Emotions and Divine Immutability

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My mind does not rest until at rest...it is a sickness.
trust me, I need to pound it out, develop a foundation. Answer my questions. Know what I mean.

jeff...I think you have mentioned him before, but a website would be great help

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[quote name='Revprodeji' post='1136088' date='Dec 6 2006, 12:02 AM']
My mind does not rest until at rest...it is a sickness.
trust me, I need to pound it out, develop a foundation. Answer my questions. Know what I mean.
[/quote]

Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I've lost much sleep over many things. Stop this tendency now before you begin to lose faith. There have not been many theologian saints in the last few centuries and the reason is because for many, theology has been merely an academic and rational pursuit. Take time to rest and use your heart. Theology cannot be done so forcefully. You must use theology to seek God. Allow yourself to slow down. Focus on the coming of Christ the King and pray that He enlighten you this Christmas, but do not try ravenously to fulfill your hunger for knowledge. Seek to develop instead a hunger for the truth and beauty and glory that comes from knowing, loving, and serving God.

I don't mean to lecture you...we just share a common sickness, I think, and I am giving you a heads up about what comes ahead.

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Short question cause my mind wont put this down..

"If" God "knows/sees" our future acts completly, and knows us perfectly, and can influence humanity. Where is our free will in salvation if God knows our outcomes to ever push and pull.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[quote name='Revprodeji' post='1138098' date='Dec 8 2006, 12:48 PM']
Short question cause my mind wont put this down..

"If" God "knows/sees" our future acts completly, and knows us perfectly, and can influence humanity. Where is our free will in salvation if God knows our outcomes to ever push and pull.
[/quote]
I'm going to answer by posting a conversation I had with an old friend. I hope it helps. I'm in red, she's in blue.

[color="#FF0000"]God is outside of time, since time is a created thing. He doesn't really see things happening before they happen, or even after they happen...to Him, everything that happens in time is in the present. He sees it as it's happening, but He can see all the "happening" at once. So He sees what we do with our free will...just all at once. Since He sees it all at once, we would perceive Him as seeing the future, but it's only the future to us, not to Him. So really, we're not bound to what He sees, but rather, He sees what we freely do. Moreover, an analogy...if one man on top of a building sees another man walking into a manhole on the street, we don't say that he caused that other man to fall in, but only that he saw it happen. So knowledge of what is going to happen doesn't restrict what's going to happen at all.[/color]
[color="#000099"]so god knows everything, just has no timeline for it?[/color]
[color="#FF0000"]lol...well...He knows when things happen in time, He just sees all time at once. I suppose you could compare it to looking at a ruler in front of you. If you had the capacity to concentrate on every point of the ruler at once, you would be seeing them all at once. If we colored one of the points (I realize that a point has no geometric size, but bear with me) and it moved along the ruler, you would see it moving, but since you saw all of time at once, every moment (in its time) along its movement would be visible to you at the same time (in your time). now, of course, God technically has no time. One of the weaknesses of theology is that analogies aren't perfect, lol[/color]
[color="#000099"]right[/color]
[color="#FF0000"]It's a hard concept to grasp, but that's it. All of time is immediately visible to God. To Him, I am present as a baby, a teenager, an adult, an old man, and, God willing, a saint in heaven.[/color]
[color="#FF0000"]however, I am not yet, to me, an old man or a saint[/color]
[color="#000099"]so he sees your whole life, but not as it happens, just all at once[/color]
[color="#FF0000"]Well, both, really, lol...you see, "as it happens" refers to a change in time, and all changes in time occur in time, so He does see it as it happens, but He sees the before, during, and after of every "happening" all at once[/color]
[color="#000099"]ok, so he sees it as it happens and as a whole[/color]
[color="#FF0000"]yes, each detail and every detail, all at once, because His "point in time" (although He's really outside of time) is fixed. I would sort of compare it to time-elapsed photography...if we could take God's memory (if God had memory) and examine it, I think it would look like that
and yet, it would also be crystal clear...not at all blurry
lol
the fact that the human mind fails to grasp it, and yet, that it somehow makes sense, generally indicates that it's accurate with reference to God, lol
Now, then we have God's intervention in time, but that's not so hard to understand. God works in time, but also sometimes doesn't intervene. He does this because He knows how everything will turn out in the end and He knows exactly what to do for the best. Notice, however, that He never forces anyone to do anything...He may put people in difficult situations, but He never possesses them or anything.
He only controls things in such a way so as not to hinder human freedom. He may provide you with fewer choices, but you can always choose to go with Him or against Him.
God only intervenes in our lives in a way so as to present us more opportunities to grow closer to Him. He knows that He is the fulfillment of our every desire, so like a good teacher, He keeps giving us extra chances.[/color]

Anyway, the point is that God's knowledge of what we will do doesn't mean it's set-in-stone. He knows it not because He stood at the beginning of time and looked forward and saw all that would happen as if it was fate, but because He stands at the side of time and sees things as they happen and He stands at the end of time and sees things as they happened. He gives us choices and we decide. He knows what we will decide, but that's not because He had prior knowledge. He did have prior knowledge, but only because He's eternal. His knowledge from seeing all that would happen is His the same as His knowledge from seeing how we've made it happen.

Futher, knowledge of what will happen doesn't equal causation of that future event. If I am permitted to see that I will win the lottery tomorrow, that doesn't mean that my seeing that future necessarily caused me to win the lottery...the numbers were randomly selected...my knowledge of them had nothing to do with what numbers would come up. The same way, God knows what we will decide. The determining principle in decision-making is in man.

A ---> B

A=internal choice
B=act

God sees A and B from all eternity, thus allowing Him to see what would happen, but He still didn't make it happen that way...He sees us make it happen that way. The decision is in us. What you're proposing is this:

God knows A, therefore, B.

In reality, it's really:

A ---> B.
A, therefore, B.
Oh, and God knows it.

[Thy Geekdom Come]

[Guest JeffCR07]

Rev, all of Anselm's treatises can be found [url="http://cla.umn.edu/sites/jhopkins/"]here[/url]

The De Concordia is what you want (it is the very last treatise of his on the list). Please take your time with it - don't rush through it. Anselm, like many other Doctors of the Church (and perhaps more than most) often blurs the line between meditation, contemplation, prayer, and philosophy. As such, any cursory reading or speed-read will just be a waste of time.

Please know that you are in my prayers, and I am confident that, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you will get through this time of trial. May the Peace of Christ be with you!

Your Brother In Christ,

Jeff

[beatty07]

I'm really late on this thread, but maybe can offer something a little worthwhile on what's come before.

On experience of God: a lot of posts talk about God "experiencing" or having "experiences." I think that's out of bounds. It sounds as though something is being done to God, with God as a passive subject. Nothing happens to God. God does all that is. The only other actors, us and the angels, "do" analogously and in a way that is wholly contingent on God's primary "doing." We might be an efficient cause, but only God can be the Final Cause.

On God having emotions: some of this discussion seems to point to God's "emotion" as analogous to ours, but that's backwards. It's our wrath, love, etc. that are analogous to God's. Likewise, the word "passion" is particularly dangerous because it means something that is done to you, something that happens beyond your control, or something you suffer. We can predicate it of God, as long as we remember the analogy.

On stoicism: The Christian (and Jewish) concept of an unchangeing God is emphatically NOT stoic. The stoic idea rejects even analogous passion in God...God can't care or He wouldn't be God. Much of the Reformed tradition slides this direction as well....Calvin, e.g., as though God caring about us infringes upon His sovereignty.

It's striking to me that these points, as well as almost all the previous posts, revolve around one central point of confusion, and that is the analogy of being. Here's what I mean: the stoic and the open theist look opposite, but they are two sides of the same mistake. They collapse the analogy of being, and fall to either side. Either God experiences/feels like we do, or not at all. Only the Analogy of Being can break this awful bind.

Think of Parmenides arguing with Heraclitus. "Being is, therefore nothing in the universe ever changes, change is impossible." "No, everything changes, there is nothing that does not change, the only thing that Is is change itself." That's the same double bind.

Our relation to God is analogous the way a painter's painting is related to the painter as his creation. There is no substantial analogy...none of the painter's substance has been transferred away from him to the painting. So we're not neoPlatonists or "emanationists." However, something of the painter can be known in the painting. How much? Not much. But something TRUE. Seeing "Starry night" without knowing anything of it's creator, you would be at a loss for words to describe what you've learned about him from his work, right? And yet you really would know him more than before.

analogy is always present. Even in defining it, e.g., "whatever similarity exists, a greater dissimilarity exists", we are analogously defining analogy! Because the terms "similar" and "dissimilar" can only analogously be applied between God and creation.

i don't know if this helps, but reading through the thread I think it might be helpful to identify the real point of difficulty, and I think that's it. So maybe that would be a helpful direction for further efforts. Just my $0.02

[beatty07]

I was trying to say so much I completely forgot about the Christological component. Just something I would add to what's come before, that talking about Christ's two natures can never be done without remembering the unity of His Person. He was one divine Person, and I haven't seen this distinction in the discussion so far. How it plays out in formulation: Christ's divine nature did not suffer. Divine nature can't. Christ's human nature did suffer. Here's the kicker: The divine Person suffered.

Only the person/nature distinction upholds (sorry, here it comes again) the analogy of being. And consequently, by the communication of idioms, we can say that God suffered. He suffered in a human nature, which He had taken to Himself. So divine nature remains perfectly divine, and yet God really experiences suffering. (This is also an important corrective to my last post.)

rev, it's not that I think you need me to tell you this stuff. From what I remember, you probably already know all this and could quite possibly formulate it more clearly. But sometimes when your mind is spinning out of control like a tire on ice, it helps to grab one bit and say "stop...look at this, get some traction."

Edited December 13, 2006 by beatty07

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Ok, so God is immutable, never changing.

What difference does it make if God "experiences" time at once. When he created us, since we are not eternal there had to be a "moment" in which he created us and experienced all of time at once(*according to what is expressed here) or if he experiences our time graduatly as it develops and progresses?

[Guest JeffCR07]

[quote name='Revprodeji' post='1153389' date='Jan 1 2007, 04:07 AM']
Ok, so God is immutable, never changing.

What difference does it make if God "experiences" time at once. When he created us, since we are not eternal there had to be a "moment" in which he created us and experienced all of time at once(*according to what is expressed here) or if he experiences our time graduatly as it develops and progresses?
[/quote]

This would only be true if God existed in time, but He does not. If we understand God to be outside of time, then everything that God [i]does[/i] is done in one perfect act that is outside of time just like He Himself is. This single act is simultaneously the act of Creation, Incarnation, Sanctification, and all else that God does. There is no "moment" when God created that followed some previous "moment" when it was just God. God is outside of all conceptions of time.

Your Brother In Christ,

Jeff

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Jeff, we might need to do a couple rounds here.

even one moment is still a moment, There was a moment when we did not exist, then there is a moment when we did exist. Before that existence God did not experience us, after our existence he experienced all we experience(in your model of everything at once) but that means that there was a moment in which he did not experience something that he later did.

also, the creation and fall of the angels is another thing that did not happen in our created world, but is something that shows God experiencing a change.

If God is eternal, and what God is never changes we can mutually hold to that.

But I do not see how we can have a God that experiences time at once. The essence of time is that it is not at once. It is a progression. Small events here show that God has to have experienced progression. But then there are also aspects such as the incarnation, and the numerous old testaments interactions that appear to have God regret, or change his mind. Im starting to wonder here if aspects of openess might not be as closed off as I am led to believe

Why doesnt the catechism speak on this?

[Guest JeffCR07]

hahaha, you know me, I'm always willing to go as many rounds as you want or need! :

The problem is that you are trying to imagine time as being somehow outside of creation. You are seeing the moment of creation as somehow being contained "within" the broader context of time. Try imagining that time is [i]part of[/i] Creation. Time began when creation began. As such there could be no "before" in a temporal sense precisely because there was no time logically prior to the act of Creation.

notice how I said "logically" prior. This is a critical distinction to make. Something can be logically prior without being temporally prior (prior in time). In the same way that God the Father is logically prior to God the Son (since the latter is begotten of the former) it does not follow that there was ever a "moment" in time when the Son did not exist. In the same way, there was never a moment in time "before" God created - it was [i]the[/i] beginning.

Your Brother In Christ,

Jeff

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Jeff,

I dont see how this answers my objections. God still "experiences" something that has not always been. WHether this is for a moment, or progressively the fact is he still experiences something.

I dunno, maybe I need to read your response again. I just dont know how this isnt just semantics. As if the problem was there and over time someone has worked hard enough to fit it together, but it doesnt seem like the natural working.

[Guest JeffCR07]

I think the answer to your question (and this is my fault for not bringing it out earlier) can be found in the distinction made by the Fathers and Scholastics of [i]sub species aeternae[/i]. That is, God "experiences" but he experiences all things under the aspect of eternity. Thus, God eternally experiences all of Creation, Redeption, Sactification, etc. as one eternal "present."

Thus, although all things, considered under the aspect of time, "began," under the aspect of eternity they have always existed, since it was always true that, in time, they would begin. Because God experiences things under the aspect of eternity, he experiences all things as eternally created by him, but he does not experience their creation within time. Rather, he experiences it from eternity.

Your Brother In Christ,

Jeff

[Guest JeffCR07]

Rev, while I was doing thesis research I ran across a quote from Professor Dominic J. O'Meara's [i]Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads[/i] that may help. If you are familiar with Plotinus at all, you will know that O'Meara is one of the top scholars of Neoplatonism alive today. Here is what he has to say that I think is very relevant to the issue at hand:

[quote]It should be noted finally that the derivation of divine intellect from the One must take place outside of time, since time is produced by soul which derives from intellect...There can be no beginning or end to the derivation of intellect. It does not happen at a particular moment. To speak of the One as giving rise to divine intellect would be misleading if we are to imagine this as taking place in the framework of time and space, occurring at a moment such as those moments marking lower processes of derivation or production. Divine intellect exists as an eternal, that is extra-temporal, expression of the One.

O'Meara, pg. 65[/quote]

This is much the same in logic as the issue we are discussing. It would be wrong to say that there was a "moment" when God created (and thus a "moment" when God experiences us) because "moments" occur in time, and so would demand that there be a preceeding "moment" (as you have been arguing) in which God did [i]not[/i] experience us. This, however, arises not from a problem with the theory of God's extra-temporal nature, but rather, the problem is located in our not being careful enough when we attempt to describe such a nature.

Perhaps this will help bring my previous points into better focus. Since God exists outside of time, it is wrong to think of God experiencing "moments." Rather, God experiences all things eternally as one.

Your Brother In Christ,

Jeff