At 04:35 PM 09/04/2001 -0400, George Andrews Jr. wrote:
>Why would a view of a deity who limits him/herself be "improper"?
If we are talking about the Christian deity, then it's because such a
proposal wreaks havoc with the traditional doctrine of God. That doctrine
posits certain attributes of God -- omnipotence, omniscience,
omnibenevolence, et al -- as being essential expressions of God's being.
You cannot "limit" any of those attributes without abandoning the
traditional portrayal of the Christian God. A Christian God whose
omnipotence can be curtailed may turn out to be a God who cannot perform
the miracle of redeeming and reconciling his fallen creation. A Christian
God whose omniscience can be tampered with may not in fact know the needs
and sufferings of his own flock (Matthew 6:32). We may not like the
traditional depiction of God's being, and feel it needs revision, but any
revision will produce a different picture of God.
Furthermore, the notion that the Christian God can "limit himself" is
simply incoherent. If, say, God's omnipotence is to be limited, what is it
within God that would do the limiting? Is there something more omnipotent
than God's omnipotence that would limit God's omnipotence? And what kind
of thing is "limited omnipotence," or "limited omniscience"? The questions
quickly become thoroughly gnarled. Most of the arguments of this sort that
I have encountered make some type of distinction between God's being (as
exemplified in his traditional attributes) and God's will. Then, as the
argument goes, God can choose to limit himself by exercising his will. But
this makes God's will more omnipotent than God's omnipotence, and we are
back to incoherence. In addition, do we really want to bifurcate God into
being and will, and pit the latter against the former, such that God has to
constrain his very being in order to function in accord with the biblical
account? It all sounds "improper" to me.
Tom Pearson
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Thomas D. Pearson
Department of History & Philosophy
The University of Texas-Pan American
Edinburg, Texas
e-mail: pearson@panam1.panam.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Sep 04 2001 - 17:32:37 EDT