Philetus said:
Like I said, you can stretch or shrink God’s involvement as much as you like, but you can not deny God’s interaction in the affairs of mankind and take conversation like that of God and Moses (and countless others) as serious. Call it what you like ... there is a difference in saying God is manipulated by creation and saying God is actively involved in guiding creation. God is not manipulated. God can be influenced. Otherwise, prayer is reduced to only ‘personal piety’ or dismissed all together.
I have not denied that God is involved in the Creation. But that involvement is revealed in Christ (not in God's "conversation" with Moses on the mountain or with any other person, no matter how "good" they might have been). God does not simply interfer with men's affairs (which is to assume that men have affairs that God can "influence"). You give far too much credit to men. God is not the drug altering our state of reality; we have no state of reality ("we are dead in our tresspasses and sins"). God is not a "manipulator" (as you and I have already agreed to on more than one occasion); God is the giver of life, as we find in that wonderful proclamation of Paul to the Athenians, "And God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because God himself gives
all people [wicked or not] life and breath and
everything else." A manipulator only manipulates out of necessity. A dictator is utterly contingent upon his people for his own life (those under him are his servants who give him all that he needs by their own hands). A god who enslaves humanity so that humanity can "feed him" (which is the picture of the Creation given to us by the ancient near-eastern traditions) is a god that is not god. And you see this "controlling god" is very distant, only because god becomes another actor on the stage of events, which are being driven by the fates in the Greek tradition.
God is not influenced. God's will remains to the end. Abraham prays for the righteous in Sodom and Gomorra, yet God still destroys the cities. Moses prays for Israel (he abates God's wrath) and yet when he descends from the mountain it is revealed to him just how ignorant he was in his prayer and he himself brings God's wrath on the people, then gives proper atonement to God for their sins. Jonah sits outside the city of Nineveh praying for its destruction (because his prophesy is on the line and because he wants the city to be destroyed) and God's answer to his prayer is that God can do whatever he wants with this city, and is it not his place to show mercy to these people where God decides to show mercy? Jesus prays for the cup to pass, but finishes his prayer with, "Not my will, but yours be done, Lord." Do you begin to see a pattern? Prayer is not about changing God's will. As Jesus puts it, "The Father was aware of your requests before you even asked him." We aren't filling God in on the details. God is very much aware of our suffering. And the image of the saints that we are given in Revelation is that they must be patient, they must wait for God's action in this world, and they do not pray to speed it up. Even as they pray for the Lord to "come quickly and avenge their blood" they are told to wait a while longer as their number is completed (as everyone who is going to die for the Lord's sake, dies). This is not just the passivity of a bunch of weaklings. They are also active in bringing about God's will on the earth, not by forcing others to do it, but by living it out in their gathering even as the world is punishing them for it.
Prayer is not about changing God's will, it is about changing our attitude towards God, for we only pray to God, because we know that God is the giver of life, the sustainer of us all, and if we are to go to anyone, we must go to the Creator, and "God will suply all our needs, according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus." We don't go to God because God only acts in response to us. We don't go to God only when our own actions fail. Notice we are to give thanks to God even for that which we have supplied by our own hard work. We go to God in order to submit ourselves to the God who has already acted and who is a God more than capable of supplying our needs. In the prayer our Lord taught us to prayer, the core of it is this, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."
Philetus said:
Yes, I do. I didn’t say Paul sounds like a deist. I said you do. If you think Open Theist resemble deism you really are out in left field. Creatures are so dependent on God in the unsettled view that God better be involved. You only prove in the above statement that you either do not grasp Open Theism or you are so hung up on Process Theology that you can’t see past it.
I am not out in left field. If you have read my discussion with Clete you would know exactly what I am talking about. The Open Theists do claim that God has ordered the Creation in such a way that it is governed by his laws (and that he himself is restrained by those laws). This is
the tenant of the deists. Enyart in the post that Clete copied over to this thread makes it very clear that there are laws governing our universe to which both the Creation and God submit (meaning that God has already set things into motion) and God only intefers with that motion when things go wrong; the deist god is not distant; the deist god is just so good at what he does that once he acts in the beginning, that action is good for a while. And god need not sustain the Creation anymore. The deist god is not active in everything; God is only active as an initiator and as one who interfers. The God of the scriptures is not this god. The God of the scriptures is the God of both the Jews and the Gentiles, of both the unrighteous and the righteous; as Paul states in his message to the Athenians, "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."
You are the one out in left field, for what I have said is no where near the deistic understanding of God.
Philetus said:
The inscription referred to was that to an unknown God. Paul was not commending them for lack of knowing God. Paul was evangelizing (informing) them that the God of the universe was not some nebulous-known-not but a personal and involved God who could in fact be known. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a record of all the rest of what Paul said to the Athenians. He spent a lot more time there, talking with them about The Gospel. I guess we will just have to settle with the assumption that the rest of what he said squares with his epistles.
How about we content ourselves with what is actually in the scriptures and leave the quest for the historical Paul to the liberal protestants! Apparently the early church was quite content with the message that we have from Paul recorded by Luke. There are no major insertions into this text (meaning the early copyists did not seem to need to elaborate on Paul's message). God is not defined as "personal" and "involved" by Paul. God is first Creator ("who made the world and everything in it"); he is then "Lord of heaven and earth"; and he is much more distant than the Greeks had made the gods out to be for he "does not live in temples built by hands" nor is he "like gold or silver or stone -- an image made by man's design and skill."; we are God's offspring, which means if we are to understand who we are as humanity we must look to God; we cannot look to ourselves to know God. God needs nothing from humanity, but supplies all of humanity with everything they need. And God is the one who drives human events, determining their times and their places so that they might grope for him. Paul's concern is not that the Greeks turn from a non-personal God to a personal God (God has has been personal from the beginning whether the Greeks are aware of it or not); Paul's concern is that the Greeks turn from their idolatry to the living and true God (which is the very same message of the Jews to the Gentiles). And the reason why this is now so important is that God has acted in such a way in Christ that the judgment is near. Judgment can only come from the Father if his will is established on the earth. In Christ this has been accomplished.
Philetus said:
Sounds like the God Paul was introducing the Athenians to wasn’t to be manipulated. Doesn’t mean God isn’t involved on a personal level. I hope you don’t see every honest request made of you as manipulation.
How many times do I have to say that manipulative God is a God who is in need, who threatens because he himself is threatened. God cannot manipulate if God is not in need. This is what I claim.
Philetus said:
They don’t, for the most part, come and witness ‘our gatherings’ any more. They have been there and done that and for the most part they have already concluded that God is not present because of our disunity and unfaithfulness. Christ didn’t say go build churches so they can come to me. Jesus said, Go make disciples and I will build my church. You say God doesn’t inhabit houses made by hands and then make your self-made gathering the link between a god that you claim isn’t in process with a world that isn’t paying attention to you. Christ is present where to or three gather in His name as members of His body, not in a building that claims His presence yet denies His power to raise the dead, and set captives free. The God of the individuals unsettled future is greater, closer and more involved than you will allow. God is involved whether you are or not; whether you realize it or not. The God who is all in all is also the God in you and in me. That is scandalous good news. Either the church goes into the world or it doesn’t represent anything other than another monument to an unknown god established for more empty Athenian god-talk.
Yes, and this has much to do with both the Catholics and the Protestants who have forgotten to wait (hope) for the Lord to come and who have been content in unifying the church to the nationalistic endeavors of men (divorcing the church from Christ, and uniting the church in its identity as an invisible unity of all Christians, mirroring the empire and the state). The church is not a building;
ekklesia in the Greek means "called out ones". Does that sound like a building to you? Peter speaks of the church as a temple composed of living stones. The church is neither a building nor a personally witnessed identity; the church is a gathering of those who have been united in Christ in such a way as to follow Christ's example and to live by Christ's words in the most radical of ways. It is not personal (individual), nor is it a systemic framework of regulations; the church is a people, the people of God who have finally been made worthy to be his people. The church cannot go into the world because the church never left the world. That's the problem with your language of the church needing to "go into the world." If the church was not in the world at first, it wasn't the church. We are in the world, we are just not of the world, and our testimony (witness) to the world of Christ is that we obey his teachings, and live by God's command. We don't teach the world about God when we are "personal" and "friendly" to the world. John the Baptist's message shatters any hope of that (which is the same message that Jesus preaches when he begins his ministry). Our message to the world is simply, "Your way of life is a way of death, and it is coming to an end (if it hasn't already been ended). Repent and be saved." And how are we able to proclaim this? Well, we must first be living in such a way as to make our proclamation true (John was raised for 40 years in the dessert on locusts and honey, probably among the essenes; Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days). If we preach the gospel message against the world but continue to live as if the world had something to offer, our message is pointless. There is a reason why the poor and the marginalized of our society can hear the message of the gospel; they already know that this world in its present form is passing away (they themselves are the victims of its passing).
Philetus said:
Well, duh. Romans 8 .... Learn to live with a little tension between the already and the not-yet; the God over-all and in-all; to-all and for us all.
I will not live in tension; the tension will be the world's. The world that remains hostile to God will not like the message that I proclaim in the way that I live. I am seeking to live as a single man in this world, and to live in such a way as to not covet the things of the world. My call is to celibacy and to poverty, so that I might devote myself to the work of God in the
ekklesia. I am not in tension, because God in Christ has transferred me into his Kingdom already. I am fully God's (because I submit to the life of his Son in the gathering, not simply as an individual). My life consists in daily repentance of sin (as I continue to allow the world in me to be put to death) so that I might continue to be raised up in Christ in the edification of the church. I do not fear death, for I know that God has already swallowed it up in life. If there is tension, it comes in the world that refuses to see that God has already conquered it, and God will not need to come in force to put down this rebellion, for God's power has already come in full force, and has declared that the enemy is his friend. Their destruction will come by their own hands. "Those who live by the sword will die by it!"
Power has not been exchanged for weakness in the cross! True power has come by Christ's death, and the powers of this world have been shattered. Christ is raised (this is the culmination of Paul's message to the Athenians, and is also the point of contention that they wish to further discuss with Paul). The resurrection is power, for by it God has rectified that which was lost! God in Christ has redeemed the world! This is not a tempered message. It is good news that must be proclaimed from every place, and is the message that has rung out in all the Creation. Learn to live in the gospel, not in tension!
Peace,
Michael