3.God as creative Responsive Love (2)

God as responsive love

     Whereas in a primitive religion “you study the will of God in order that He may preserve you.” In a universal religion “you study his goodness in order to be like him.”

     The Toaoist tries to live in harmony with the Tao; Hindu Vedantis seeks to realize the identity of Atman with Brahman; the Moslem bows to the will of Allah; the Marxist align with the dialectical process of history. //Atman inner self, soul, Buddhism anatta non-self, anicca: impermanence//Atman :innerself soul, anatta: nonself , dukka : suffering, anicca:

     Matt 5:48, “you, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” is a particular expression of the universal religious aspiration of humanity to participate in or be in harmony with perfection. → by definition the divine reality is perfect. The question concerns the nature of this perfection.

     Christian faith has held that the basic character of this divine reality is best described by the term “love” → love in the fullest sense involves a sympathetic response to the loved one. Sympathy means feeling the feeling of the other, hurting with the pains of the other, grieving with the grief, rejoicing with the joys. → the others with whom we sympathize most immediately are the members of our own bodies.

     This Greek notion of divine impassibility was in serious tension with the Biblical notion of divine love for the world → Anselm said “thou art compassionate in terms of our experience, and not compassionate in terms of thy being. Thomas said  God loves without passion.

     This denial of an element of sympathetic responsiveness to the divine love meant that it was entirely creative. That is, God loves us only in the sense that he does good things for us. → for our love is partly responsive, since it is moved by its object, whereas the divine love is purely creative, since it creates its object.

     The acceptance of the notion of divine impassibility undercuts the Biblical witness to the love of God.

     Since we mold ourselves partly in terms of our image of perfect human existence, and this in turn is based upon our notion of deity, the notion of God as an Impassive Absolute whose love was purely creative could not help but have practical consequences for human existence.

     Love is often defined by theologians as active good will. The notion of sympathetic compassion is missing. → this perverted view of love as purely active goodwill is due in large part to the long-standing notion that this is the kind of love which characterized the divine reality.

     This traditional notion of love as solely creative was based upon the value judgement that independence or absoluteness is unqualified good, and that dependence or relativity in any sense derogates from perfection.

     But while perfection entails independence or absoluteness in some respects, it also entails dependence or relativity in other respects. →     Process thought affirms that both of these are true. While traditional theism spoke only of the divine absoluteness, process theism speaks also of the divine relativity (this is the title of one of Hartshorne’s books)

     Process theism is sometimes called dipolar theism, in contrast to traditional theism with its doctrine of divine simplicity. → for Charles Hartshorne, the two poles or aspects of God are abstract essence of God, on the one hand, and Gods’ concrete actuality on the other.

     Abstract essence is eternal, absolute, independent, unchangeable. It includes those abstract attributes of deity which characterized the divine existence at every moment.

     The concrete actuality is temporal, relative, dependent, and constantly changing. In each moment of God’s life there are new unforeseen happenings in the world which only then have become knowable. Hence God’s concrete knowledge id dependent upon the decisions made by the worldly actualities. //초월 과 내재, 귀납법적 추구//

     Whitehead’s way of conceiving the divine bipolarity was not identical with Hartshorne’s. whitehead distinguished between the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature.

     Divine relativity

     God enjoys our enjoyments, and suffers with our sufferings this is the kind of responsiveness which is truly divine and belongs to the very nature of perfection. Hence it belongs to the ideal for human existence.

     //response 할 수 도 있고, 반응을 않할 수도 있다.

God as creative love

     If sympathetic responsiveness is an essential aspect of Christian love, creative activity is no less essential.

     the notion that God is active in the world, working to overcome evil and to create new things, is central to the Biblical tradition.

     It is precisely this notion of divine creative activity in the world which has been most problematic in recent centuries both within theological circles and in the culture at large. → however, most events were understood to be caused by God through the mediation of worldly or natural causes. God was the primary cause of these events, while the natural antecedents were called secondary causes.  However, a few events were thought to be caused directly by God, without the use of secondary causes. These events were miracles.  → God was creatively active in the world.   

     However, there are two major problems with this notion.

1)     It raises serious doubt that the creative activity of God can be understood as love, since it creates an enormous problem of evil by implying that every event in the world is totally caused by God, with or without the use of natural causes.   

2)     Since the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the belief has grown that there are not events which happen without natural causes.      

     Accordingly, the notion of acts of God has lost all unambiguous referents. Every event termed an act of God was said also, from another perspective, to be totally explainable in terms of natural causation. //누가 모든 것들이 natural causation으로 설명될 수 있다고 하는가?

     Deism was a manifestation the felt difficulty of speaking of divine activity in the world. → the ideal one’s activity in the world could put one in harmony and contact with deity has faded.

     Twentieth-century theology has reaffirmed the centrality of the idea of God’s activity in history. But it has generally lacked the conceptuality for consistently explicating this belief.

     Karl Barth had only one complaint regarding the traditional understanding of God’s relation to the world: it was not clearly affirmed that the God causing all things is a completely gracious God. → in the light of the tremendous evil unleased in the twentieth century, the assertion that the God who is in control of the whole process is loving or gracious seems just the – a bare assertion.

     Rudolf Bultmann’s double perspective presupposes →

1)     from objectifying perspective of science and ordinary life, all events are linked together in a chain of cause and effect, which means that there remains no room for God’s working.

2)     From the perspective faith, the believer can in the moment confess that an event is nevertheless an act of God. → s activity in history. Intelligibility remains         

     Bonhoeffer’s negation of the God of the gaps. → a protest against the idea of God as intervening here and there in the world, especially to solve human problems.  → no positive alternative way of understanding the divine creative presence int eh world.

     Tillich’s theology being-itself and not being interacting with others. → a denial that God is a causal influence in the world, even though much of Tillich’s language illegitimately gives the impression that creative n=influence is being exerted by God.

     Process theology provides a way of recovering the conviction that God acts creatively in the world and of understanding this creative activity as the expression of divine love for the world. → the notion that there is a creative power of love behind and within the worldly process is no longer one which can only be confessed in spite of all appearance to the contrary. In stead it illuminates our experience.