I don't really like the word religion, particularly when it is applied to Christianity.
This is largely due to the negative connotations which this word has for many people including myself. It leaves a bitter and acrid aftertaste lingering on the tongue.
Religion implies a great deal of things. It generally implies for instance the codifying of a system of rules and the institutional structure which binds them together and legislates them.
There is a very real human tendency to ascribe more importance to religion than to the Lord that religion is meant to honor.
Religion as a Vehicle
Of course, the human tendency is to ascribe more importance to anything than to God, but religion happens to be a particularly nasty and insidious idol, because it is so closely associated with God.
But what we tend to forget is that religion is only associated with God inasmuch as it is subservient to Him, and is a vehicle to carry us into His will and His kingdom.
When religion ceases to be a subservient tool in the Master's hand,
it ceases to be a useful institution and must be either revised or abolished.
Why am I beginning an entry on the nature of God with a diatribe about religion?
Because religion is meant to be a vehicle for a relationship with God.
And in this office, religion often fails terribly.
It often fails to paint an accurate picture of God's nature, or ascribe appropriate significance to God's characteristics.
Religion distracts us from questions of prime importance.
Who is this God whom we serve?
Do we know Him?
Do we know His character and His nature?
His likes and dislikes?
Why It's Important That We Know About God
Faith, by its very definition, is trust in someone or something.
If we claim that we have faith in God, but do not even know His character,
how can our words ring true?
For it is impossible to trust someone you know nothing about.
In light of these things, there are few studies more important than the study of God's nature
and character.
Because our knowledge and our opinions on how God acts, reacts, and behaves subconsciously
order our own actions, reactions, and behavior.
If we are called to be image-bearers of Him, and to reflect His attributes to a world that desperately needs fulfillment, how can we do so without knowing more about Him?
Before I launch into some of the more controversial theological areas in which my thoughts and opinions have shifted during the past six months, it would be generous to lay a solid foundation to my arguments and ideas. So the first three entries that I make, will be an earnest attempt to do just that.
This is the first of the three, and arguably the most important.
How we view God changes everything.
The Importance of a Firm Foundation
In Matthew 7:24-27 Jesus lays out the advantages of building our house on a firm foundation.
If there is such an immaterial thing as a foundation to ones theology, it would be their comprehension and thoughts of God's character.
To attempt to list every single attribute of God and every single opinion God expresses throughout Scripture would be an absolutely monumental undertaking and certainly beyond the scope of what I'm capable of here.
So instead I'll be as succinct as possible. Let us begin with some commonly understood attributes.
The Attributes of God
1.) God is immaterial. (John 4:24; John 1:18; Col 1:15; 1Ti 6:16; Luk 24:39; Rom 1:20; 1Ti 1:17)
His true form is spiritual in nature, and as such He must be worshiped by man who has been gifted with a spiritual nature.
We have been crafted in God's image, and stand in a unique relation to our Creator.
2.) God is infinite. (Psa 145:3; 1Ki 8:27; Jer 23:24)
3.) God is immutable. (Psa 102:27; Jas 1:17; Mal 3:6; Heb 6:17-18)
I have addressed this property in a prior entry on 'Spirit of Liberty' here.
I want to make specific mention that the immutability of God should provide the believer with a great deal of trust, because unlike capricious human beings, God's character never changes.
I do not believe that Scripture implies that God has no capacity to change His mind or His course of action, only that the core element of His character never changes.
He will always be just, kind, loving, holy, etc. We will delve further into this topic later.
4.) God is truth. (Deu 32:4; John 17:2-3; Psa 19:9; Psa 33:4; Psa 57:10; John 8:31-32; John 17:17; John 18:37-38; 2Th 2:10-13)
This is incredibly important, because it covers a whole spectrum of secondary attributes including God's justice. He is just because He is true.
5.) God is love. (1Jn 4:8; John 3:16; John 15:9-14; Mat 22:36-40; Rom 5:8; Rom 8:35-39; 1Co 13:13; 1Jn 4:12; 1Jn 4:16)
This is one of the most potent understandings of God from Scripture, and to be quite honest, one of the attributes of God that truly separate Him from all of the fictional gods and goddesses throughout history.
To quote Philip Yancey:
"On our own, would any of us come up with the notion of a God who loves and yearns to be loved? Those raised in a Christian tradition may miss the shock of Jesus' message, but in truth love has never been a normal way of describing what happens between human beings and their God.
Not once does the Qur'an apply the word love to God. Aristotle stated bluntly, "It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus"---or that Zeus loved a human being, for that matter."
6.) God is eternal. (Psa 90:2; Isa 57:15; Deu 33:27; 1Ti 1:17)
7.) God is holy. (1Pe 1:16; 1Jn 1:5; Psa 98:1; Psa 145:17; 1Sa 2:2; Isa 6:3; John 17:11; Rev 4:8)
God's holiness is one of the most important of His attributes.
Because He embodies purity and truth, He is said to dwell in light which no man can approach.
His very essence is holiness of a magnitude that would appear (from biblical description)
to literally disintegrate any darkness or evil which comes within proximity.
Other Means of Knowing God's Nature
There are a number of other attributes of God's nature, but these are commonly viewed by theologians as the most critical.
Aside from Scripture itself, there are two other sources which we can utilize in knowing God's nature.
The first is our conscience. I have gone into some length into a discussion of the conscience in an entry on 'Spirit of Liberty', however I intend to recapitulate many of those thoughts in a specific entry on the conscience here.
Suffice it to say that it is my belief that through our conscience, we are aware of where we stand in relation to God and His holiness. And so through our conscience we intuitively know certain things without explicit instruction.
A second way aside from Scripture is through our own personal experience.
After we come to know Christ as our living Savior and begin a daily process of walking with Him, He begins to teach us His ways.
I know of no other way to put this, but I trust that any Christian who has been so for any length of time should know what I am speaking of.
As we come to know Him, God works through our daily experiences in our
lives individually (because we are not all alike) to grow us as human beings in our
dealings and relationships with each other and with Him.
Of course these resources in knowing God have to do more with comprehending Him on a personal level rather than with a cold and clinical knowledge of the impersonal traits which make Him who He is.
It is also important to note that each of these three means of perceiving God's nature are fallible.
We can fail in our interpretation of Scripture.
We can fail to apprehend moral truths of God because our conscience has been severely damaged.
We can fail to understand the intentions of God through our life experiences due
to our own desires and idols getting in the way and effectively blinding us.
That is why all three resources must be held in constant comparison to each other to bring us back
into proper alignment in relation to God.
Warring Attributes
There are a few things which I feel it necessary to mention in relation to this important topic while we linger on it, before moving on to the next chapters as they are critical to later points I wish to make.
One of these is that I have noticed from the teachings of many ministers and churches that they tend to pit God's attributes against one another.
The most commonly overused and abused one is Love vs. Holiness.
I have constantly heard this phrase or variations thereof:
"Well it is true that God loves all people, but He is also holy."
Why is there a choice at all?
The false implication is that God can either be love or holy; but He cannot be both.
But this is absurd since we know that God is love and that God is holy.
The commonsense solution to this dilemma would be to conclude that God's love is infused with His holiness and that His holiness is also infused with His love.
When God chastises His children out of His holiness, He does not carefully wrap His loving nature up in a boutique box and place it on a dusty shelf somewhere, only to take it it up again when He is finished exercising His wrath.
Rather God's judgment is also just precisely because it is tempered by His other attributes.
Placing God's attributes at odds with each other is a dangerous practice to indulge in, because it often
paints a false or lopsided image of who God is.
Euthyphro's Dilemma and Divine Command Theory
The second stems from a famous (or infamous, however you prefer it) philosophical problem known as Euthyphro's Dilemma.
Simply stated it amounts to this question: Are moral acts willed by God because they are good, or are they good because they are willed by God?
Quite simply, it is my belief that Euthyphro's Dilemma is in fact a false dilemma because there is a third option: God wills moral acts because He is good.
When God commands something that is good, He commands it because those commandments are merely extensions of His own nature.
What is right would have no meaning without God because He is the source of rightness.
There are many theories for morality and ethics and where they are derived from, but I tend to lean heavily toward viewing God as the ultimate Source from which all attributes such as goodness, kindness, mercy, love, justice, holiness, and so on emanate just as rays of light radiate outward from the sun.
Indeed, this makes the most sense of Scripture, since we are told explicitly that we are to love, because He is love (1Jn 4:8) and because He first loved us (1 Jn 4:19);
we are to be holy, because He is holy (1Pet 1:16);
we are to be perfect, because He is perfect (Mat 5:48);
we are to be just, because He is just (Deu 32:4).
This is, in my opinion, one of the axioms of Scripture.
The theory of Divine Command Ethics however, tends to envision God as a 'Do as I say, not as I do' sort of Father figure.
According to A. Van de Beek who holds this theory to be true:
"What goodness is at a specific moment is determined by the action of God at that moment.
And if today God acts differently than yesterday, goodness today is different from what it was yesterday. God is the criterion for good and evil...There is no authority above Him to which He could be subject."
This viewpoint is in serious tension with the Paradigm theory that I have proposed here,
since God is either bound by His own nature or He is not.
If He is not, then we must acknowledge that He is at liberty to arbitrarily choose what is good or
evil moment-by-moment.
But this is not objective moral value, which is what Christians believe to be the case
(objective moral value being defined as a concrete standard of right and wrong which is static and unchanging).
If God is good by very definition, just as a circle is round, then issues of Divine Command Ethics need not even enter the picture.
To insist that God can re-interpret wrong and right on the fly severely weakens the Christian's position when it comes to morality and ethics, since if such objective values can be rewritten with God's every action, then they are not actually objective at all,
and God's self-revelation would be rendered meaningless since it could change tomorrow, and henceforth each day thereafter.
In essence, if Divine Command Ethics is true we are all moral relativists.
Free Will or Not
I suppose that since it will become readily apparent in the process of reading
my ramblings that I do not subscribe to the doctrine of Calvinism or the
typical doctrine of exhaustive foreknowledge, that I should briefly address
those concerns before I continue.
I am intimately aware of the fact that the question of divine providence is an
extremely sensitive one, and it is a discussion which all too frequently devolves
rapidly into screaming matches the only certain outcome of which is that truly
sincere and genuine believers lose all sense of Godly grace and love for one another
and part paths red-faced and filled with bluster.
That is not my intention here, so I would desire to head off all such
tirades at the pass. As I've stated before and will do again, I could be mistaken
in my beliefs. But all belief must be founded on solid reasons, and mine is
founded on the most sturdy reasoning that I'm capable of.
For those who are not aware, the argument that has typically raged in centuries
past is between Calvinism (also known as compatibilism), and Arminianism (also
known as libertarianism).
As with many other doctrines, there are virtually infinite stops along the way
between the two. One of the primary differences between compatibilism and
libertarianism is their view of divine providence.
Calvinism is well known for it's TULIP anagram, by which its primary
tenets can more easily be remembered.
The letters respectively stand for (T)otal depravity, (U)nconditional election,
(L)imited atonement, (I)rresistable grace, and (P)erseverance of the saints.
Although I have issues with many of the points of Calvinism, it is the third,
limited atonement, with which I have the most difficulty.
Limited atonement essentially says that God does not in fact, love everybody
and that Jesus did not in fact, die for all; He loves and died only for the elect.
Those predestined by God's exhaustive foreknowledge from the beginning of
time to be saved.
Of course the necessary corollary of this belief is the much darker one that since
God predestined (from the beginning of time) for certain individuals to be saved,
He also predestined certain individuals (statistically a great many more than He chose
to be saved, in fact) to be damned eternally.
Aside from numerous Scriptural contradictions and problems this doctrine creates
it also leads us down a gloomy road to an ultimate conclusion that most
Calvinists reach which is to affirm that God either decreed or ordained evil, or at
minimum that He uses evil that already exists. In the words of Jonathan Edwards:
"Thus it is necessary, that God's awful majesty, His authority and dreadful greatness,So we are to understand that God created evil in order to glorify Himself.
justice, and holiness, should be manifested.
But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the
shining forth of God's glory would be very imperfect, both because these
parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory
of His goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay,
they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree
and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God's holiness
in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in His providence, of godliness before it.
There would be no manifestation of God's grace or true goodness, if there was
no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever
He bestowed, His goodness would not be so much prized and admired...
So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the
completeness of that communication of God, for which He made the world."
Because without evil, His goodness would not be apparent enough.
That God created or ordained evil, the fall of man, and the damnation of billions
in order to glorify Himself seems a terribly problematic view for theologians
to hold; or perhaps ought to be.
Because Christianity hinges on our belief in a Being of ultimate goodness,
mercy, and love; indeed our entire faith is ordered around it.
But the God portrayed by Calvinism seems to be a far more clinically detached
being of neutral alignment rather than good. And since I do not worship an
omnipotent God of neutrality, I therefore choose to reject Calvinism.
The Open View
During the past few months, I have been led to lean strongly in favor
of a view of divine providence referred to by many as Open Theism.
Open Theism posits that God chose not to exercise meticulous control
of the universe in relation to His creation and interaction with free moral
agents (us). Subsequently, God has not exhaustively settled the future
as pertaining to our choices.
The problems seep in when proponents of opposing theories of foreknowledge
claim that Open Theists are promoting a heretical doctrine which limits
God's omniscience. But this is not what Open Theists are claiming at all.
Instead of asserting that God does not know something which will happen in
the future, we claim that it would be nonsense to assert otherwise because
there is nothing there to know.
That God has allowed other rational creatures
possessed of free will into existence, means that He has made the decision
to limit Himself (just as He chose to limit Himself by placing Himself in the
form of a man in the incarnation). The implication of Open Theism
is that the conscious decisions of beings with free will is not knowable until
they occur.
The Open view therefore seems to allow a much smoother understanding
of biblical passages that seem to clearly state that God changed His mind,
altered His plans, cancelled prophecies, expressed surprise and sorrow, etc.
These passages of Scripture, John Calvin insisted, were merely God 'lisping'
to us through the words of the authors much as a mother 'lisps' to her infant
because it is incapable of comprehending genuine speech.
But this view opens further troubling avenues of thought.
For one thing, it would seem that on this view God (whatever the case may be)
is misleading us by presenting to us an image in Scripture which is intellectually
dishonest and not the genuine article.
But if we cannot even trust the foundational information we read in Scripture
pertaining to God's nature, what can we trust? How does this position not
undermine divine revelation entirely?
Furthermore, the doctrine of divine impassivity (the idea that since God
exists outside of time, He cannot be affected in any way by His creation),
poses extreme difficulties. If God is not affected in any way by His creation,
why is He portrayed in Scripture as being affected, or is this simply more 'lisping'?
Why is He outraged by sin? How could sin be an affront against Him at all
since He cannot be affected by anything?
And why are we encouraged constantly throughout the bible's pages to pray
if the future is exhaustively settled, and in any case God can't be 'bothered' by our
heartfelt petitions since He is utterly immutable and impassive.
For these reasons (among many others), I affirm the Open Theist view of divine
providence. I had originally intended to write an entire chapter regarding this massive
topic (Chapter X). Perhaps I will still do so in the future but for now, I wanted only to state my current views without venturing into a full disclosure.
Conclusion
I have chosen these issues to discuss for good reasons,
and I hope that you will be patient with me long enough to see the conclusion of my thought process and that you will pardon me for laboring so intensively over seemingly trivial issues at present. The groundwork must be laid before any true arguments can be put forth.
One of those arguments is the following.
That no theological framework can be coherent and consistent unless it somehow unifies and reconciles our understanding of the attributes and nature of God with Scripture and with our lives. Our theology must resonate profoundly with truth.
If it contradicts itself, it is useless, for although it is definitely possible for God to contradict the logic with which He has endowed us, for Him to do so would render all theological discussion utterly unintelligible, since we could no longer rely on our foundational faculties of reason to infer anything. And I, not choosing to believe that my God is the author of confusion, prefer to believe instead
that He has chosen to reveal Himself to us in a meaningful manner that inspires creative discourse.
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