Why I've learned to avoid the term 'God'

To say that revelation is not understandable is the same as saying there is no revelation. And it simply isn’t true. There is much revealed in data coming from earth and sky, and while it may be difficult to understand, it is not true to say that it is not understandable. And this doesn’t agree with my experience of the Bible either. Even coming from a completely scientific background I find much in the Bible which is understandable and revealing.

But as for philosophy? A better argument can be made that this is something which leads nowhere (or anywhere) since it all depends on the premises you start with. Some even come to such bizarre conclusions as “there is no such thing as meaning.” But ultimately I think this just means you have to take its conclusions with a grain of salt and discernment rejecting that which is without meaning in the context of human existence.

Seemingly I had to be more clear. Of course I don´t deny the ability to understand that something has been revealed. What is not open to us are the reasons (“What are we that you are mindful of us”) and what that says us about Gods essence. The Christian claim of the Trinity is a good example of the latter. Only if we at one point get to witness Gods essence can there be any hope for us to understand.

Extracting God from the bible and doing so from general philosophic considerations are both intellectual endeavors, or at least can be. Both approaches assume that finding an intellectual basis for God is a reasonable enterprise. But why is it reasonable? If it were only a cultural transmission taken very seriously by our parents and teachers but with no obvious basis, then perhaps skepticism would be the better intellectual response.

Rather than engaging the intellect immediately in any of those directions, I’d prefer to make a phenomenological survey of what it is in our experience which supports the love of, respect for or even belief in God. Is there anything about our experience which suggests the presence of a divine other? Is that something we can experience directly or are we really dependent on witnesses to past miracles and whatever direction was delivered with them?

My point.  

We are given quite a few, actually. A significant on is in John 3:16.

I take that as a rhetorical question of amazement and wonder. John 3:16 again gives us an answer.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Once again, John 3:16. God is love.

 
A book you might find intriguing is this:

https://www.amazon.com/Pleasures-God-Meditations-Delight-Being/dp/1576736652

I know that my co-instants accounts are not compelling to those not ready to accept them, but they are definitely an answer to your question. They are evidence of God’s sovereignty over time and space, timing and placing, and they are also evidence of his immanence and personhood, and his caring and interventionist M.O. I don’t know which you have seen, if any, but I presume some, since I have posted them in conversations here several times. There is one here and another here and also here. A series in another contemporary’s life is here. I know you have seen some before, because I just found this one.

Merry Christmas, Dominik.

That is a real dichotomy between the God the Bible and the God of the philosophers. I would not say that philosophy overlap. For me philosophy, the love of wisdom, is about knowing and how humans know, while theology, the study of God, is about God.

That is a philosophical statement which is the basis of @Reggie_O_Donoghue’s problem, and it is just plain wrong. If that were true then humans cannot understand love, because God is Love. No can we understand goodness, justice , and mercy, because God is these things too. If we cannot understand God, then we might as well submit to Putin and co. who promise a modicum of order for a surrender of freedom.

No humans do nit completely understand God, sow God created the universe out of nothing, nor can we understand why God loves us even though we are sinful, but we know that God created us in God’s own image, so we are able to relate to God, to others, who are created in God’s Image, and the universe which God created.

I will take the metaphysical statement that God is love and God cares over the statement that humans cannot understand God’s essence, which is Love.( and Personal.)

Gods love is something that has to be derived of Gods essence which is his act of existence. If God=Love were true, we´d be left with an abstract object devoid of causal power.
Further more I reject the univocity in the language when talking about Gods love

Thanks for the recommendation, but the describtion sums up everything that is wrong with modern discourse about God. Take this passage

What does bring delight to the happiest Being in the universe? John Piper writes, that it’s only when we know what makes God glad that we’ll know the greatness of His glory. Therefore, we must comprehend “the pleasures of God.”

“The pleasures of God” is literally a nonsensical term. God is the absolute, hence he is perfection and hence everything is derived from him. If he is perfect he desires nothing that is not himself. It follows that nothing done by us fulfills any of Gods pleasures, since he, as the perfect absolute, can´t have any. He loves the world for the worlds own sake and not because he gains anything from it.

I hope that passage isn´t an actual indication of the content.

That God is love in no way denotes that that is all he is. That would be a mistaken inference, because there is way more to consider in the whole context of scripture.

No, it is not, because God is personal and possesses emotions. The reason he created the universe was to increase his joy by including us and increasing our joy. Adding to a joyful relationship (within the Trinity) adds to his joy by adopting more children to be happy and joyous with him.

Merry Christmas, Roger.

Well we need to make several things clear here. Metaphysics for example is something that can tell us something about God, but I would put it into both the philosophical and the theological category. I take theology as having a theoretical note, too, where we are not concerned with revelation. This is the part where I´d take it to overlap.

I qualified my statement on revelation. My intention was merely to point out that we are still left with even more puzzling mysteries.

Yes, my claim is that we can´t understand it in their fullest form. No, that doesn´t entail that we can´t understand them at all. But those from God derived concepts have a different meaning for us. What you tend to be doing is applying the concepts univocally, but that is especially problematic with “goodness”. People tend to think of “Gods perfect goodness” to entail that God acts like a morally perfect human being. I reject that completely; Gods goodness is derived from his essence, which I take to be his pure act of existence (following the scholastics), which entails that goodness is convertible with “being”. What else would goodness be after all, other than a thing acting according to its nature? But that also means that a “good” lion is different from a “good” human. In a similar way that applies to God. The best book on that topic:
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/082649241X/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=311IU8M97N56G&keywords=the+reality+of+god+and+the+problem+of+evil&qid=1577468256&s=books&sprefix=the+reality+of+god+%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C586&sr=1-1

This is where you and I differ and where my appreciation for the resources of philosophy comes in. It is appropriate to ask how it can be that God still saves us from our own fallen nature. But the classical theistic account answers the bolded part though, since God as the perfect being necessarily is perfectly loving of his creation. The idea of an evil God becomes a literal contradiction within scholasticism.

Those two aren´t mutually exclusive. Like I said I reject the idea that concepts derived from God can be univocally applied to him, especially not by by us limited creatures. Rather I adhere to Maimonides negative theology which is just a consequece of monotheism. God is uniquely unique and the absolute, necessary ground of being. From that account statements like “God is Love” at most become analogically true, but even that is in danger of being distorted through the anthropomorphic lense of finite creatures unable to comprehend him.

There is not a single word I can agree with.

You can’t agree that God is personal. Huh. That’s really too bad.

I deny that the anthropomorphic being you are describing could be God. The attributes indicate a contingent being, which means that what you describe as God would be dependend on something else

You have the imaging backwards. It is we who are in God’s image, not vice versa. There is no contingency about him.

It seems to me that you have the problem here. If God’s Goodness is based on God’s essence, then it seems to me that God’s character is determined by God’s nature. How can God be truly good if God has no choice as to whether God be good? Was God forced to create the universe because God is good? If God had chosen not to create the universe would that make God not Good?

It seems to me that the definition of love that theology should use is either the example of Jesus or Paul’s definition in 1 Cor 13 or both, which are not metaphysical. God is love because God is Trinity. This means that the focus of our understanding of Love must be on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. The way to stop focusing on anthropomorphism is to focus on God and not on philosophy which is how we understand what is real and human.

It is hard to see how God increased God’s joy by creating humans. It would seem to be the opposite since humans have made such a mess out of the universe. If God had stopped short of creating humans it would seem make more sense in this area, but, praise God, God did not.

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You seem to be arguing with the Bible. The Bible says God is love. The question is what does it mean. And I agree that God=love is incorrect – as bad as saying that God = Being or existence. But I think your talk of God’s love being derived of God’s essence obscures this even worst. First of all love which is not a choice isn’t love at all. Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence are things God has by nature much in the same way that we are mammals and have a race, sex, and nationality. These things do not define us. If you really want to know someone you need to look at his choices. God chooses love and that is why love describes Him better than these other things. Indeed you could say this is His essence in the existentialist sense of existence precedes essence because it is what we do with what we have been given that really defines us.

I must admit that this title doesn’t sit all that well with me either, but I think you go too far. I disagree with the way Dale describes God motivation, and agree with you that God has no needs whatsoever that He would seek to fulfill. But it is going too far to say that nothing done by us can give God pleasure for this contradicts the words of the Bible, which says numerous times that God is well pleased with particular people. I think the truth is that God is even MORE able to appreciate people and what they accomplish than we are.

Good point, and well put. :slightly_smiling_face:

 

He was actually quoting me, and I will stand by it. Our human families are really images, God ordained metaphors, of the original ‘Family’, the Trinity – God was joyful within himself. Family is joy is increased by adopting beloved children who can love in return, increasing familial love and joy. That is what the work of Jesus accomplished, redeeming delinquent children like you and me off the streets and out of the prison of sin so that we could be legitimately adopted into his family.

True. But he wants to share his joy and add to it as described just above because he is generous and loving.

 

Not so. Obedient children bring joy to fathers, and to Father.

For the LORD takes delight in his people…

This is not true. Quite a few times the Bible says God is pleased with someone.

Gen 6:8 “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”
1 Kings 3;10 “It pleased the Lord that Solomon asked this.”
Exodus 33:17 “For you have found favor in my sight.”

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David B. Hart mentioned to me in an email that he was “not religious.”

Your view reminds me of apophatic theologies.

There appear to be different kinds of faith (some much less clingy and defensive than others) when it comes to faith in something transcendent.

In other words there is not merely the either/or of no faith, or faith in the Christian God (or Jewish God, or Muslim God) who inspires certain sacrosanct writings. Those with the latter kind of faith have throughout history often become upset if their particular ideas about the transcendent or even about their exegesis of certain holy writings get questioned. In fact the greatest debunkers of the Bible are Christians debunking each other’s interpretations, or even each other’s spiritual experiences. And conservative Christians often can’t get along as well with each other as more inclusive members of completely different religious traditions get along with each other.

In comparison there is a wide range of more inclusive more universal yet also transcendental forms of trust like those of Thoreau, or like philosopher of religion John Hick in our own day (who left Evangelicalism for a more inclusive belief that different religions were connected by an underlying universal transcendence they each tried to demarcate).

Here is how Thoreau put it…

Let God alone if need be. Methinks, if I loved him more, I should keep him–I should keep myself, rather–at a more respectful distance. It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover that God is. I say, God. I am not sure that is the name. You will know whom I mean…

Doubt may have “some divinity” about it…

Atheism may be comparatively popular with God himself…

When a pious visitor inquired sweetly, “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” he replied, “We have never quarreled.”

as quoted in Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man? By Edward Wagenknecht

There is also the Alan Watts definition of the difference between having beliefs and having faith. Having beliefs is like clinging to something in the pool to keep one afloat, always being afraid of letting go and learning to swim. Also try googling “sea of faith.”

Robert Anton Wilson pointed out how many people cling to a single reality tunnel and don’t dare to seek all the ways their tunnel overlaps with that of others. Concerning western religions of the book, many of their adherents view only their holy book as being inspired and containing the lessons and stories above all other lessons and stories of all humankind, and grow defensive even when the most gruesome laws and tales of divine anger in their holy books are questioned.

And of course there are Christian conservatives, moderates and liberals who differ concerning what their holy writings really mean or what the most essential and necessary lessons really are.

And so it goes.

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