Saturday, February 09, 2008

Does God Suffer? Part 4

Sorry for the infrequent updates. I've been very busy lately - I've got a lovely girlfriend who takes priority over blog posting and I'm helping to run a quiz tournament. Back to God and suffering...

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

We need to reflect first on what it means for God to act in history before we can reflect on what it means for Jesus to suffer in history. The Bible strongly affirms that God does not change, but clearly also states that he can and does act in history, which seems to conflict with a naïve notion of what change is. In 500BC, God was not incarnate. In AD20, he was. And yet God is unchanging. Grudem summarises the Biblical evidence well:

God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations. This attribute of God is also called God's immutability.

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology

I think Grudem is unhelpful when he says God feels emotions. God feels love, anger, compassion and so on, but when God feels them they don't change, they aren't wrongly motivated, they're always totally consistent with his character. I would say they're like emotions, but it's truer to say that emotions are a bit like them. But otherwise, Grudem's about right

Grudem also clarifies the Bible's teaching on divine eternity well:

God's eternity may be defined as follows: God has no beginning, end or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time.

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology

If we combine Grudem's conceptions of what it means for God to be unchanging and eternal, a conceptual model of God starts to emerge which allows him to be both transcendent in the sense that the impassibilists affirm and suffering in the sense that the cross and human experience seem to require. It is further aided by the insight from General Relativity that time and space are so strongly interconnected that to be outside one would require being outside the other. If then, God transcends both time and space yet can act into time in exactly the same way that he can act into space, the way starts to become clearer.

God's changing emotions as presented in the Bible could then be seen to be true expressions, though also accommodations to our understanding, of unchangeable “themotions”, which change only because our position in history changes, and therefore we see some aspects of God's unchanging nature more clearly at different times, because our situation is different.

So God acts into history and therefore can and does suffer in history. And yet what is true of God in history is also true of God in eternity. God suffers in eternity because of what he chooses to experience in history.

So does that mean that suffering wins? If suffering goes on into eternity, doesn't that mean it's won? No.

For in God taking suffering into himself in eternity, yes, suffering itself becomes transcendent, and yet God transcends it, because the centre of the Christian faith is not Moltmann's Crucified God, but the Crucified and Risen Christ. Suffering is transcended because it is defeated and exceeded by the glory of the Resurrection.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

ha ha ha . a girlfriend reference.

Daniel Hill said...

'In 500BC, God was not incarnate. In AD20, he was.'

'God has no beginning, end or succession of moments in his own being'

This seems like a contradiction to me: if God changes from being non-incarnate in 500BC to being incarnate in AD20, then there is a succession of moments in his own being -- at least one at which he is not incarnate and at least one at which he is. Further, the second succeeds the first.

To put the point more generally, it's not sufficient to say that in the Incarnation God acts in time, one has to say that in the Incarnation God is in time. (Since Jesus is God and not just an action of God's, and Jesus is in time, not just acting in time.)

John said...

I think the Incarnation does something pretty fundamental to God. Jesus is still human.

From my point of view, it's clearer to say "In 500BC, God, as seen from a human perspective, was not incarnate. In AD20, he was." It's the perspective that changes, not God.

Yes, in a sense Jesus was in time. But I don't think he changed his mind, and in a sense all his actions were eternalised.

Anonymous said...

Custard,

One question that fascinates me about all this is how much Jesus actually knew.

Christians state that Jesus was God incarnate but did God the Son have complete knowledge throughout space and time? i.e. did God the Son retain His omniscience when Jesus was in time?

Jesus obviously knew things about the past and future and the history of creation. He also knew that he would have to suffer and in what way. Yet some knowledge was hidden such as the hour his own return.

Yet, when reading the Gospel one gets the impression that there are some things only known to God the Father.

So I put it to you the question as to whether God's omniscience was somehow limited - at least in God the Son, by entering human history in the Incarnation?

If we believe Jesus is God then how much did he know?

Daniel Hill said...

I'm afraid you still seem to be contradicting yourself, Custard:

`I think the Incarnation does something pretty fundamental to God'

`It's the perspective that changes, not God.'

Does the Incarnation change God or not?

John said...

Perhaps what I wrote would have been better phrased as "God is different than he would have been in a hypothetical universe + God without the Incarnation".

I guess I see the Incarnation as an eternal event - yes, God is different because of the Incarnation, but he is different because of the Incarnation in 500BC as well.

See my recent Pratchett quote for some of the fun that can be had with conditionals where time flow doesn't work in the way we're used to.

John said...

Iconoclast - yes, I think it was. His omnipresence (however that's defined) also seems to be affected.

It's Philippians 2 and God the Son emptying himself...

Daniel Hill said...

"God is different than he would have been in a hypothetical universe + God without the Incarnation".

Do you mean that God is really different or just that our perspective of him is different from what it would have been?

'God is different because of the Incarnation, but he is different because of the Incarnation in 500BC as well.'

Earlier, you wrote 'In 500BC, God was not incarnate'. Are you taking that back now? If not, in what way was God different in 500BC?

Incidentally, on omniscience I agree with the apostle Peter that Jesus was omniscient: "Lord, you know all things" (John 21:17). I don't think Philippians 2 teaches that Jesus divested himself of his essential nature (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc.). What do I say about Matthew 24:36, then? This is certainly a tough verse, but I think Jesus is saying that he doesn't know the date of his return in his human capacity, i.e. he cannot process it through his brain. He does know it in his divine mind, however.

John said...

I think that God is really different than he would have been had he not chosen to reveal himself to humanity.

I'm drawing a radical distinction between the use of time language as applied to us and as applied to God. So "God was not incarnate in 500BC" is true from our point of view. From our point of view, God appears to change. But as far as we can tell, from his point of view he does not appear to change.

Daniel Hill said...

'So "God was not incarnate in 500BC" is true from our point of view. From our point of view, God appears to change.'

He may appear to change from our point of view, but the point is: does he really change? Is it really true or not that God was not incarnate in 500BC?

'from his point of view he does not appear to change.'

God's point of view must surely be correct, no? So therefore God does not really change, and therefore, 'In 500BC, God was not incarnate; in AD20, he was' is not really true, but just seems true to us. Is that your view?

John said...

I disagree, of course.

God's point of view is correct, but that does not mean it is the only correct point of view.

How we see God does change with time, but that does not mean that God himself changes. God is eternally incarnate on Earth from (say) 5BC to (say) AD33. I think...

Daniel Hill said...

`How we see God does change with time, but that does not mean that God himself changes. God is eternally incarnate on Earth from (say) 5BC to (say) AD33.'

So, God himself did not change in 5BC? It's just the way that we see God that changed then? But is the way that we saw him in 6BC true or not?

What does it mean to say that `God is eternally incarnate on Earth from (say) 5BC to (say) AD33'? Doesn't `eternally' mean `outside time'?