibility of sin is, for St. Thomas, incidental to freedom. It is quite possible we develop our persons through the exercise of virtue to the point where we are quite free, where freedom is not reduced to just choosing the right thing (a freedom evacuated of its specific difference).
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“[God] has but one intellectual act which is no different whether or not we exist. God is no different whether or not the world exists. He neither needs nor wants anything.”
God, so the Bible tells us, is love. Love is pure desire for the joy and benefit of the beloved. It is very difficult to see how God’s will could be anything *other* than the pure desire to pour himself into creation without rendering the statement “God is love” meaningless.
That God’s love is not deliberative as a man’s would be, I’ll give you, but that is because we ponder particular acts through time with limited knowledge to uncertain effect. God’s love would have to be a single pure continuous act of love, but one which, to be accurately described as “love” must at least (within time and in our experience of it) reveal itself as both anguish and joy, and as being capable of response to our attempts or otherwise to reciprocate it.
Whilst I (more-or-less) get the theological reasons for it, there seems to me to be an ongoing tendency to so over-intellectualise God to an extent that renders him unrecognisable as the God we read about in the Bible or actually experience in practice.
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Well, that is the neo-theist or monopolytheist view. I wasn’t saying that view didn’t exist, only that it is not the traditionally theistic one.
As to which is the correct view, that is an intellectual question deserving an intellectual answer. I’d refer to the arguments that all that is is grounded in an immutable, infinite act of pure existence–particularly those from efficient causality. I’d endorse the versions found in the work of Robert Spitzer, Barry Miller, and Joseph Owens. If that is correct, there’s no question of God having intentional states directed at the world.
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You’re at it again with this nonsense? Hart does hold to the classical theistic view. That’s what makes this argument so powerful. God doesn’t have to create, so when he does, he shows his character, since he is completely unfettered. If the ultimate result is dualistic, then there is an eternal dualism in God’s nature, which defies logic. It cannot be so.
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Spitzer, Miller, Owens. With which of them do you imagine I have any metaphysical disagreements. Have you read any of my books?
As it happens, it is precisely that metaphysics that makes universalism inevitable.
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I assume, since you use my neologism “monopolytheism,” that you understand this. So what’s the problem?
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Dr. Hart:
As I said in the comment, the specific caution is that, for a classical theist, the notion of God’s will as a desire or want (whether for the salvation of all) is at best a metaphor, and it tends to be misleading. It really determines the meaning of the “not even God can” paragraph above, which, on a naive reading, seems to say that God has wants and tries to figure out how to satisfy them.
But when we (i.e., theists) say that God wills, say, the salvation of all, we cannot mean to name some volitional act or intentional state in God, any more than when we say God knows what’s really going on in the Ukraine involves the attribution of any real difference in God had the Ukraine never achieved its independence. The truth of predications about God’s will or knowledge of goings on here below are determined by differences in created things.
The risk in imaginative depictions of God’s intentions or desires with respect to the world is that people spontaneously tend to take them as more than metaphorical. They may think that there is a desire in God that all be saved, that God’s character may be different if he has other desires (such as that some be damned). They may even have the impression that the debate is ultimately about God’s intentional stance toward us, rather than the way in which we are ordered (or not ordered) to God as a final end.
You might say that you know all this, and that your reviewers and readers have committed it to memory as well. No need for tiresome rehearsals of the notion of extrinsic predication or even a reminder in the comments section. But this really trips people up, and not only casual readers. W.N. Clarke, for instance, was so confused on this issue he introduced accidents into God as a concession to process theology, thinking that designating them as “intentional” or “mental” somehow salvaged divine simplicity. I suspect that if you polled most of your readers, at least a majority would say that there is at least some difference in God had he willed that all be saved, or only some. I would be happy to be proven wrong!
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Thomas, you give yourself away. You really have got things backwards. You write:
“They may think that there is a desire in God that all be saved, that God’s character may be different if he has other desires (such as that some be damned).”
Which is precisely what they SHOULD think, on the principles of classical Christian theism. You are the one who is suggesting an interval of arbitrariness in God in suggesting that God might will one thing or its opposite without in any way “altering” his character. Well, obviously he can’t alter, but that’s why whatever he ultimately wills must be a revelation of who he is. Whether God wills all to be saved or wills some to be damned tells us who God is, whether our language of divine goodness and justice is intelligible or merely equivocal, and so forth. As it happens, precisely BECAUSE God intends only his own infinite simple act of love and knowledge, the God who WILLS universal salvation and the God who WILLS eternal damnation would be two different Gods. The teleology of creation is nothing other than the “teleology” of God’s own Trinitarian life, revealed in all his acts.
Yes, there is desire in God–one desire in God that has infinite aspects. Again, you have not understood the philosophers you invoke. All they are saying is that he does not desire things outside his own nature, available to him as extrinsic modifications of that nature. Well, yes. WHat he desires is precisely who he is, and who he is is what is revealed therefore in what he desires.
It is obvious you think you are making good and important points, but you really aren’t. You really have things inverted rather badly. Would you like to ask Robert Spitzer directly?
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Dr. Hart
It may be that I thought there was more of a turn between Beauty of the Infinite and The Experience of God than perhaps there was.
One question to help me understand your view here: Is God any different on account of knowing, loving, and willing the world than he would be had the world never existed, or a different world in its place?
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Thomas,
You’re not asking an interesting question. It’s one of those vacuous yes-and-no questions that one asks if one is confused about the difference between God and some finite agency.
Yes, in the sense that the God who willed other than he wills would not be the one God who wills only one thing. There’s nothing accidental to God. It’s a meaningless counterfactual.
No, in the sense that the world as a modally contingent reality adds nothing to, modifies nothing in, qualifies nothing about the eternal infinite God who has no real relation to any extrinsic reality. It’s a meaningless modal query.
The issue has been answered. God has intentions within his one intentionality. He has logoi within his Logos. Creation is therefore an intentional terminus as comprised within the one terminus of his goodness. It reveals who he is. He could not intend a world–could not create a world–in which his Goodness is not the sole ultimate intentional horizon. You’re making the Thomists you think you’re siding with sound almost like Ockhamists.
And apparently you have some starnge misunderstanding of my first book too. Please do not tell me what it is.
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Dr. Hart:
Whether there is some reality in God that would not be there if the world did not exist is an absolute disjunction (to use Robert Spitzer’s term). If there is some such reality, then it either is accidental (in which case God is not simple) or essential (in which case God depends on the world). If God has conditions, he is not absolutely unconditioned.
Probably for its obviousness, this line of philosophical reasoning is a commonplace of the Christian tradition. I’m quite confused one could claim to have read many Thomists (whether St. Thomas himself or modern takes, like Miller or Lonergan) and regard it as the slightest bit unusual, much less a misreading. Lonergan’s Insight may be controversial in places, but he speaks for the blandest parts of the tradition when he says:
> The first corollary [to the argument for the existence of God] is that every contingent predication concerning God also is an extrinsic denomination. In other words, God is intrinsically the same whether or not he understands, affirms, wills, causes this or that universe to be. If he does not, then God exists and nothing else exists. If he does, God exists and the universe in question exists; the two existences suffice for the truth of the judgments that God understands, affirms, wills, effects the universe; for God is unlimited in perfection, and what is unlimited in perfection must understand, affirm, will, effect whatever else is.
Likewise, Barry Miller goes on at length in Chapter 6 of A Most Unlikely God about saying God wills the world is a Cambridge property positing nothing in God, and therefore God does not actually make choices (!). I wouldn’t go that far, but the point is that you can’t miss it.
The central dilemma, at any rate, is pretty clear: either God is different on account of creating/willing/etc or not. If this additional reality is not accidental, as I think I hear you saying, then it is essential: and were creation not to exist, God would not exist. On the supposition that creation does not exist, God would not be. Creation is, in step 1 of Spitzer’s metaphysical argument, a condition for God’s existence — for were it not to exist, God wouldn’t exist either. And therefore this God fellow we’re talking about is not the absolutely unconditioned reached in stage 1.
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Robert, I wouldn’t presume to answer DBH for him, but I would point out that is not by any means obvious that being intrinsically ordered towards manifesting goodness (i.e. creating) is the same thing as being ‘conditioned’ by that reality. I would personally think the opposite: it is the reality of God that conditions the world, not the other way around. The fact that God has intentions ordered towards the world (or rather, with respect to God’s intrinsic idea of the world) does not mean that the world ‘has to exist’ in order for God to have those intentions; rather, God’s intentions are just the necessary condition for the world existing. That is only a problem if you think that God needs a libertarian account of freedom in order to be free.
That said, while (as DBH argues) God could not create a world ‘in which his Goodness is not the sole ultimate intentional horizon.’, it does seem that there are are a variety of ways in which this could be expressed, such that ‘God knows David sins once again at X’ and ‘God knows David manages to avoid messing up for once at X’ are both different knowledge states which, on first viewing, could equally well exist in God, i.e. they cannot just be read off God’s nature int he same way that I think DBH wants to say that we could read off ‘God wills the salvation of all’; God’s character would not be different if God’s knowledge of what happens to be the case were different. So I would be interested to know whether DBH would at least identify those sort of properties as contingents in God that could be different – or whether we just have to say that the whole notion of ‘could’ is not applicable for the eternal one for who all moments are present: to be God just is to be the creator of beings who act in a genuinely non-determined, autonomous way at the level of secondary causality, and that from the creative perspective the ‘facts of the case’, as it were, with respect to how they act, are not going to change any time soon.
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Thomas
You are again confused. And it is getting tiresome.
No one here is guilty of the errors you fear. You however are guilty of not following a simple line of argument. No one has said God is conditioned. But that means that God does not choose among possibilities outside his nature, as that would mean he IS conditioned by a higher source of actuality than himself.
Try to get this into your head: the issue is not that creation determines who God is, but that who God is must determine creation. Thus creation MUST reveal God in its ultimate intentional horizon.
You misunderstand Lonergan and Spitzer and the rest if you don’t get this. They do not mean that it is a matter of indifference to who God is whether he creates a world in which murder is good or one in which everyone goes to hell. They take it as given that God cannot arbitrarily give being to what is repugnant to or alien to Being itself, which is also the Good. What they mean is that no created order adds to what is always already supereminently present in God. They are not, however, nominalists. If God could create a world in which evil is good, he would not be God.
You are confusing two entirely different modal issues. YOU ARE IN ERROR. This is not debatable.
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So I am incorrect in attributing the view to Lonergan that there is a fallacy in supposing God’s knowledge of the creature, or his creative will and operation, to be some reality in God that would not be there?
I’d check out Grace and Freedom, where Lonergan says exactly that.
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Sorry, the view I am attributed to Lonergan cut off. It should be: “there is a fallacy in supposing God’s knowledge of the creature, or his creative will and operation, to be some reality in God that would not be there if he had not created“?
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No. Lord. Once again: You are in error in thinking that that is relevant to the issues raised in this article, or to the issue of God’s intentionality (not cognition) in creation. You are confusing issues.
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DBH – I’m aware I may be intruding still further on your discussion with Robert, although please note I am not seeking to debate you, but learn from you – I believe I am more or less aligned with your position, and if to any extent I am not fully aligned with it, I wish for you to help me correct that error!
With that being said: would you be so kind as to clarify one thing: on your way of looking at things, is it true to say that statements like or ‘God knows David chooses to be impatient at time X, though he might not have done so’ or ‘Germany invaded Poland in 1945’ are identical with God’s nature, and in the same sense that you would hold God’s act of freely creating and loving the world in a more general sense is identical with God’s nature? i.e. is God’s knowledge of genuine indeterminates (particularly our autonomous choices) just identical with God?
The point I am getting that is that while, as you say, creating a world where everyone goes to hell would clearly be incompatible with God’s nature, it does not seem to obviously be the case that God knowing our choices happen to fall one way one way rather another would be similarly incompatible with God’s nature (but aren’t they just that, if they are in some sense identical to God? i.e. if God knowing I happen to rob a shop today (or not doing so) is identical with God’s nature, doesn’t that mean that God would not be God if God did not know that fact? (to be clear, my worry is *not* that God’s knowledge would be determining my actions, just the conclusion that God would not be God without creating this specific world in all its details)
I’m wondering if you may point me to your previous comment ‘no created order adds to what is always already supereminently present in God.’ Certainly, it is obvious that no good thing exists without being latently present in the Good itself, and that my free choice to do X rather than Y could in no way ever add to or diminish the divine beatitude. But i still can’t shake the feeling that ‘God knows David chooses to do X’ and ‘God knows David chooses not do X’ are not identical Gods, if God is by definition identical with His knowledge.
Would you kindly be able to pinpoint the exact nature of my misunderstanding (for I am sure that is what is going on)? As you may tell I am rather dense in these matters, so any assistance would aid me greatly.
(Again, I am wondering if the solution involves just noting the unchangableness nature of creation relative to God is part of the answer (from God’s perspective, creation is neither determined by God, nor is it an indeterminate contingent that could conceivably go either way: it is just there). Or put differently: if we accept that God is, by definition, the absolute explanation, we can note that while God explains everything, that does not mean God explains all ‘possible worlds’, for there are no possible worlds in need of explanation. We need not worry that God would be different in a different possible world in which we act differently for, while we indeed could act differently, from the perspective of eternity, all possibility is exhausted and there is only actuality. Let the non-existent possible gods take care of their non-existent possible worlds, and let the only true and living God take care of this one.)
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DBH:
You seem to be under the impression that I think the issue of extrinsic denomination somehow undermines the larger points, such as whether the issue of salvation reveals the character of GOd. I am not. In fact, I’ve raised one narrow and well-defined caution: we should take care in speaking of God willing contingencies as though this attributes something real in God that would be absent had he willed some other contingency. I had thought, actually, I was simply offering a clarification on usage of language that can be misleading (divine will as a “wanting”) rather than the main points of the article–with which (to repeat myself) I agree.
What I would want to avoid is someone thinking that the question whether God saves all or saves only some turns on some additional reality in the divine mind that could, conceivably, have been absent (say, had the world not been created). God’s will vis a vis the world is immediately present in the world, identical, in fact, with the existence and orientation of the world to God. The actuality of God’s acts of knowing and willing are really identical with the actuality and finality of things, not features in God. As I mentioned, this strengthens the universalist case.
If God is no different having willed the world than he would be had he not done so, if the difference of creation and salvation lies entirely on the side of creation, then there’s no disagreement. My caution remains, in that case, as it was originally offered: a clarification that prevents a very common misreading. If there is some sense in which God is really different (i.e., not merely different in how we might think about God), then there is a disagreement. Not about universalism or the mercy of God, but about God’s nature as immutable and absolute.
I think we disagree to the extent that I would give an unqualified “no” to the question: “Is God any different on account of knowing, loving, and willing the world than he would be had the world never existed, or a different world in its place?” But I was reading your qualified affirmation of the difference in God as something more than a Cambridge property. If you regard the difference between God as the creator of the world and saver of souls with God as he would have been in the absence of creation as nothing more than a Cambridge property, then maybe we’re not much in disagreement after all.
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Yes, Thomas, all right. I simply want you to grasp that the question has two correct answers. If asked as a matter of metaphysical possibility: No, because God is metaphysically susceptible of no pathos or modification of his nature and creation can neither add to nor subtract from him. If asked as a mere question of the counterfactual: Yes, because the world we have is the one that expresses the divine nature as God eternally wills to express it in creation, and so its relation to WHO God is is not accidental. It depends what you’re asking.
Here, incidentally, Bulgakov is more rigorous than any of the other figures you mentions. But I don’t want to start the conversation up again.
As long as you grant that creation must reflect the nature of its creator, and that God is not some finite subject who might “cause” a reality extrinsic to his own nature, we have nothing to argue about, and that God of his nature could not create a world that is ultimately contrary to Goodness as such, I gladly retract any accusation of modal error.
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There is nothing “traditional”, as I undestand it, about denying God intention or purpose in creating, and thus creation a purpose, which would make the Bible history a meaningless absurdity and Christ a lie. Your view would seem largely indistinguishable in practice from atheism.
Whilst more knowledgeable theologians may correct me, the “traditional view” has always seen creation as a single act of pure love, and the purpose of God in creating the purpose of creation that of a creation in loving union with God. The position of utter indifference of God to his creation is directly contrary to the character of God as revealed in Christ Jesus, and therefore necessarily wrong, whatever argument you may think supports it.
However “misleading” you might think it to attribute to God something analogous to a human will, denying it would appear to be infinitely more misleading.
(I am also puzzled how human beings having a faculty lacking in God is compatible with creation ex nihilo.)
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> The position of utter indifference of God to his creation is directly contrary to the character of God as revealed in Christ Jesus, and therefore necessarily wrong, whatever argument you may think supports it.
This is not at all what the position entails, though I can see how it can look like that. For St. Thomas, at least, while it is true that whether or not God wills the world makes no difference in him, the world is suffused with the operation, the actuality of his will insofar as it is ordered to him. Just as God’s knowledge of things is not an intentional stance toward the world, but is constitutive of the world insofar as the world is intelligible, so God’s will is not something he “makes up his mind about”, but is found in the world’s orientation to God as its final end.
God doesn’t need to observe or react in order to know, his knowledge is efficacious; similarly, he doesn’t look at the world hoping and wanting for this or that. The structure of the universe is ordered to a concrete series of goods terminating, ultimately in him.
The background here is that for St. Thomas knowing is not defined by confrontation (the Platonic tradition) or the modern notion of intentionality in which a subject has the right kind of relation to an object. Knowing is the immaterial actuality of an intelligibility as intelligible. God knows everything because, as an unrestricted act of intelligibility, there is no further intelligibility to be possessed. And he knows not by looking at himself, but by a complete identity with himself. Since there is no further intelligibility to be grasped, there is nothing he does not know. Speaking of him as subject and object are just projections that arise from our way of thinking (as St. Thomas repeatedly asserts), and, taken literally, it vitiates the absoluteness of the divine nature.
Likewise, to say that God wills is to say that, with respect to himself, he enjoys the good (again, by identity, not by an volitional act involving some actual separation as willer and willed). And it is to say that, with respect to everything else, they are instruments of that Good, reflections of it, ineluctably ordered to it. God is not a wishful thinker. He does not know us because we already are, he does not need to figure out how to change our minds; our existence and orientation is really identical with his intellectual and volitional operations. Good news, I would think, if one is a universalist.
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Yes, it sounds a bit silly. Our friend Thomas seems simply to be confused about the metaphysical position he thinks he’s defending. He has confused two different assertions with one another.
On the one hand, since God is infinite and simple and the fullness of being, creation cannot be for him a “real relation,” or intentional object of the sort that we experience: meaning an extrinsic reality that qualifies or modifies us in being experienced by us, by way of a pathos. God is not a cognitive subject in a universe of external objects. Fine.
But Christians are Trinitarians, not Aristotelians. They believe in a creator God for whom everything—uncreated and created alike—is known and loved by God within his one infinite intention of his own essence (which is to say his goodness) in his Logos and Spirit. So, yes, creation is most definitely a terminus of divine intention, enfolded within his eternal knowledge and love of his own essence. Neither Spitzer nor Miller nor Owens would disagree with that. True, God does not create by “choosing” among an array of possibilities external to his own nature. This in no way alters the truth that creation, in itself, “might not have been,” so long as this claim is understood as a modal definition, a statement of ontological contingency, a recognition that creation receives its being from beyond itself and so has no intrinsic necessity.
For those, conversely, who grow anxious here that creation is prompted by God’s “internal necessities,” I would again insist that such a worry makes no sense in regard to infinite Being. It is a mistaken ascription to God of a language of freedom and necessity that logically applies only to finite beings, for whom the fullness of reality is necessarily something lying outside their bounded substances, and can be reached only under the aspect of inexhaustible and indeterminate possibility.
Still, creation exists only as the object of God’s intentions (love and knowledge). Our friend Thomas is simply confusing the categories of “intention” and “extrinsic relation.”
It is precisely on account of this metaphysics, incidentally—the knowledge that God is not a limited psychological subject playing with possibilities, but rather the infinite “intention” of his own goodness who wills the good in willing all things and reveals himself in his acts—that the ultimate “intentional” horizon of creation must reveal him for who he is.
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Thank you for this DBH. I have to say it soothes my heart to hear these points being made by one as authoritative (although happily not magisterial!) as yourself, as I have found myself a little confused by the apparently wildly varying interpretation of just this point by different Thomists.
However, I have to say I do sometimes feel the force of those objections from the other end of the telescope. That is, while I agree it is nonsense to talk of God being ‘modified’ by extrinsic realities, as though God were a being amongst beings, it does seem to be sensible to say that God’s knowledge of the world is in some sense ‘intrinsic’ to God – i.e. God knows the world not by some distinct and separate act of looking at the world, but rather God knows the world just in God’s in being God – insofar that to be God is to be love, and to be love is not to be self-enclosed but to manifest that love, i.e. to create.
Now, like you, I am certainly not worried about God’s act of creation being an ‘internal necessity’, as I agree with what I take to be the classical account of freedom that you propound – freedom for God is not some libertarian choosing between alternative possibilities, but the free unfolding of his nature.
However I sometimes wonder whether God’s knowledge of our own autonomous acts – e.g. my choice to sin today or not to sin – is similarly immune. Certainly I am not bothered about God’s act of creation, and God’s ultimate intentions towards that creation, and God’s ultimate fulfillment of those intentions, being in some sense implicit in the divine nature. But it does not seem to me that God’s knowledge of a particular sin could not be implicit in the divine nature in quite the same way (you are no compatibilist, after all).- i.e. the two propositions ‘God knows David chooses to sin in X way on 14 October’ and ‘God knows David chooses not to sin in X way on 14 October’ appear to be two genuinely different propositions, and if one holds that it is really ‘up to us’ which one we choose (for alas we autonomous beings, lacking true freedom) then it seems that we can say that, at least logically – if not temporally – there is something in God which ‘could be otherwise’, depending on how we autonomously choose to act. I take it that this is why people like Thomas are worried about God having intentional states and indeed intrinsic ‘knowledge states’, as it appears that these states could be different depending on what we do, which might appear a violation of the divine simplicity.
Is it enough just to say that God’s atemporality resolves the issue, and the idea of those states being considered ‘logically could be otherwise’ is just not necessary from God’s perspective? I have noted once before on this blog that Eleanor Stump (pages 111-113) argues that God is *not* intrinsically the same in all possible worlds, but argues this is still compatible with simplicity as it is apparently fine for God to have intrinsic qualities that ‘could have been in otherwise’ (I suppose in the ‘possible worlds’ logical sense), so long as they are eternally fixed.
This may not be a very helpful way of putting it, but I take her to be making the point that, from God’s perspective, our choices are already fixed – not in the sense that God determines them, or fate determines them, or that God’s nature implies them, but just that they are eternally ‘there’ before God. Or a simple way of putting it might be this: timelessness puts the whole notion of ‘possible worlds’ out of a job.
I would like to ask, is that on the money, or does it weaken the divine simplicity?
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Oh good. I thought it might just be me. I feel rather like a casual spectator watching a sports game – everyone else may be far more an expert than me but I do like to think I can at least more or less follow what’s going on.
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David,
Stump is an analytic philosopher who thinks of God as the highest entity in whatever possible world he inhabits, and as someone who therefore is determined in relation to that world by his decisions. I believe that is an incoherent view of God. But I have to ask you to refer to my The Experience of God–or, for that matter, to the entire history of classical theism before analytic philosophy was visited on the world by Satan (or someone more malevolent).
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Otherwise, David, there are numerous ways of thinking about the issue, none of which necessitates that God is modified by us or that we are helplessly determined by him. We too often think of the act of creation as a kind of causality, analogous to other kinds of cause, and too often think as a consequence how it would “determine” what is created. We also think of it as God choosing one world out of an infinity of compossible worlds, each fully determined in every detail. These are suppositions, not logical requisites of the idea of creation.
Alas, being only a creature myself, I can’t tell you what the act of giving being out of nothingness would be. I can tell you a few things about what is logically permissible. For instance, one can say that the world God makes has its rationale in who God is, and so is not just one equally plausible world among others. One can also say that, even if he creates the one world that truly reveals him (supremely, Christians assume, in that it is the world in which the Logos is to become incarnate), there is no logical requirement to assume that, in determining all things to his own goodness, God is not capable of allowing creatures a kind of stochastic liberty at the level of secondary causality, since no actuality they can bring to pass is absent from God’s infinite plenitude of being; this may, in fact, be a necessary aspect of his revelation in creatures. One can also say that this does not mean that creatures thus “surprise” him or that they modify his knowledge of them, since God eternally knows even the inmost free determinations of his creatures in creating them. Again, though, all of this requires us to recognize that to create out of nothingness is not to “cause” the world in any sense we understand. To think in terms of determinism or total indeterminacy here is already to have reduced that transcendent and unique act to a logic of causal relations immanent to a contingent reality.
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Thank you DBH. I have in fact read your wonderful The Experience of God. I apologise if I have not grasped your thought entirely – if only! – but I certainly appreciated its general toppling of the analytic tradition, even if I am not entirely sure how to apply that toppling at this particular juncture. Anyway, I do still tend to think that the question ‘if we really could do otherwise, and God’s knowledge of his creation (including what we autonomously happen to do) is identical with God’s one infinite act of self-knowing, then doesn’t that (at least on first inspection) imply there is some aspect of God’s act that “would have been different” had we done something different?’ is at least a question worth asking – even though I trust the classical traditional can answer it adequately (or reveal it as a non-question). As I say above, Stump couches her answer in the language of ‘possible worlds’, which of course is rather ‘peak analytic philosophy’ move to make, and something I am uncomfortable with. In what is a slight contrast to how Stump puts it, I have suggested that timelessness – given the eternal ‘giveness’ of the world, from God’s eternal perspective – perhaps puts the whole notion of ‘possible worlds’ out of a job, i.e. reveals the whole dilemma as a false question. Is that close to a response, or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?
At the risk of repeating myself, to restate my concern in a slightly different way: I suppose my basic worry remains that it seems to be that, say, ‘the Father loves the Son’ can be taken to in some sense ‘imply’ creation, and God’s act of loving creation, so that they are coherently wrapped up into one act – yet ‘the Father loves the Son’ does *not* seem to imply that I sin in a particular way, and the concomittant of ‘God knows David sins in X way at time Y’. Does timelessness solve the problem here? Is perhaps the point that, while our acts may be logically ‘contingent’ and ‘could be otherwise’ depending on what we in fact choose to do, that does not mean God’s act of knowing all those contingent things is itself contingent – precisely because the very definition of God is to be at the end of history (or rather outside of history), which of course makes all of history present and known (perhaps we could say that ‘knowing history’ is identical to the act of ‘being outside of history’). So while my sin of X occurring may be contingent at the time the decision is made, from the perspective of the eternal, the decision is already made, and so indeed known in the same act as ‘the Father loves the son’ (analogous to the way the past is open for those to whom the past is present, but when past is considered as past, it is closed).
Apologies again if this is just analytic-inspired tosh, I do feel it is a disease that has infested me at times.
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Thank you DBH – apologies for crossing posts, I had not noted your followup response when I posted my last message. Yes, I quite agree that we cannot ‘surprise’ God and, if I am understanding you correctly, that God transcends our concepts of both determinism and indeterminism – thank you for this insight, which is too easy to forget, especially for so banal a thinker as I. One thought I have just had, in light of my worries that ‘the Father loves the Son’ does not ‘imply’ God’s contingent knowledge – perhaps not an issue, as God does not ‘work out’ or ‘determine’ this contingent knowledge by knowing ‘the Father loves the Son’; instead, ‘the Father loves the Son’ just is same act of creating the world in the sense that the Father loves the Son timelessly brings about creation, and, as I rather sloppily set out in my previous post, the necessarily timeless nature of creation means that, from said timeless perspective, creation is ‘just there’ just as much as the Father loving the Son is ‘just there’, even though from our temporal perspective we might notionally distinguish one as logically necessary and the other contingent. Again, perhaps the whole classical concept of God, simplicity, and timelessness puts our notions of ‘possible worlds’ and ‘necessary vs contingent’ out of the job, at least so far as God’s perspective is concerned.
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I’ve got some bits coming up that are really going to annoy you.
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Comment intended for the indefatigable Thomas. (One hits the reply button thinking it will appear directly below the comment one is replying to. I should know better by now.)
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I try to keep a steady diet of high quality writings that I don’t fully agree with. So I look forward to it!
(And I think “vastly outnumbered” is a bit more fitting here than indefatigable. In fact, I haven’t been able to keep up.)
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“[E]very death of a child, every chance calamity, every act of malice; everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel; and until the end of all things, no answer has been given” (That all shall be saved, p. 73)
The force of the above words hit me hard during my just completed visit to Israel. At the Children’s Memorial at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, one enters into a dark cavern like display illuminated solely by tiny points of light which represent the souls of the innocents murdered during Hitler’s Final Solution. As one proceeds through the Memorial, voices break the dark silence with the names and ages of each child sacrificed on the altar of Nazism’s demonic depravity.
No answer has yet been given to the voices announcing the names of the victims of such senseless genocide. Nor has any answer ever been given to those slaughtered during the genocidal hysteria of the 20th century, from the Armenians after the Great War, through the Holocaust, Pol Pot, the Bosnian Serbs’ war crimes, the intertribal madness of Hutu against Tutsi in Rwanda, the persecution and execution of pretty much all religious groups by ISIS right up to the second genocide of the Kurds now taking place in Northeast Syria by the Turks and facilitated by the imbecility of Donald Trump.
Indeed, the only possible answer must be eschatological, as Dr. Hart so amply demonstrates in his book. If salvation is not universal and a residue of tragic darkness remains in the eschaton, than God cannot be the transcendental Good since all is freely created by Him ex nihilo. I have always felt the logical force of that argument, but prior to visiting the Holocaust Museum the sheer moral and existential force of the matter escaped me. For if apokatastasis is not true, than no answer will ever be given to the voices of the innocents being announced reverently at Yad Vashem.
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I wish the typical genocide lists one commonly sees from Americans or Brits would include those caused or supported by America or Britain and while the current Kurdish situation might become that, there is a large ongoing slaughter in Yemen with the fingerprints of both Obama and Trump all over it. Bipartisan, you see. Most of our bloodletting has that quality.
Otherwise I agree.
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I love that mosaic icon of Christ the Creator.
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Brian,
Excellent work as always. You’re definitely sketching out contours in TASBS that I haven’t discerned, at least not to those depths. This, while quintessentially Hartian, jumped out to me with arresting quality:
Much of the vehemence that animates traditionalists is not savage insensitivity, but groaning protest that the ledgers acknowledge the cruelty and rank injustice of our experience in this world.
Perhaps this has been the curse that Christianity has borne every since it became a respectable religion. I don’t think it happenstance that the howling from both First Things and The Gospel Coalition are both advancing reviews of TASBS as well as (in TGC in particular) going out of their way to prop up the most threadbare strawman of Christian universalism as possible. A gospel of such radiant beauty robs them of their raison d’etre.
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David (the non-DBH) one:
> I would personally think the opposite: it is the reality of God that conditions the world, not the other way around. The fact that God has intentions ordered towards the world (or rather, with respect to God’s intrinsic idea of the world) does not mean that the world ‘has to exist’ in order for God to have those intentions; rather, God’s intentions are just the necessary condition for the world existing.
Specific intentional acts are conditioned by their objects. The choice to vote for a Democrat or a Republic (or the DSS) are different choices, because they are different things. Were the Democratic party never to exist, I could not choose to vote for them. If my wife and children did not exist, I could not love them. Etc.
For a certain kind of neo-theist, God is a condition for the world because he makes it. Yet the world is also a condition for God, because God could not be himself except as Creator. Circular conditions are pretty common actually. A cat depends on its nervous system, the cat’s nervous system depends on the cat. Substance depends on form which depends on act which depends on form ….
My central point has been that attributing wishful intentions (“wants”) to God, realities in him that would not be there had the world not existed, or had he wished a different world, is a form of neo-theism. (I began the conversation in the belief that DBH and probably Brian agreement with that, and that my caution had to do mostly with modes of expression.) When we say that God wills x, we should not attribute an intentional state to God inconsistent with the statement that God does not will x. Rather, as St. Thomas maintained, we should understand the ground of the statement to be the dependence of x on God and its ordering to him. The difference between the truth or falsity for the proposition “God wills x” is not found in God, but in x.
What I am not arguing is that God could create a world in which the problem of evil has no ultimate resolution, or that the state of the world tells us nothing about God’s character. I’m not sure why that inference seems to have been drawn. I’ve argued for the view that sin and suffering pose a problem that demands a solution, and that I think a strong argument can be made that the only adequate solution would be a final restoration.
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This seems like a massive red herring and distraction over a super nitpicky issue to be honest. Maybe that’s what most of theology is, idk I’m not a theologian. It seems everyone agrees on the overall picture though, so this seems like a waste of time and breath for all of us.
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“When we say that God wills x, we should not attribute an intentional state to God inconsistent with the statement that God does not will x. Rather, as St. Thomas maintained, we should understand the ground of the statement to be the dependence of x on God and its ordering to him. The difference between the truth or falsity for the proposition “God wills x” is not found in God, but in x.”
I think, Thomas, that the confusion lies in the point of reference. The above statement is true of God as a metaphysical “substance.” It is true also as a modal statement about creation: that it is wholly contingent on God, but God is absolute in regard to (absolved, that is, of real relation with) it. It is not true, however, with regard to God understood as intending creation within his intention of his own Goodness. In the latter case, what God wills simply is who God is, and so what God wills is not simply a matter of contingent “choice” from the perspective of God’s eternal identity.
After all, Surely you don’t think God “chose” to create in a sense that means he might equally well not have chosen so to do, as if he were a deliberating substance. What you mean is simply that God’s intention toward creation is not some additional feature of God’s eternal intention of his own essence. Otherwise, you’re back to a changeable God again: a deliberating subject with a history of extrinsic possibilities either actualized or not actualized.
Please someone stop me. It’s the insomnia that keeps me typing.
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> Surely you don’t think God “chose” to create in a sense that means he might equally well not have chosen so to do, as if he were a deliberating substance. What you mean is simply that God’s intention toward creation is not some additional feature of God’s eternal intention of his own essence.
What I mean is that God’s free choice to create the universe entails no difference whatsoever in God than had he not chosen to create the universe. There is a real difference, but it is completely extrinsic: the actuality of things. (We may mean slightly different things by intentionality, since I would exclude “directedness” or “orientation”.)
The counterfactual is important here insofar as it cleanly disposes of the possibility that there is really some kind of relation in God to us. Otherwise, people like William Hasker end up with the misunderstandings like “God is identical with his action of parting the Red Sea”, or think that contingent actions form some kind of part of God’s will.
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Isn’t it impossible for the triune God of love not to create? (Theological amateur here)
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