Re: impassibility

Dave -

I think this has gotten to the point where we're just playing old tapes. I want to insist as strongly as possible on the reality of God's involvement in history via the Incarnation, & the implications of the cross & resurrection of Christ, & think that it's necessary to drop a metaphysics of divine timelessness to do justice to that. You think that the necessary christological & trinitarian emphasis can be maintained without abandoning that metaphysics. We probably aren't going to get beyond that. You can have the last word here, at least for the time being.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
  To: gmurphy@raex.com
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 4:01 PM
  Subject: Re: impassibility

  Mine also.
  Dave

  On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 13:08:01 -0500 "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com> writes:
    Comments below.

    Shalom
    George
    http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
      ----- Original Message -----
      From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
      To: gmurphy@raex.com
      Cc: asa@calvin.edu
      Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2005 11:19 PM
      Subject: Re: impassibility

      George,
      I know you don't recognize it, but you are moving from the Son entered time to something like the deity was always in time. The problem with your suggestion is that, if God is in any kind of time, it must be infinite backward and the question of what God was doing before he created the world is valid, but leads to a nonsense answer.

      What God was doing before he created the world in God's temporality but not in that of the world. & no "nonsense answer" results if one simply says "I don't know."

      Given this approach, I can get out of any problem. Like it or not, any kind of temporality has a before and an after. It does not have to have the physical changes of our space-time existence. An eternal "now" is nontemporal, without before or after.

      If you go for panentheism, you have a kind of answer. But I contend that, since our world is only 13.7 Gy old, it must have been preceded by a previous world that collapsed to provide material for this world, with that world preceded by an infinite series of worlds--unless God has multiplied his being-creation to accommodate the multiverse view.

      Augustine, as you know, gave 2 answers to the question of what God was doing before he created the world. The 2d, & serious one, is that there was no "before": "God made the world with time, not in time." That is true with respect to the world's time. It's a reasonable answer to a questions which is reasonable because we experience the time of the world & can ask sensible questions about it. Augustine's 1st jocular answer, "Preparing hell for those who pry into mysteries," is, I think, appropriate for those who insist on asking questions about things of which we have no experience and can know about only by revelation. (I think Luther's slightly gentler answer was that God was out in the woods cutting switches for people who asked foolish questions. In either case, beware :) )

      If I recall correctly, the earlier answer was one Augustine noted was given to which he did not subscribe. I take Augustine's serious answer to claim that there was no time of any sort before creation. Luther's answer requires both that there be time and the created world before creation, so his utterance has to be tongue in cheek--unless God exists in a world like ours, though perhaps with different dimensions. In this case, deity inexorably exists with a before and after.

      Your notion of creating worlds fails totally unless your created beings communicate with you and you with them; in which case the question what you did before you created them is valid. In your case we go back to a beginning, though there could be a double beginning with transmigration of souls. But you, or any "creator" who does not produce their own matter /ex nihilo/, are in time with a temporal "before."

      My analogy (for that was all it claimed to be) does not "fail" at all because I didn't intend for it to illustrate any more than the possibility of a temporal entity creating a world whose time had a beginning. Whether or not that world has any intelligent inhabitants is irrelevant.

      The beauty of analogies is that they only have to match a limited number of parameters. I'm trying to avoid analogies on the basis that time is time wherever encountered. If you want to claim that there is divine temporality without before or after, you are claiming that time is not time, which is nonsense. This gives me immediate proof that there is no God, and that I do not exist. Consequentia mirabilis holds.

      Your last paragraph is a near-perfect illustration that human beings cannot imagine things except in time. It is built into our language as well. /En arche en ho Logos, k.t.l./, taken literally, proves that there was time before the beginning of space-time-matter. Are you going to cite that to demonstrate that God is temporal, even though that requires that the Almighty twiddle his thumbs for an infinite duration before initiating this universe? What alternative besides hand-waving and insistence do you offer to this consequence? God's time is indivisible?

      Speaking of straw men - I referred to passages that speak of God changing and you address not them but John 1:1. & still you avoid the fact that any scriptural support for your view is feeble at best & the couple of verses that can be cited by no means demand a maximal interpretation of timelessness.

      My point is that your citation of passages that indicate divine change requires divine temporality, which necessarily requires either that there was a state before and a state after, which extends infinitely unless God was created, or that time is not time. The alternative is that these statements are an adaptation to human limitations. This last fits your interpretation of the six days of Genesis 1, for you accept neither that yom applies to 24-hour history not to day-age sequence. If no literal or quasi-literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is necessary, why must a literal interpretation of these other passages be demanded. Are God's threats to be understood as absolute, or with unstated conditions? If there are grounds for a different hermeneutic for the two sets of passages, what are they, and how do they fail to produce contradiction? "I don't know" is not an adequate response.
      Dave

      Dave

      On Sat, 3 Dec 2005 17:58:03 -0500 "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com> writes:
        Dave -

        I deny that I am "imposing" anything except to the extent that I take with utmost seriousness that the Son of God became a participant in human history - i.e., time. That does not mean that he is limited to our time but it suggests that there is a kind of time appropriate to God which created time may be made a part of.

        & while this by no means amounts to a proof, the ability of temporal human beings to construct things like space-time diagrams, & in fact novels and plays, which have their own internal histories, strongly suggests that there can be a temporal creator who is not bound by the times of the worlds he/she creates. E.g., I can draw a space-time diagram with an expanding universe which has a beginning in time. For imaginary creatures in that universe the question "What was the creator doing before he made the world" would be meaningless in terms of their time, as Augustine pointed out. But it would not be meaningless in my time. N.B. This is not at all a claim that such human creators are in any sense "timeless" or have the experience of timelessness - just the opposite.

        My supposed "literal interpretation" of scripture is a straw man. But metaphors, images &c aren't arbitrary, & the fact that so many of them suggest God being affected by what happens in the world, "changing his mind" (cf. Jonah) &c, should count for something. OTOH in order to get any biblical support you must insist on a maximal & literal interpretation of Jas.1:17 & Mal.3:6 - especially when it's realized that passages referring to divine foreknowledge &/or predestination do not require divine timelessness.

        Shalom
        George
        http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Fri Dec 9 17:11:09 2005