This is just a brief idea that's been floating in my head since yesterday. I am not trying to suggest that God has made a mistake, or that He ever will, but I was wondering whether the possibility of God making a mistake was part and parcel of His greatness. This is a question about the deepest of philosophies. Hear me out...
Imagine that you could not make a mistake - that nothing you ever did would ever go wrong. Would there be any reason to do anything? Surely one of the reasons we humans do things is to see if we can. We stand up and stumble and walk and get satisfaction from our accomplishments. We learn to ride a bike. We struggle to find just the right words to woo the love of our life. We seek deeper meaning in the stars and the sun and the way the earth moves, and sometimes we get it wrong. Our limited vision of the Universe is one of the reasons we strive to move forward, to understand, to achieve great things - because we don't know what the outcome of those struggles will be even if the deck is totally stacked in our favor.
God gave us free will so that we could have control over our lives and also to allow us to make a choice about our own existence. Part and parcel of that free will is the opportunity to make the WRONG choice, to be wrong, to be fallible. God made us in His image. Therefore, despite God's omniscience and omnipotence, isn't there also the possibility, however slim, that He could make the wrong choice. Can perfection truly exist without the possibility of imperfection?
I can't say that I know the answer. But part of me says that God has to be infallible in order for His perfection to really matter. If there is no possibility of failure, then success has no meaning. And I want my God to be successful over Evil, not just some creampuff victory guaranteed since the beginning of everything, but a real struggle with real consequences for failure (that nonetheless can never happen).
Anyway, just some deep thoughts to mull over this weekend.
Talk to you on Monday.
11 comments:
The Bible answers that question most definitively. Failure is an attribute of humans, brought into the world by the rebellion occasioned by our will rejection of God's perfection. If you suggest that God is imperfect --which is what the possibility of failure means-- then God becomes nothing but an arbitrary entity, similar to Zeus or Apollo, intervening upon the merest of whims.
Further, the suggestion of imperfection obviates the necessity of Christ's (God made flesh) death on the cross and resurrection, inasmuch as only a perfect sacrifice would suffice to redeem the imperfection of sin.
Frankly, Will, you are toying with a heresy that has periodically cropped up in various incarnations over the last two millennia. Arianism, Catharism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others believe variants of this and it begins with your stated and very human desire to have a hero who could lose the fight, and attribute which you deem necessary to make that hero worthy of your allegiance.
My friend, I strongly suggest you get back to the Logos--The Word--and think about this one.
Randall
Randall - I don't want to argue this if I'm going to be guilty of heresy. It was curiosity that made me ask the question. You say that His perfection makes it impossible for Him to make a mistake. I say that He would be even greater if He could make a mistake and never did - that the possibility of failure makes perfection real. Not that God is imperfect, but that the chance of imperfection in what He does exists.
I don't know if that puts my line of thinking in the same vein as these others. Like I said, I don't think God has made a mistake, or indeed, ever will - and I think that is what sets my line of thinking apart from these heretics. But I could be wrong. I am human, after all, and therefore, I am imperfect.
Let me rephrase. I said you are toying with a heresy, not that you are embracing one. I point out to you that the question you posit is the basis for any number of heretical doctrines which have been examined and rejected by church fathers over the last 2000+ years.
I cite just one of any number of Bible verses to refute your assertion: I John 1:5:
5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
In point of fact, see also I John 1:1 to I John 2:1. Note I John 1:10. To believe that God is fallible makes Christ fallible. It is the infallibility of Christ and God which can live in and through us as Christians. To say otherwise is, in John's words, to make God a liar, which in turn makes His entire Word a lie.
I would ask, why do you need a fallible God or Savior? You suggest he would be greater that way. Let me suggest, God became in incarnate as Christ. He was faced with the same human weakness that we are, but his God-ness manifest itself in a perfect life, not succumbing to human frailties. It is what saves us.
You proceed from an assumption that Evil is something separate and distinct from God, that it exists independently of God. Not so. Evil is the absence of God. Stated differently, Evil is, by definition, fallibility
And that is why your question forms the basis for virtually every heresy that's ever existed.
Cheers.
And another thing.
I'm sorry if my comments offend you. If I didn't think you were a brother in Christ, I wouldn't bother.
But we as Christians are enjoined to reach out to our brothers with correction, if necessary.
I'm not smarter or better than you. My personal portfolio of sins is so huge, I know I've got a lot to answer for.
That said, I cannot let a friend and brother travel down a road which I know leads to destruction without saying anything.
After all, you posted the question. I assume you wanted some discussion.
Cheers.
Of course the problem begins when we start trying to give God human attributes. We usually come up with human ones because those are the only ones we have experienced. In this example you might say, "To err is human, so why not make our God a little more like ourselves so that He is more reachable." This is, as Randall points out, the start of a journey which all too often leads to heresy, but is correctable by continued study and prayer. Some people reject the idea of having a discussion of the "nature" of God starting from a scriptural basis, they have told me, just this past week in fact, that they could start from any faith's scriptures and build up a suitable description of god.
Rather than quote scripture, I will bend a bit and quote someone else as we ponder together the subject of God's perfection:
Thomas Merton in "New Seeds of Contemplation" wrote,
"I must begin, then, by realizing that the holiness of God is something that is to me, and to all men, utterly mysterious, inscrutable, beyond the highest notion of any kind of perfection, beyond any relevant human statement whatever. If I am to be 'holy' I must therefore be something that I do not understand, something mysterious and hidden, something apparently self-contradictory: for God, in Christ, 'emptied Himself.' He became a man, and dwelt among sinners….If, then, we want to seek some way of being holy, we must first of all renounce our own way and our own wisdom. We must 'empty ourselves' as He did. We must 'deny ourselves' and in some sense make ourselves 'nothing' in order that we may live not so much in ourselves as in Him. We must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there."
Will, I love your questions. A thoughtful question, honestly asked, deserves due consideration. You ask a doctrinal question and Randal has supplied the proper doctrinal answer. I appreciate and live by good doctrine myself. We need it to help us know where the theological boundaries are. If we had no boundaries, we’d all drift of into New Age spiritualism, where each of us creates God after our own image.
Nevertheless, I think it is appropriate and necessary to feel free to walk up to the boundary and test it. Why do we believe the things we do? It is safe to simply accept good doctrine as fact without question, but it is not always enough. Some of us must be convinced, must argue it out. Many look at earthquakes, floods, famines, fires – all natural disasters (acts of God, as the insurance companies would say, and not the result of human free will) – and think that, if God exists, either God is making some terrible mistakes (or perhaps is evil) or God is not in control.
The Bible itself does not shy away from the boundaries. We read about God’s regret at creating humans in the story of the flood. God has a change of mind regarding his decision to destroy Israel after the incident of the golden calf. God negotiates with Abraham over the fate of Sodom. All of these examples might be thought of as instances where God admits the possibility of error. What is that if not fallibility?
However, fallibility is, in many ways, a matter of perspective. I may think I’m infallible, but my wife, kids, and anybody who talks to me for five minutes knows otherwise. But as God teaches Job, God has no peer who can make such a judgment. Further, you could think of the possible divine “errors” referenced above as, in some sense, expressions of love. God may not be fallible, but God does seem to be vulnerable to those whom he loves. In the greatest act of vulnerability, we meet the omnipotent, omniscient, infallible God face to face in the limited man Jesus. A contradiction, a unity, a mystery.
Ultimately, I think Thomas Merton has the right approach. I appreciate Pewster’s reference. I always think Thomas Merton is brilliant when other people quote him, but unbelievably boring when I try to read his books. So I need those like Pewster who are better read than I to bring up these pearls of wisdom. God is the Holy Other, without peer, wholly mysterious and unknowable other than in the ways he has chosen to reveal himself. When confronted with mysteries that seem to have no answer, “we must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there.”
I love that stuff!
Dear Mr. Robinson, and everyone else.
Your interlocutors are right: you've asked a very good question. I like the responses thus far, though I FEEL like some things are being overlooked.
Randall avers that evil is the absence of God; that fallibility and evil are correlated. God, being God, cannot be absent of Himself. Hence, God cannot be evil or fallible in actuality or potentiality. Sounds good.
You, Will, have wondered this:
God gave us free will so that we could have control over our lives and also to allow us to make a choice about our own existence. Part and parcel of that free will is the opportunity to make the WRONG choice, to be wrong, to be fallible. God made us in His image. Therefore, despite God's omniscience and omnipotence, isn't there also the possibility, however slim, that He could make the wrong choice[?] Can perfection truly exist without the possibility of imperfection?
You seem to be engaging a bit in reverse engineering, starting with the thing made and working back toward the designs by which it was made. Man is fallible. Man is created in God's image. If man is created in God's image and yet is fallible, then God must be fallible too, at least potentially. Interesting.
Let's take a minute to look at what the Bible says in Genesis. Here we go:
Genesis 2:8-9
"8 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."
Curious, no? God is not evil, and yet He created the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." Wow.
Genesis 3:22
"22 And the LORD God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.'"
More wow!
OK. Now we're in the thick of it. Who dares venture forward another step?
What do these passages mean? Are we still confident that God cannot "know" evil? If Adam and Eve are driven from paradise for this knowledge (that's the context of Gen. 3:22), a knowledge that God Himself has, what's going on? Does God expel Himself for the same knowledge?
Here's a thought, muddled as it will be. Has any of you watched the rather humorless comedy, "The Invention of Lying?" (It's rather adult, so if you do watch it, beware.) Ricky Gervais, who wrote the film and stars in it, is an atheist. Essentially he is arguing that a lie set humanity free (in a way), giving humanity free will. Indeed, in the godless, always-truthful world depicted by Gervais, there is no free will. A lie, at least in this film, set one man free.
I ask: Without temptation, could Adam and Eve have free will? If Adam and Eve COULD ONLY BE GOOD, could they be free?
Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps the temptation of Eve is essential for the birth of free will, even self-consciousness. But the Judeo-Christian view is that free will would have been born either way through temptation: If Eve rejected the serpent's lie, she would have done so freely, securing her "free will" forever. But believing the lie and eating the fruit is not the liberation of the free will; it's the birth of a free will that is enslaved to sin. It is free will, and indeed it's self-consciousness, but it is not the free will and consciousness that would have been born had Eve said "No."
[continued below]
I also think we need to separate moral fallibility from other types of fallibility. Did Jesus EVER make a mistake? Did he ever measure a board incorrectly? Did he ever tie his sandals incorrectly? Did he ever drip sauce on his clothes? Did he ever stub his toe, or forget a birthday, or use too much sugar when making cookies with his mother?
I don't see how it would diminish (in our eyes) Christ, the Emptied God, if we learn He was fallible on matters mundane, common to us all. These errors are irrelevant in a moral sense. As long as Jesus Christ is not making moral mistakes, I am fine with his amoral shortcomings. St. Luke adds this to his biography of Christ's childhood and adolescence:
Luke 2:52
"52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men."
Would a perfect God-Man have to grow in wisdom and stature, if we mean by "perfect" that no mistakes or deficiencies of ANY kind are present in that God-Man? No. We are interested in moral infallibility, not intellectual or physical infallibility when we are talking about our Lord and Savior.
So, where am I? I am not sure I know. But I think that it might be OK to suggest that God could possess the possibility of making a mistake. God created us in His image; He wanted us to have free will, just like Him. Unfortunately we chose incorrectly. And, fortunately, He did not choose incorrectly (nor will He).
Remember during Jesus' arrest and trial? Remember what He said, that He COULD end everything in a different way; that He COULD call forth a battalion of angels to kick ass and rescue Him? Note what He seems to be implying, that He KNOWS the wrong thing to do, and that He could do that wrong thing.
The difference in all of this is clear: we sinners say "Get thee in front of me, Satan." Our Lord and God says "Get thee behind me, Satan." There are similarities here, for sure; but the one dissimilarity is stark -- and ineffable.
I hope this helps.
Peace to you,
BG
Yes, Bill Gnade is the closest one to what I was talking about. He gets my point.
After reading Randall's comments and leaving my reply, I tried to figure out why I was wrong. But I came down to a simple answer to what I was trying to say.
If you were to flip a coin 100 times and it came up heads 100 times, you would be perfect. But the possibility would have existed on every single flip of the coin of it landing on heads. Your feat of flipping is more impressive because it landed on heads 100 times when the possibility existed of it landing on tails. If both sides were heads, it would still be possible to be perfect, but impossible to not be perfect (assuming we don't count the edge as a side ;). In fact, our human nature would say that flipping a two headed coin a 100 times and saying that it landed on heads every time is cheating - that there is no meaning to such an obvious outcome.
That lead me to the question, does it matter what we think as humans? God is so far above us. God's idea of perfection is not our own. AND YET, that leads back to the same thing that Bill was arguing. Jesus was FULLY human. God was one of us. He did flip that coin 100 times and it was a two sided coin and it did come up heads every time. BUT, in theory, it could have come up tails. God created the very laws that allow for the possibility of failure and He has to live by those laws.
If he had jumped from that pillar like Satan wanted him to, Jesus would have fallen and died - or the angels would have flown down and stopped him from hitting the ground. Jesus was subject to temptation as well as the laws of physics. To take away the possibility that Jesus could have said, "Alright, Satan, you're on," diminishes the fact that Jesus didn't take the bait and told Satan off.
I appreciate all of your comments and you are all correct. But I think Bill grasped the concept of what I was trying to convey better than the rest of you. The Gnostics believed that Jesus was never fully human and that is a heresy as well. To say that Jesus was beyond the ability to fail means that he was never fully human. I think, in this case, my thought was right but my explanation was really not thought through far enough to avoid the obvious pitfalls of such thinking.
In short, Infallible was probably the wrong word to use.
Dear Mr. ROBISON,
I note my own fallibility here; I called you Mr. Robinson. Apologies.
Dear Mr. Robison,
I thank you for the flattering comments. However, I hope no one thinks I am competing with anyone here. I am not. I share in this journey with each of you.
If I could, I would restate at least one thing. I don't think the serpent's temptation in the Garden of Eden was God's direct doing. Actually, what I mean is that it is not necessary to believe that God WILLED the temptation, that it was part of His master plan. Because language falls short; since language is always symbolic and hence inherently ambiguous, I lack the diction to express the distinction I believe exists between WILLING and PERMITTING. However, let me say for the sake of argument that God WILLED the serpent to offer his tempting recommendations: "Take. Eat. This is good for you." The fact is that God need not have willed how Eve acts on that temptation. God very well may have hoped, or even willed, that Eve say NO to the serpent. Eve, obviously, was free.
We know from the Epistle of James that God does not tempt anyone. OK. Let's agree that He doesn't. But I have my doubts about this if applied universally. Clearly God "tempts" us toward the Good, the Holy; He "tempts" us to follow Him in all sorts of gentle ways. So James could not mean that God does not "tempt" us at all. When God offers me a slice of chocolate cake, it is not a temptation if it is offered in love or kindness. Nor is it a temptation if the cake is good for me. No, James must mean that God does not tempt anyone with evil.
But if you think about it, the Garden of Eden temptation is not SOLELY a temptation towards evil. The serpent's offer is bifurcated, like his tongue. On the one hand, there is the GOOD that is offered: Just say NO to disobedience, and paradise is secured. Surely that choice is GOOD. But the other side of the temptation is indeed evil, leading away from GOOD. Saying YES to the serpent is NOT good; it is not a temptation from God, but from some dark desire.
So, MAYBE, like a good rabbi hashing things out in Midrashic hair-splitting, I have split the serpent's temptation into two parts: God's part, which is ALWAYS good, and Satan's part, which is just destructive. At least in a very literal sense the temptation of Eve did NOT come from God; it is clear that it came from a slithering, elusive thing; evil incognito.
Perhaps, then, I have fallen on a further explanation of the last petition of the Lord's prayer: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." God does not tempt us with evil; His intentions are always good. But does Jesus' archetypal prayer suggest that God sometimes leads us toward temptation?
Lastly, a quick note. I believe a God that WILLS everything (think Calvin, or Islam) is not much of a God. If God is truly omniscient and all-powerful, He need not WILL everything for His ends to be met. (I can explain this further sometime; or see this.) Karl Barth said it well, and I paraphrase: God is so powerful He can be completely impotent (in a manger, on a cross) and STILL be God. True power, as we know, is born of weakness. The hymns and praise choruses have it wrong: our God is not a "mighty fortress"; God is not an "awesome God" because He is strong. Our God is the God of Weakness; He is the Emptying God, the Servant of All, even a Servant of death. He is the Man of No Significance -- the Good Shepherd. It is His Weakness that makes Him strong; it is His Meekness that makes Him Awesome -- and Mighty. Never has anything been protected by something so wonderfully weak and so gentle as the Church is protected by her God. We should be singing praises to God's weakness, and not to His great strength (I speak in half-truths here).
Anyhow, just some more thoughts.
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