Tom Pearson wrote:
> 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.
Paul's statement about Christ's kenosis in Phil.2:5-11 clearly point to
some sort of self-limitation on the part of God. We are to start from there &
adapt our understanding of God's being & will to that rather than the other way
around.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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