Here’s Ravi Zacharias’ definition he wrote for one of his classes (believe it was at Trinity): : He is the only entity in existence, the reason for whose existence is in himself. Every other entity or quantity has the reason for their existence outside of themselves. From “Who Is God?”
This seems like it fits with Mr O’Donoghue’s definition; it seems a good one, from the perspective of a monotheist. Thanks.
I’m sorry, I don’t like that term “first cause,” so I will thank you to stop making this out to be the same as God. The first cause is different things to different people. In Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” the first cause is a quantum fluctuation. So NO! God is not a quantum fluctuation! Nor is the God I believe in this concoction of some philosophical proof in Neoplationism.
What I means is that you can always find similarities and differences between any two things and that is what a comparison means. But I am not so sure that all the gods of all the pagan religions are spatio-temporal things. Many are familiar with the rhetoric of Christian theology and so they are quite capable of employing the same kinds of tricks to explain their belief in things that cannot be seen.
I still see the fingerprint of God behind the workings of all things, if you go back far enough, including that first creative act you mentioned
Yeah that is exactly what is wrong with this “first cause” stuff. It is fine for Deists who only believe in something that got everything going. But theists believe in a God who is involved in the living our lives. He is not just some beginner of the universe but a creator of you and me because He is actively involved beginning, end and everything in between – not just a forensic fingerprint left behind but an active presence in an ongoing relationship.
I for one do not.
You believe in the God the philosophers, while I believe in the God of the Bible, I AM WHO I AM.
The God of the philosophers is the First Cause, while YHWH is the Creator Who created the universe over billions of years, Jesus saves us from sin and death, and gives us eternal life, while the Spirit gives us joy, peace, and love.
But that is an unnecessary dichotomy.
True. And following Leo Strauss, philosophy and theology overlap, but there are exclusive aspects to it. Theologians have the resource of revelation on their side, to which a philosopher can´t have anything to say. Vice versa however if a philosopher makes a metaphysical argument to study Gods essence it is not a good counter argument to point to a bible passage where your understanding differs from the consequences of the metaphysical argument.
Neither revelation nor Gods nature are understandable to us. Hence the popularity of negative theology in traditional circles.
Not completely, no, but to a significant degree – otherwise revelation wouldn’t be revelation, it wouldn’t have revealed anything.
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.
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
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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