A God of love births love in splendorous ways by granting agency to love from His Being or Essence. Not by decree or coercion but through who He is. Love is, because God is.
So too creational agency. An agency of becoming we might think of as freewill. As God has agency so too His creation has agency. Again, not by decree but because of God's Self, Being, or Essence.
The paradox is evil and how past church creeds and traditions misapplied ideas of God's Sovereignty to human culpability. Though God is sovereign He is sovereign not because He controls creation but because He releases it from His control to become as He is: "A serving God of sacrificial love and care. Of wound binding, healing, nurture and wisdom."
But this also speaks of a very weak form of sovereignty whose weakness is observed by our Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul to be God's greatest power. Again, a paradox. Would a powerful God allow evil? Illness? Suffering? Or be crucified on a cross? No, but a God of love who leads by love, who is love, would. This kind of love allows agency, not control. Though our ideas of God seems to be one of power, strength, absolute determination, and judgment, they are but very pagan forms of God-ness inherited by the much older religions even earlier then the Greeks.
Nor is a loving, giving, guiding God of the bible what God's followers in the bible expected. They wanted protection, deliverance, sustenance. And therein lies the struggle both in the bible narratives as well as in the histories of the church. A powerful God of judgment loses the idea of a loving God of care guiding his creation to become more than it is.
God's agency is certainly not a sovereignty / rule by coercion. Nor peevishness. Nor authoritarianism. No, a God of love shares Himself through His creation that it might become as He is becoming. Where together, both God and creation, may fulfill the bounty of the other in fellowship and communion.
In the end, we pray that God may act in our lives in ways which we may not be understandable but known by its fruit bearing goodness and love. Not only in our lives but in the lives of those around us and very nature itself in earthcare and restoration.
R.E. Slater
March 30, 2020
* * * * * * * * * *
by Thomas Jay Oord
BOOK REVIEW by W. Tyler
In this helpful and thought-provoking book, Thomas Jay Oord presents a love-based model of providence (which he calls the "essential kenosis" model) that fits very nicely in the framework of open theism, with special attention to making sense of our lived experiences in a world that is filled with "regularities and randomness, freedom and agency, good and evil". In wrestling with the apparent tension between divine power and divine love (which is ultimately the central locus of any discussion of providence), Oord opts to prioritize love in a logically consistent way, arguing that any account of God's action in the world which allows God absolute power over even the smallest part of creation logically fails to prioritize love. In the negative sense, this is because a God of absolute power exacerbates the problem of evil by adding to it what others have called "the scandal of particularity"; if God can stop events whose overall effects are evil, but chooses not to, then God is culpable for that evil. In the positive sense, this is simply the nature of self-giving love, and this extends all the way to the most fundamental laws of physics: "Regularities of existence—so-called natural laws—emerged in evolutionary history as new kinds of organisms emerged in response to God's love. The consistency of divine love creates regularities as creatures respond, given the nature of their existence and the degree and range of agency they possess. God's eternal nature of love both sets limits and offers possibilities to each creature and context, depending on their complexity. In this, God's love orders the world. And because God's nature is love, God cannot override the order that emerges." Oord takes special care to note that this is not the same as saying that God voluntarily limits his own power in the service of love; rather, God's power derives from his love, and so the power that we often attribute to God simply does not exist whenever it would conflict with love, and in particular whenever it would involve unilaterally overriding the so-called natural order that itself derives from God's love. It is worth mentioning here that even though Oord's proposal focuses a lot of attention on what God cannot do, this is only to clear away the reader's preconceptions, and would perhaps not be necessary were it not for the long theological tradition of depicting God as an absolute sovereign. The constructive part of Oord's proposal is substantial, so his is not a merely negative account of providence.
These basic assertions have surprising implications. One is an apparent solution the problem of evil: "This model of providence says God necessarily gives freedom to all creatures complex enough to receive and express it. Giving freedom is part of God's steadfast love. This means God cannot withdraw, override or fail to provide the freedom a perpetrator of evil expresses. God must give freedom, even to those who use it wrongly. ... Essential kenosis [also] explains why God doesn't prevent evil that simple creatures with agency cause or even simpler entities with mere self-organizing capacities cause. God necessarily gives the gift of agency and self-organization to entities capable of them because doing so is part of divine love. God's other-empowering love extends to the least and simplest of these. God cannot withdraw, override or fail to provide agency and self-organization to any simply organism or entity that causes genuine evil. The kenotic love of God necessarily provides agency and self-organization. God's moment-by-moment gifts are irrevocable. Consequently, God is not culpable for failing to prevent the evil that basic entities, organisms, and simple creatures may cause." An auxiliary claim is that even though God is present to all places at all times, he is not present in a bodily way, so that he must work lovingly and persuasively through and in creation rather than acting unilaterally from outside of creation; God actually needs the free cooperation of creation in order to redeem evil. Another surprising assertion is that God experiences time in a way analogous to our own experience of time, and in particular that God does not know the future. This is motivated partly by the understandable (but not incontestable) claim that God's foreknowledge would render creaturely freedom an illusion. Perhaps more importantly, this claim is motivated by the idea that "Love is an adventure without guaranteed results". While I appreciate the intuition behind this, I find myself skeptical of the idea that God experiences time with us; I find myself asking, "Where in the universe does God experience time?", because according to relativity, time flows differently in different places, and in fact time is wrapped up with the spatial dimensions of reality. Further, no two events taking place in different locations can be said to happen simultaneously. How then should we understand God's experience of time in light of God's omnipresence? This is not necessarily an unsolvable problem, but I find myself in want of a fuller explanation of how this problem might be solved.
Finally, Oord has an incredible exposition on how miracles fit into the essential kenosis model. Essentially, God is always working with and in creation, constantly opening up new possibilities if we cooperate; when our cooperation results in unusual good that appears to fall outside what we would call "natural", then a miracle has occurred. Because both the natural order and miraculous events derive from God's love with the cooperation of creation, there is no clear line between the natural and the miraculous; there is an irreducibly subjective, relational aspect to miracles. This coheres well with much of what the Bible depicts as miraculous; it especially sheds light on Jesus' oft-repeated phrase "Your faith has made you well," as well as his claimed inability to perform miracles for faithless people. It also helps explain why miracles are not always consistent; even for those who have faith, a miracle may not occur if some other aspect of creation is especially resistant to that miracle. My only complaint here is that Oord does not address biblical events attributed to God which are unambiguously harmful and unloving, such as the plague of death in Exodus. On the one hand, such events are not miracles at all by Oord's definition, since they are not good; on the other hand, one can hardly avoid calling such events miracles, since they appear to be the direct result of unusual divine action. The only way forward that I can envision here is to recognize that such events, though attributed to God by the biblical authors, cannot have actually happened as recorded if God is truly the God of love revealed perfectly in Christ. I am quite prepared to take this course, but other readers may not be.
Oord is to be praised for so consistently prioritizing love in a way that upholds the dignity of God and of people. His compelling vision of God working in and with others is compatible in interesting ways with other concepts within the Christian theological tradition, such as panentheism and deification. One particularly challenging but fruitful exercise in this regard is the reconciliation of open theism and universal salvation. Oord does not comment on eschatology in this book, which leaves the door wide open for a variety of views on the final state of created things. The most obvious choice would be to endorse a free will model of salvation and damnation, but I fear that this is too high a price to pray for God's goodness; as David Bentley Hart has pointed out, a God who knowingly creates a world in which the final damnation of any creature is even possible is an evil God, for morally speaking what has been risked has already been surrendered; moreover, in such a picture it would be logically possible to say that God loved all humans to the utmost, even though all humans voluntarily damned themselves. On the other hand, some Christian universalists have suggested that God may occasionally override human freedom in the interest of saving all, and on Oord's account this is too high a price for God's love. Following the lead of Hart, I would suggest that God's love has fashioned us in such a way that we are intrinsically drawn to God, who is our sole and final good; our freedom is ultimately not our ability to do wrong, which arises from deception and slavery to sin, but rather it is our ability to do right, to simply be what we are be design. That is to say, God's love naturally makes us so that we naturally seek God's love; just as God cannot not love us, we who are made in God's image cannot in the end not love God, though for some while we may deceive ourselves into thinking that we do not. So God need not know the future in precise detail to guarantee the ultimate reconciliation of all things (which I think he must do if he is good); and this inexorable return of all things to their source is not coercive on God's part, precisely because it is deeply consonant with the love-fashioned nature of created things.
Again, this is a helpful and thought-provoking read. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in providence, miracles, or open theism. I look forward to reading some of Oord's other books in the future!
No comments:
Post a Comment