on 9/4/01 11:00 PM, george murphy at gmurphy@raex.com wrote:
> 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
>
Our evidence of God's self-limitation is not confined to scripture.
Does not God's gift of freedom imply that God chose to limit God's freedom?
This seems very true to me.
James Stark
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