divine mutability?

The thread on Hell attracted views from varied positions. I thought I'd offer another such. While the topic has interest to me and is relevant to my thesis, I promise I won't be disappointed were it to stir little interest. I believe I can phrase my question so that others besides Christian evangelicals may wish to respond. I mean it to transcend creeds and religions:


If there were a God, would He change?

 

Would She change?

 

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yep

 

Based on self-revelation mutability is an impossibility.

 

Why? Is He unhappy with the way He is now?

Lynette

 

I suppose it would be a matter of perspective, wouldn't it? I mean, to a man, it might appear that God changed. We see where the Bible says that God relented, or that he changed his mind. But does it mean that he really didn't know what the final outcome would be? Of course not, in my opinion. From man's perspective God appears to change, but from the divine perspective he does not.

Of course, that doesn't really answer the question, does it? Should perspective make any difference? Does he REALLY change or not? Well, if he is truly divine, and perfect and his perspective is that he does not change, then he must be right...

so after all this meandering... I would say that God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. Gee, I think I've heard that somewhere...

clint

 

Change compared to what?

In a way, it reminds me of special relativity. If I see you going past me, you appear foreshortened to me and your clocks run slow BUT to YOU, your dimensions and clocks seem perfectly normal.

Change is a time-based concept, or more accurately, time is a change based phenominon.

I see obvious development in God throughout the Jewish bible, but it seems to me that what I am really seeing is a developing understanding of human values applied to the human notion of God.

I suggest reading Husserl (sp?) and undertaking to understand that most difficult thing, phenominology.

Nosborne, JD
(Who is WAY, WAY out of his depth, here.)

 

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Compared to what God was before that change.

Of course even within "Christianity" there are views expressed that God changes. Process theology holds that change is 'being 'and a requisite to existence;therefore, God must change. Similarly, panentheism sees creation as contributing to divine mutabilty. Open theism maintains that God is not exhaustively omniscient and that the choices His creatures make add to God's knowledge. It could be argued that an increase in knowledge is a change . Eutychius in the 5th century proposed that when (in Christian theology now) Christ was incarnated the two natures blended. I do not see a real difference here with the eastern church which rejected the Chaledonian statement of a distinction between those natures in Christ. Such would seem, if true, to occasion a mutation in the divine nature. Many see that God repenting or changing His mind in your own Scriptures as in his choice of Saul which turned out badly or in His sparing of Ninevah are evidences of God's mutability. Here I agree with you such represent maturation of the human understanding rather that the mutation of God.

But if God changes was not He/She (the gender ambiguity here a concession, though I think God has no gender as we do, ) before that change ,or after it too, finite and if finite not God?

 

As soon as you say Change compared with before the Change (menopause?) you say God exists in time.

This is a problem since, it appears, time has a genuine beginning as a matter of physical reality.

Nosborne, JD
(Sorry about the menopause joke.)

 

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Remember that I was sharing the views of others ; personally I don't think God is mutable.

But if we say God exists "before" time doesn't that adverb render the concept self-contradictory? Isn't "before" temporal?

If God is not "in time", as you say being a Reformed Jew, then how could God appear even if not in essence to Moses and others and how could God predict through Moses and the prophets? While time may not affect God, how could God not affect time were God not in time in some manner? How could God hear or answer prayer as your Scriptures say God does ( Call upon Me and I will answer thee) ?? Why cannot God be above time and in it too? The Psalmist says that he cannot escape God's presence (Whither shall I flee from Thy presence?), but the psalmist was in time. How can God be omnipresent , in every place, yet not in time which occasions "places"? As for the argument that God is Spirit and therefore could not be in time, which is physical, our common Scriptures represent "spirits" frequently in temporal contexts, do they not?

There are, I believe, two theories on time. One is that only the present is real. The other is that , the past, the present, and the future exist and God is there in them all. Were we to adopt the former, then to say God is in our present time only, that adoption would contradict implications in your Bible of God's eternality (from everlasting to everlasting You are God). But if we opt for the latter, then I see no inconsistency with representations of God's acts in your (mine too) Bible; in fact I see them as only then explainable.

But if God acts in history that is the ground for Hartshorne and Cobb to say that these interactions between God and creation are experiences which change God. So, we have a dilemma. To remove God from time would seem to circumvent His modifications on creation, but to retain God in time means we must wonder if creation modifies God?

{Here in my response to Nosborne's post I deal with this issue in the context of Nosbornes own words, and by that I do not mean to imply that the Bible's representation of Deity is the only view acceptable on this forum nor is this purposed to challenge anyones views}

 

One of the problems with this question is that it concerns God. There are simply too many questions and not enough evidence to provide an answer.

Does God exist? Can humans know God? If they can, does that mean being able to understand God's essential characteristics? Is God a person in some sense or is that simply anthropomorphism?

And there are questions about change and immutability. For example, are they contradictory, or might something both be immutable and subject to change?

Let's take ourselves as examples. We exist through time, so it appears. We once were babies, and we will eventually be old. But through all of this we remain ourselves, in some sense.

So one could imagine a human being as he or she is usually perceived as being a three dimensional cross-section of temporally extended four dimensional being.

When looked at that way, atemporally, *we* are immutable, since the four dimensional being that is our life contains everything that will ever happen to us or that we will ever do.

If we can look at ourselves that way, I suppose that we can look at God the same way. Perhaps in one sense God is everything that God will ever experience or do. Seen atemporally from ouside time, that never changes. (How could it, outside time?) But looked at from a particular point in time, God is actively responding to events as they happen, and making decisions.

Of course, this little model has obvious and serious problems for free will and for contingency.

Perhaps free will only exists from a certain temporal perspective. Or perhaps it exists more fundamentally, and part of whatever it is that creates each four dimensional entity (which are our lives) actually comes from within that entity. We might be self-creating in some interesting sense.

The four dimensional history contains in some extra-temporal way everything that we have ever been or will ever be. But it is precisely those temporally localized things that combine to create the temporally extended entity. So to the extent that we create our actions, we create ourselves. Perhaps.

My personal guess is that our philosophical understanding of things like time, change, causation and process are still too primitive to adaquately deal with this stuff. Perhaps this explains part of our problem with understanding quantum mechanics.

 

Though it be unlikely, should I ever again be required to furnish mathematical descriptions of Hermitian operators and Hilbert space, this is the answer I shall give.

"[O]ur philosophical understanding of things like time, change, causation and process are still too primitive to adequately deal with this stuff"

.

 

May I suggest that the views and objections to change and temporality of God posted here are part of the reason that I think we CREATE the God we worship. As a result, that God tends to reflect the times and cultures that describe him. Hence, he develops throughout Torah and appears in many different religions.

This is NOT to suggest that there is no God out there (or in here). The human need for a deity outside ourselves is almost (?) universal. I think that religion, especially MY religion, is an expression of our search for God. I suspect that this desire comes from somewhere, if you see what I mean.

God is incredibly beyond our ability to say anything about. Maimonidies stated flatly that we can make NO positive attribution to God; all we can do is say what He's (She's, It's) not. Not limited by time and space, not mortal, not visible, not this or that.

Nosborne, JD
(Who HATES talking like a mystic!)

 

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Except that a mystic believes that he has found or has been found by God through spiritual insight; unlike Maimonidies he feels positive statements can be made. That's why, Nosborne, I sought from you in another thread your epistemological view on the Bible you use as to whether it is revered by your Faith simply because for centuries it has been important to Judaism or whether it is in revered because it is in your opinion a record of God's "search for" man. And making those negative assertions are simply making positive ones are they not? Not limited by time= God is eternal, right?

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Sure, but how do we define the term "eternal"?

See what I mean? We have no experience of "eternal" in our lives. We do have the experience of time. So inevitably "eternal" is defined as "not subject to time or change".

Nosborne, JD

 

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Well what about the oneness of God, that there is no other in Dt 6 :4. Could I make the positive statement that there is only one God ? Also you didn't respond to my question on your view of Scripture and why it should be revered.

(again this discussion has its context in a dialog re Nosborne's beliefs and is not meant to insist on truth)

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Reform, not Reformed.
Maimonides or Rambam, not Maimonidies.

 

I enthusiastically agree with that.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes wrote this:

The Ethiopians make their gods snub nosed and black; the Thracians make theirs grey eyed and red haired.

And if oxen and horses and lions had hands, and could draw with their hands and do what men can do, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own.

St. John of Damascus (early 8'th century) believed that scripture operates in much the same way, because:

Since we find many terms used symbolically in the scriptures concerning God which are more applicable to that which has body, we should recognize that it is quite impossible for us men clothed about with this dense covering of flesh to understand or speak of the divine and lofty and immaterial energies of the Godhead, except by the use of images and types and symbols derived from our own life.

Certainly an argument can be made for a transcendent dimension to reality. The problem is how can such a transcendent being be understood when by definition all human concepts fall short of it.

This was a widespread doctrine in late antique and early medieval period.

In the early 700's, John of Damascus said that the most proper of the names of God is 'he that is'.

Next to simply affirming God's existence, the next best way of conceptualizing God is apophatic, by means of negative terms: 'uncreated', 'incorporeal', 'unseen' etc.

But obviously religious language makes use of positive as well as negative predicates, so John says that the third best way of speaking about God is analogically.

This goes back to Aristotle, whose example was 'health'. The human body can properly be called healthy. But such things as food and medicine can be called healthy by analogy, because they are conducive to better health.

John of Damascus uses the theory of analogy to reinterpret anthropomorphic language about God in terms of God's ineffable powers and energies:

Hence by God's eyes and eyelids and sight we are to understand his power of overseeing all things, and his knowledge that nothing can escape... God's mouth and speech are his means of indicating his will; for it is by the mouth and speech that we make clear the thoughts that are in the heart.

Of course the most straightforward way of approaching it is the opening words of the Tao Te Ching:

Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.
Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.
Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.

 

Bill Grover

I did not intend to ignore your query concerning the significance of Torah in Reform practice. The trouble is, I don't think I CAN answer it.

The divide between the Orthodox and the Reform can be thought of in part as a fight over the source of authority for Jewish law. If God whispered Torah (and the Oral Law) into Moses' ear on Mount Sinai, then we cannot alter the law to meet modern needs, at least, not radically or easily. Jewish legal tradition DOES allow us to adapt the law but it is a difficult and limited process.

On the other hand, if Torah is a human document reflecting the Jewish experience of living as a community that experiences God in some way, the authority behind Torah is fundamentally human, not divine. (I believe that this is what is meant by the claim that Torah is written in our hearts and not across the sea or on a mountaintop.) The community therefore has the right and obligation to do justice and to reinterpret the Tradition to meet modern needs and circumstances.

Now, the Orthodox position presents no real problem as far as legitimacy. Torah is Torah because God wills it so. End of discussion.

But the Reform position prompts the very question you ask, "Why should Jews care about Torah at all?" Surely any other human document would do as well, maybe better.

I don't know the answer. Our dedication to Torah is not the result of rational thought; it is emotional. I can't explain it. All I can tell you is that it is real.

Nosborne, JD