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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Does God Feel Emotions?
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stonespring
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# 15530
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Posted
Catholic theology has traditionally said that God cannot feel emotions (God is impassible) because God cannot change and God cannot be affected by anything else. Jesus indeed felt and feels emotion and pain, but, the RCC has traditionally said, it is only his human and not his divine nature that feels emotion. Therefore, when the Bible talks about God's affection, wrath, hate, etc., it is an allegorical reference to God's goodness and justice (and "lovingness" to the degree that love is not an emotion - I'm sure the love issue makes more sense in Greek or whatever other source language).
This means that even today, Catholic theologians can get in trouble with the doctrinal authorities for writing something like "God feels our pain." What do you think?
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Sipech
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# 16870
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Posted
Short answer: Catholic theology is wrong. ![[Cool]](cool.gif)
Slightly longer answer: attributes of God such as "affection, wrath, hate, etc." are human linguistic constructs to try to express the inexpressible. A.W. Tozer in The Knowledge of the Holy expresses this much better than I can. To use the expressions and say we therefore understand God perfectly would be wrong, but neither they are a fair approximation to help our understanding.
In rejecting a literalist view of God's emotions, one should be careful not to veer too far the other way into mysticism, as that can lead to you making up whatever you want, which is rather poor theology.
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I try to be self-deprecating; I'm just not very good at it.
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
The "impassivity" of God is a construct from Greek philosophy, completely alien to Hebraic understandings of God. The paradigm makes much of the Bible incomprehensible.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Gamaliel
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# 812
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Posted
I'm sure this has been discussed before.
I seem to remember some contributors saying that God's immutability doesn't mean that he's like Spock ... some kind of passive, unconcerned and unengaged entity ...
The Orthodox are big on God not being given to 'passions' too ... again, I don't think that means that they regard God as 'unemotional' - and these concepts are anthropomorphisms of course - simply that he is isn' prone to fits of pique or to the gamut of ups and down, topsy-turvy type emotionalism that humans are subject to.
That's why Orthodox iconography doesn't go in for expressive displays of emotion in the same way that some Western iconography does.
Roman Catholic spirituality doesn't appear unemotional. If anything, some aspects of popular RC devotion can get as carried away with emotionalism as some forms of Protestant pentecostalism ...
It's one of these areas where I don't think it's right to say, 'RC theology = wrong. Other theologies = right' as there are different understandings and sliding scales.
The Pentecostal God can certainly seem rather capricious and prone to emotional hissy fits ...
At times, the Roman Catholic God can be portrayed as somewhat obsessive.
I think there's a balance between the Greek and Hebrew elements on this one - that it's not an either/or choice but a both/and one ...
![[Biased]](wink.gif)
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
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The Silent Acolyte
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# 1158
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Posted
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
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deano
princess
# 12063
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
...and is He outraged if adults suffer excruciating pain as well?
If not...
a) At what age does God stop believing people to be children, and therefore worthy of outrage? 16, 18, 21?
b) define excruciating? You mention leukemia, but what if the pain is controlled? What about toothache? Or a broken leg from falling out of a tree? What is the level of pain felt before God feels outraged? Is there a level of pain where is is slightly incenced, or a bit miffed?
c) Where is your evidence for the answers to (a) and (b) above? Which biblical passages define the ages and pain levels?
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"The moral high ground is slowly being bombed to oblivion. " - Supermatelot
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
Answer: yes.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by stonespring:
This means that even today, Catholic theologians can get in trouble with the doctrinal authorities for writing something like "God feels our pain." What do you think?
It's part of a change from a classical model of the human mind to a Humean or romantic model. So previously it was thought that emotions are weaknesses and reason was activity, whereas now we tend to think that emotions are positive activity and reason is merely reactive. So previously a number of things we now count as emotional strengths would have been thought of as falling under reason. (Even among the Romantics Shelley of all people wrote a Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.)
Still I think there's still room for the idea that God has no passions if it's properly understood. Roughly speaking, when God is concerned for our pain it is because God is concerned for us feeling our pain, not because God is concerned about God feeling our pain. God's judgements are made without concern for God's subjective state. Along with a rejection of God's passions really ought to go a rejection of any idea that God has honour that can be offended. The idea is still that God is entirely outgoing and creative; that there's no trace in God of self-concern.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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The5thMary
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# 12953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
Yes! Yes! Yes! That is what I believe with all my heart, mind, soul, everything! Anyone who wants to lock God up in an airtight box where He/She feels no pain, sorrow, gladness, joy, passion...well, they might have "captured" something but it's not the God I give myself to!
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God gave me my face but She let me pick my nose.
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
Man is made in the image of God. To suggest that God is somehow less than man, by being unable to feel emotion, is about as illogical as one could imagine. Whatever qualities man has, the Creator of man must have those qualities - and more besides. An effect cannot be greater than its cause.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
When they say God is impassive, they mean that he is not subject to the gusts of changeable, shortlived passion/emotion that overtake us all the time. That's because his "passions" if we can call them so are permanent, not temporary. They are greater, not less.
Our joy comes and goes; his is eternal. Our anger comes and hopefully goes--his is also eternal, and the only reason we don't permanently suffer it is because his love (also eternal) pulls us out of the realm of that anger.
I'm thinking of it by analogy with Mercury, or any planet where half the world faces the sun all the time, while the other half is in darkness. But the light and the darkness exist and are eternal at the same time. But they are not intermittent. Our experience of them may be intermittent, but that's because it's us who are moving from sunside to darkside and vice versa--not because the planet itself changes. God's emotions are similarly stable, but our experience of them isn't, because we move. Or by God's mercy, we GET moved, by him.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Man is made in the image of God. To suggest that God is somehow less than man, by being unable to feel emotion, is about as illogical as one could imagine. Whatever qualities man has, the Creator of man must have those qualities - and more besides. An effect cannot be greater than its cause.
If we accept the scientific evidence that natural selection and mutation operate in quite free-wheeling ways to shape the qualities of humans and all other living organisms, then I'm not sure the above assertion really works, at least unless broadened to a point that it becomes almost meaningless. The Deity isn't subject to the evolutionary pressures that act on creatures to produce their respective attributes.
Questions that then arise for the Christian who seeks to reconcile science and theistic faith include what is meant by core attributes imputed to God, including God's love and God's essential creativity; and how the Incarnation - the taking of human nature into the Godhead - works in respect to God's attributes.
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Man is made in the image of God. To suggest that God is somehow less than man, by being unable to feel emotion, is about as illogical as one could imagine. Whatever qualities man has, the Creator of man must have those qualities - and more besides. An effect cannot be greater than its cause.
That argument doesn't actually work. Firstly, it presumes that being unable to feel emotion (in the way humans do) is a negative quality. A lot of philosophers have thought it would be a positive quality, and they're not obviously wrong.
But even if we assume being able to feel emotions is a good quality for human beings to have, is it therefore applicable to God? Consider: being able to run 100m as fast as Mo Farah is a good quality. Running fast is a human excellence. Can God run as fast as Mo Farah? Can God run 100m as fast as I can? No - God cannot run at all because running is a method of ceasing to be in one place and starting to be in another, and God can't be anywhere in particular. For that matter, can God be brave? No - there's simply no danger that can threaten God for God to be brave about.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by The5thMary:
quote:
Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
Yes! Yes! Yes! That is what I believe with all my heart, mind, soul, everything! Anyone who wants to lock God up in an airtight box where He/She feels no pain, sorrow, gladness, joy, passion...well, they might have "captured" something but it's not the God I give myself to!
If this was Facebook I would 'like' this answer.
It also goes a long way to revealing what happened at the cross as the Father suffered the loss of his Son - you know, the one he was 'well-pleased' with.
That's Fatherly pride - an emotion - in my book ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
Let's be clear first what Catholic theology is actually asserting (traditionally). All cognition is motivated, it follows one's "appetites". The intellectual appetite is also called "will", it is what one conceptually wants. However, in humans the intellectual appetite proceeds through the instrumental means of the sensitive appetite. That is to say, as embodied beings ultimately what we do is to act with our bodies in some way and so our conceptual wants translate into bodily wants. That's true whether we want to move our tongue to elucidate a philosophical principle or our hips to increase the pleasure in our genitals. Where some motion of the sensitive appetite is connected generally to bodily changes, this is called a "passion" (because the body "suffers" the wanting). For example, in anger typically our "blood boils", indicating generalised "getting ready for a fight" changes of our body that flow from our sensitive appetite moving against something offensive in the world, which in turn through these bodily changes feeds back into our cognitive assessment of the situation (one can become "blind with anger"). We all know however that the degree of passion is variable even for similar conceptual acts of will. For example, the saying "revenge is a dish best served cold" tells us that to be effective in realising a certain conceptual want we should avoid being overly passionate about it (basically, so as allow more careful planning and avoid detection).
It is obvious that in God as God, in an incorporeal Spirit, there cannot be any passion. He simply does not have a body which could react in a generalised manner to His wants and feed that back into His cognition. God is literally "bloodless", and hence necessarily impassive.
This does not mean however that there cannot be anything like "emotions" in him, namely precisely as acts of His will. As we have just seen, also we humans can be more or less passionate about for example extracting revenge. That does not make the "cold" revenge any less biting, indeed, quite the opposite. However, many emotions do have a negative and imperfect side to them. Anger and revenge are again obvious examples. In anger we are aggressively discontent with what is facing us. Ultimately we cannot attribute such reactions to God other than in a metaphorical sense or as a human description of the outcomes of the acts of His will. We can talk about God not wanting something in the sense that if it happens there are consequences that are analogous to humans no wanting something. When people do something we do not want, then we may try to punish them. When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, they are being punished by God. The difference is that Adam, Eve, the forbidden fruit, the serpent and all the rest only exists because God constantly wills it to be. So really what God wants is something like "Adam and Eve acting with free will, but existing as punished if they eat the forbidden fruit". There is level at which we can talk about something being against God's will, as indexed by what consequences are attached to what, but ultimately all that is is as it is, only because God wills it. In this fundamental sense, God cannot possibly be angry, because that would require Him to not will what He in fact wills to be.
However, there are emotions that do not necessarily have any imperfection attached to them, like love and joy. As acts of the will, without (bodily) passion, we can attribute these to God.
So that is what traditional Catholic theology is really saying. God cannot be passionate, simply because that is something bodily, and God is incorporeal. God cannot have negative emotions in an ultimate sense, because they require some imperfection, and God is perfect. God can however have joy and love and the like. It is of course true that even God's joy and love are only analogous to what we feel, not really like what we feel. It is eternal, it embraces all there is at once, in particular also all of God, ... in fact, it turns out that just as "God's intellect" is God, namely the Word, so "God's will" is God, namely the Holy Spirit.
So there you have it. Does God feel emotions? In a sense, yes, He does. The "emotions" of God proceed eternally from the Father and (pace the Orthodox) the Son, and they are called the Holy Spirit.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:
Originally posted by The5thMary:
quote:
Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
Yes! Yes! Yes! That is what I believe with all my heart, mind, soul, everything! Anyone who wants to lock God up in an airtight box where He/She feels no pain, sorrow, gladness, joy, passion...well, they might have "captured" something but it's not the God I give myself to!
If this was Facebook I would 'like' this answer.
It also goes a long way to revealing what happened at the cross as the Father suffered the loss of his Son - you know, the one he was 'well-pleased' with.
That's Fatherly pride - an emotion - in my book
This sounds an extremely anthropomorphic God to me. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, for Christians the challenge is grasping how the human nature which was taken into God in result of the Incarnation eternally functions in the inner relations of the Triune God, the Second Person of which is eternally united with human nature. I am positing here BTW that since God is unchangeable, the Incarnation actually exists outside of our experience of linear, historical time; we perceive the Incarnation to have happened at a particular moment in human history, but I am hypothesising that in God who is beyond time, the Incarnation is an eternal attribute of the Deity.
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EtymologicalEvangelical
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# 15091
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd
That argument doesn't actually work. Firstly, it presumes that being unable to feel emotion (in the way humans do) is a negative quality. A lot of philosophers have thought it would be a positive quality, and they're not obviously wrong.
They are "not obviously wrong" if they can provide coherent reasons. I certainly agree that some human emotions are driven by personal weakness, but none of them are inherently evil. For example, anger is a response to a moral context. Whether one refers to this as an 'emotion' or just an 'experience', it is the reality of one's consciousness when confronted with that which is considered to be morally repugnant. If God has no particular state of consciousness when confronted by that which is morally repugnant to Him, then it follows that there must exist harmony between His consciousness and the reality of that evil. Which then undermines His moral purity. Human manifestations of anger may be a frail reflection of God's "anger-consciousness", but there is clearly a continuity between the two types of experience.
quote:
But even if we assume being able to feel emotions is a good quality for human beings to have, is it therefore applicable to God? Consider: being able to run 100m as fast as Mo Farah is a good quality. Running fast is a human excellence. Can God run as fast as Mo Farah? Can God run 100m as fast as I can? No - God cannot run at all because running is a method of ceasing to be in one place and starting to be in another, and God can't be anywhere in particular. For that matter, can God be brave? No - there's simply no danger that can threaten God for God to be brave about.
These analogies are rather dubious.
It's a rather daring person who thinks he can really imagine what omnipresence must be like. I certainly cannot. But a person who is 'full' can choose to limit himself. It doesn't follow that any being has to function at full capacity all the time. For example, when my children were very young I would relate to them in a certain way, at their level, for example, kicking a ball around with them in the local park. I was certainly able to kick the ball or run with it in a way that would prevent them from joining in the game. But I limited myself and reduced my ability in order to make allowance for them (and now it's a case of them limiting themselves to enable me to join in!). I see no reason why God cannot limit Himself in this way.
In fact, to suggest that an omnipotent being cannot limit himself, and must always function at full capacity, rather undermines his power. To say that God cannot run, when omnipotence implies an ability to do anything (that is at least logically possible), is incoherent. It's tantamount to saying that, because God is omnipotent, therefore He can do nothing, because any particular action limits Him, thereby undermining His status of being omnipotent!
For this reason, I don't accept the validity of your analogies.
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You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true'. CS Lewis
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Lyda*Rose
Ship's broken porthole
# 4544
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Posted
IngoB: quote:
So there you have it. Does God feel emotions? In a sense, yes, He does. The "emotions" of God proceed eternally from the Father and (pace the Orthodox) the Son, and they are called the Holy Spirit.
So the Holy Spirit is not a Person of God, but a collection of Godly emotions? Sounds rather "modal" to me.
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"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG... thank you. Thank you for my life." ~from Joe Vs the Volcano
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Jammy Dodger
Half jam, half biscuit
# 17872
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Posted
This makes me think of the character of Death in the Terry Prachett Discworld series who is unable to experience emotions because he "doesn't have the glands for it" (him being a skeleton and all).
So in one sense of course God cannot experience emotions exactly in the way that we do as like Death on Discworld he does not have a body like ours. Our experience of emotion is a complex interaction of body chemistry and conscious thought that we are still struggling to understand.
However, that isn't the point for me. If we are "made in the image of God" - then our capacity to be moved with compassion, be delighted and full of joy, to be outraged at injustice is a reflection of the capacity of God in these areas (not the other way around). It doesn't mean that the mechanics are the same - but I think we are reflecting the character of our Heavenly Father.
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Look at my eye twitching - Donkey from Shrek
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
IngoB: quote:
So there you have it. Does God feel emotions? In a sense, yes, He does. The "emotions" of God proceed eternally from the Father and (pace the Orthodox) the Son, and they are called the Holy Spirit.
So the Holy Spirit is not a Person of God, but a collection of Godly emotions? Sounds rather "modal" to me.
I had the same reaction, actually. However, I assumed Ingo wasn't trying to give a comprehensive description of the activity of God the Holy Spirit in respect to both the internal and external relations of the Trinity.
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stonespring
Shipmate
# 15530
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Posted
Heterodox as I am, I tend to agree that since emotions are reactions to external events God does not feel emotions. Creation can't do anything to God. We can't even please or disappoint Him. Joy and love are attributes of God rather than emotions, because they are not reactions to anything else.
Anger in my understanding is not a response to something morally offensive but rather, like fear, is an emotion that elicits a response of self-defense in reaction to a perceived threat. Fear makes us want to run away, and anger makes us want to fight. God cannot be threatened by anything so I don't think anger or fear have anything to do with God. God's "wrath" is just a way of describing His attribute of justice - but I don't agree with a lot of what some people say about how God is just when it comes to certain forms of punishment! That's for a different thread though.
The Incarnation means that God knows all about our emotions and the hair splitting over whether Jesus' divine or human nature is the one who feels them is not terribly important for me.
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
As He's omnipathic He feels all emotion. With His empathy too. The Spirit groans.
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Love wins
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The Silent Acolyte
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# 1158
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by deano:
quote:
Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
...and is He outraged if adults suffer excruciating pain as well? <and, the rest...>
deano, ya missed what I did there.
The merism wasn't perhaps as transparent as could be wished for, but the assertion is that God is outraged by all human suffering, from the suffocating death of the adult Jesus down to the pain of a random two-year old cancer patient.
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by stonespring:
Heterodox as I am, I tend to agree that since emotions are reactions to external events God does not feel emotions. Creation can't do anything to God. We can't even please or disappoint Him. Joy and love are attributes of God rather than emotions, because they are not reactions to anything else.
Anger in my understanding is not a response to something morally offensive but rather, like fear, is an emotion that elicits a response of self-defense in reaction to a perceived threat. Fear makes us want to run away, and anger makes us want to fight. God cannot be threatened by anything so I don't think anger or fear have anything to do with God. God's "wrath" is just a way of describing His attribute of justice - but I don't agree with a lot of what some people say about how God is just when it comes to certain forms of punishment! That's for a different thread though.
The Incarnation means that God knows all about our emotions and the hair splitting over whether Jesus' divine or human nature is the one who feels them is not terribly important for me.
Good post. I quite agree overall. I would just say that in regard to the Incarnation, the unity of the divine and human natures in the one Christ would suggest to me that God-in-Christ experiences human emotion in the sense of knowing what humans experience. However the need to resort to Chalcedonian constructs is perhaps obviated by Martin's more straightforward formulation that God knows human emotion by virtue of God's omnipathy. Again, I wouldn't posit that God experiences the qualitative emotions that humans experience, but rather that God intimately and implicitly knows these emotions because God is everywhere, penetrating, resonating throughout, and occupying the entirety of Creation.
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The Silent Acolyte
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# 1158
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
It is obvious that in God as God, in an incorporeal Spirit, there cannot be any passion. He simply does not have a body which could react in a generalised manner to His wants and feed that back into His cognition. God is literally "bloodless", and hence necessarily impassive.
So what about the fallen bodiless powers of heaven?
Of the eight passions, are they not subject to greed, anger, sadness, despondency, pride, and vainglory? And, gluttony and lust in the figurative sense?
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras:
Good post. I quite agree overall. I would just say that in regard to the Incarnation, the unity of the divine and human natures in the one Christ would suggest to me that God-in-Christ experiences human emotion in the sense of knowing what humans experience. However the need to resort to Chalcedonian constructs is perhaps obviated by Martin's more straightforward formulation that God knows human emotion by virtue of God's omnipathy. Again, I wouldn't posit that God experiences the qualitative emotions that humans experience, but rather that God intimately and implicitly knows these emotions because God is everywhere, penetrating, resonating throughout, and occupying the entirety of Creation.
Perhaps it's my maudlin evangelicalism, but that creates too much distance for my taste-- it's too far removed for me to say God knows our emotions as an indirect byproduct of his omniscience/ omnipresence. To me the (arguably unique) witness of Scripture is to a relational God that experiences emotions in the fullest sense of the term, but in a truer /holier sense as they are a response to the order/ disorder of the universe. Much like EE said above. Rather than seeing God's emotion as a dim acknowledgment of our feelings, I'd say our feeling are simply a dim and imperfect reflection of the deeper and truer emotion that is the heart of God.
[ 10. March 2014, 21:23: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd
That argument doesn't actually work. Firstly, it presumes that being unable to feel emotion (in the way humans do) is a negative quality. A lot of philosophers have thought it would be a positive quality, and they're not obviously wrong.
They are "not obviously wrong" if they can provide coherent reasons. I certainly agree that some human emotions are driven by personal weakness, but none of them are inherently evil.
In what sense evil? One needn't think emotions are a moral evil to think that perhaps they are negative qualities. The idea that emotions distort one's judgement is not implausible. The tendency for angry people to retaliate against the most obvious target rather than the target that is actually to blame is an example.
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For example, anger is a response to a moral context. Whether one refers to this as an 'emotion' or just an 'experience', it is the reality of one's consciousness when confronted with that which is considered to be morally repugnant. If God has no particular state of consciousness when confronted by that which is morally repugnant to Him, then it follows that there must exist harmony between His consciousness and the reality of that evil. Which then undermines His moral purity. Human manifestations of anger may be a frail reflection of God's "anger-consciousness", but there is clearly a continuity between the two types of experience.
That there is some analogue between what is called wrath in God and human anger is what justifies the use of the word 'wrath' for God. And yet that there is some difference is obvious by the nature of the case. It is certainly comprehensible to explain a human's behaviour by saying that he was taking his anger out on one of his children when it was somebody else who deserved it; God would not do that. ![[Two face]](graemlins/scot_twoface.gif) The question is whether by the time we've abstracted away all the human bodily features of anger we're left with something that can be usefully called an emotion.
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[b]But even if we assume being able to feel emotions is a good quality for human beings to have, is it therefore applicable to God? Consider: being able to run 100m as fast as Mo Farah is a good quality. Running fast is a human excellence. Can God run as fast as Mo Farah? Can God run 100m as fast as I can? No - God cannot run at all because running is a method of ceasing to be in one place and starting to be in another, and God can't be anywhere in particular.
These analogies are rather dubious.
It's a rather daring person who thinks he can really imagine what omnipresence must be like. I certainly cannot. But a person who is 'full' can choose to limit himself. It doesn't follow that any being has to function at full capacity all the time.
Being omnipresent is not a capacity. It's not as if God could be present only in half the places there are by running at half capacity. Omnipresence is not a superpower, as if God were Omni-Man. God is not like Superman but more so. God is omnipresent because it is nonsense to ascribe a specific presence in one place rather than another to a being that has no body that can have a specific location. It is no limitation on God to say that God cannot do that which is nonsensical. And to say that God can be in one place rather than another, except by being incarnate, is nonsensical.
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[ 11. March 2014, 05:03: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
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Posted
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Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
In fact, to suggest that an omnipotent being cannot limit himself, and must always function at full capacity, rather undermines his power. To say that God cannot run, when omnipotence implies an ability to do anything (that is at least logically possible), is incoherent. It's tantamount to saying that, because God is omnipotent, therefore He can do nothing, because any particular action limits Him, thereby undermining His status of being omnipotent!
It is not only coherent, but indeed logically necessary that an incorporeal Spirit cannot run. The simple reason is that running is a corporeal activity. Now, an omnipotent Spirit can incarnate and then run around as a corporeal being, and it is highly likely that God did just that as Jesus Christ. (It is highly likely that Jesus Christ ran at some point in His life, that is). But no matter how potent an incorporeal being may be, while not possessing a body it cannot possibly run. Omnipotence cannot create (Euclidean) square circles either. Furthermore, in the sense that we do things, God can indeed do nothing. For in anything we do, we change from a potential (for activity) to action, and God cannot change, is pure eternal act.
The vast majority of Christians worship some kind of ghostly demiurge, if we draw out the implications of their "doctrinal" understanding. That's fine most of the time and for most purposes, in particular if it is some extrapolation from Jesus Christ into the spiritual realm. But if we are seriously talking about God as such, then I'm afraid these psychological crutches lose all value. And it does not help either to hide behind some supposed conflict between Greek and Hebrew conceptions of God. If you stick literally to a God as portrayed in His interactions with humanity in the bible, then you end up with a Hebrew Jupiter. Period. It is no accident of history that Christ was born at the very intersection of Hebrew, Greek and Roman culture.
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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
So the Holy Spirit is not a Person of God, but a collection of Godly emotions? Sounds rather "modal" to me.
If I had said that, then you might be right to call that modal. But I never said that the Holy Spirit is not a Person, and I was quite careful in using scare quotes in the appropriate places, including when talking about God's "emotions". That said, define "real Person".
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Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The merism wasn't perhaps as transparent as could be wished for, but the assertion is that God is outraged by all human suffering, from the suffocating death of the adult Jesus down to the pain of a random two-year old cancer patient.
We are currently discussing in what sense one can talk about God being outraged about anything at all. A mere list of things God is supposedly outraged about doesn't help much in this regard, unless precisely analyzed towards such a sense - and that you did not do. And on a personal note, when I read such things I really have the immediate urge to become an atheist just so I can hammer this with a theodicy argument.
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Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
So what about the fallen bodiless powers of heaven? Of the eight passions, are they not subject to greed, anger, sadness, despondency, pride, and vainglory? And, gluttony and lust in the figurative sense?
The angels are not capable of any passion, for exactly the reason given. Passions are a bodily function, and they have no bodies. As far as the cardinal sins go, they are said to be affected directly (not by human proxy) only pride and envy.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Mudfrog
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Posted
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Originally posted by Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras:
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Originally posted by Mudfrog:
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Originally posted by The5thMary:
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Originally posted by The Silent Acolyte:
The God I worship is outraged when a child suffers excruciating pain, from his Only Begotten all the way down to the two-year-old leukemia patient down the street.
Yes! Yes! Yes! That is what I believe with all my heart, mind, soul, everything! Anyone who wants to lock God up in an airtight box where He/She feels no pain, sorrow, gladness, joy, passion...well, they might have "captured" something but it's not the God I give myself to!
If this was Facebook I would 'like' this answer.
It also goes a long way to revealing what happened at the cross as the Father suffered the loss of his Son - you know, the one he was 'well-pleased' with.
That's Fatherly pride - an emotion - in my book
This sounds an extremely anthropomorphic God to me. However, as I pointed out in my previous post, for Christians the challenge is grasping how the human nature which was taken into God in result of the Incarnation eternally functions in the inner relations of the Triune God, the Second Person of which is eternally united with human nature. I am positing here BTW that since God is unchangeable, the Incarnation actually exists outside of our experience of linear, historical time; we perceive the Incarnation to have happened at a particular moment in human history, but I am hypothesising that in God who is beyond time, the Incarnation is an eternal attribute of the Deity.
I do not believe that God is unchangeable.
When I read that he is the Lord and that he does not change, I take that to be speaking about his consistency, his faithfulness, his eternal plans and purpose. I cannot believe that God is immoveable and unresponsive.
Neither can I or do I believe that the Incarnation is an eternal attribute of deity. That is not what they Bible teaches at all. There are, of course, eternal attritbutes and i would strongly suggest that the cross - the death of God - is an eternal attribute, for Jesus is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Death is an eternal experience of God that was made visible in time and space at Calvary. The incarnation was very much a time and space thing.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
As far as the alleged extreme anthropomorphism is concerned I would say this: Of course I don't believe that God has a body - he doesn't smell aromas or walk in gardens or ride on the clouds or anything likke that; but as far as emotions are concerned yes, he does indeed feel.
Why would you consider emotion a mere human trait that cannot be experienced by deity? Are you trying to suggest that emotions - and maybe even thoughts - are 'lower' qualities, unspiritual, an indication of mortality and weakness?
I prefer to see it this way - God is a thinking, emoting, rational God who has shared some of his attributes with mankind - it's called 'the image of God' and in many easy these qualities are unique to humanity and are not shared by the animal kingdom - reliant as they are on instinct, rather than on choice, reason and emotion.
I think you might be holding conflicting views about God, to be honest. On one hand you say that God is unchanging, that he cannot feel wmotions, and yet you theorise that the Incarnation is an essential and eternal part of God. Surely, if God was eternally Incarnate as man, then emotions would be part of that Incarnation. Unless of course, you take it that Jesus also displayed no emotions - in which case the Gospels are erroneous. Or else in your view, the Incarnation was merely God clothing himself (lack of emotions included) in a physical human shell.
[ 11. March 2014, 10:54: Message edited by: Mudfrog ]
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
Mudfrog, it would seem that you are saying that the Atonement is an eternal attribute of God, but not Incarnation, which you see as having its inception in a particular point in time (and proceeding on from there?). I fail to see how the Christian notion of atonement can be separated from the operation of God in the Incarnation. Further, I don't think the Judeo-Christian scriptures give much in the way of intuition of non-linear space-time: why would they? A theology incorporating non-linear "time" wasn't fully possible until the theoretical physics of the last century. Yes, certainly from humanity's ordinary perspective, the Incarnation occurred at a particular point in our world history. However, I question the notion that this is the reality of things from the operational "perspective" of the Deity. The Incarnate God did enter human history at a particular point in our time, revealing Himself to us in this fashion; but the attribute or operation of incorporating human nature, and hence of being ever incarnate beyond time as experienced by humans is - I posit - an eternal attribute of God, who merely reveals this atoning reality to humanity at a particular point in our species-specific time-sense: the incarnational operation of Atonement has, however, been eternally operative.
I'm rather wary of too easily throwing around the term of theological art, "the Lamb that was slain", with its PSA overtones. The Incarnation and the Sacrifice of the Cross work because they demonstrate and effect the at-one-ment of the Deity with His Creation.
These are, of course, side-arguments around the question of whether God experiences emotions, or what it is we even mean by such a proposition. I am proposing that God's knowledge of emotion has to do with God's incarnational property, but not that God "learned" about emotion via the person of Jesus of Nazareth, born into human history at a particular place and time. If anything, I'd say the gospel accounts suggest that the human nature of Jesus learnt (or realised his) God-ness from the divine nature within him as the incarnate Christ.
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
Sorry, that last was cross-posted (or else I somehow failed to see Mudfrog's last post), so doesn't address the second of Mudfrog's two consecutive posts. I think if you will read back to my initial post on this topic, you'll find that I said God knows/understands human emotion (and indeed animal emotion generally)from His immanent, interpenetrating omnipresence throughout Creation. God is present in Creation, which cannot exist without God. All Creation ultimately comes from God, exists within God, and is taken into God. Although God is not to be confused or conflated with God's Creation, the Creation is nevertheless the prima facie evidence of God's incarnational nature.
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
As He's omnipathic He feels all emotion. With His empathy too. The Spirit groans.
This. Not quite how I would have put it, but pretty much cuts to the heart of the matter. Still, I'm trying to make the point - with a plethora of words - that God experiences/resonates to the emotions of His creatures, because God is thoroughly involved and present in the Creation. However, God is perfect and complete in Himself, and doesn't internally experience the transient passions of biological organisms. God's intrinsic "emotion" is a perfect love that resonates in the infinite energy of creation, the essential holiness in the Creation, and the ongoing redemption/perfection/salvation of that Creation.
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anteater
Ship's pest-controller
# 11435
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Posted
I'm not sure I see the problem, at least from a practical-devotional view and it surprises me that RCC priests are not meant to say "God feels our pain".
After all, they are more than allowed to say that Mary is the Mother of God, without having always to add the footnote that this pertains specifically to God Incarnate and does not imply that Mary was the source of the Eternal Divine Nature.
So why would they not be allowed to say that God shares our (non sinful) emotions, again without having always to issue a clarification.
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Schnuffle schnuffle.
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Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras
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# 11274
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Posted
Mary as Theotokos is a dogmatic Christological assertion. "God feels our pain" does not reflect in any clear way a defined dogma of the Church.
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stonespring
Shipmate
# 15530
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Posted
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Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Neither can I or do I believe that the Incarnation is an eternal attribute of deity. That is not what they Bible teaches at all. There are, of course, eternal attritbutes and i would strongly suggest that the cross - the death of God - is an eternal attribute, for Jesus is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Death is an eternal experience of God that was made visible in time and space at Calvary. The incarnation was very much a time and space thing.
Wait a minute. I am asking this because I really don't get it and I don't know that much about theology. How did Jesus' divine, and not just his human nature, die on the Cross? I honestly don't know what the traditional teaching is regarding whether The Second Person of the Trinity as God died on the Cross. I know that the two natures of Christ are indivisible -that is why the emotion question is also confusing - but the death issue is making my head spin. Anyone know more about what theologians have said on this?
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stonespring
Shipmate
# 15530
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Posted
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Originally posted by IngoB:
It is not only coherent, but indeed logically necessary that an incorporeal Spirit cannot run. The simple reason is that running is a corporeal activity. Now, an omnipotent Spirit can incarnate and then run around as a corporeal being, and it is highly likely that God did just that as Jesus Christ. (It is highly likely that Jesus Christ ran at some point in His life, that is). But no matter how potent an incorporeal being may be, while not possessing a body it cannot possibly run. Omnipotence cannot create (Euclidean) square circles either. Furthermore, in the sense that we do things, God can indeed do nothing. For in anything we do, we change from a potential (for activity) to action, and God cannot change, is pure eternal act.
This reminds me of the old debate between the theologies of Thomas Aquinas ("God commands us to do good and not do evil because acts are intrinsically good or evil without God willing them to be.") and Duns Scotus ("Acts are good or evil because God wills them to be, and in an alternate universe God could have decided that murdering your mother is good and it would therefore be good.")
So, following Scotus, could God have created an alternate universe where incorporeal beings can run?
William of Ockham went beyond Scotus by saying that God can even change the past within the same universe so that an action that you did in the past that was evil then is now good (please correct me if I am not describing this Ockhamist teaching correctly!). Does this mean that for an Ockhamist God can go back in time so that angels in this universe would not have been able to run from the beginning?
I think that it is useful to try to use human language to describe God. However, at a certain point language will always break down, even I would think for Thomists who might think their system doesn't have the vulnerabilities of Scotists' and Ockhamists'. Don't ask me to explain how, though. My head hurts...
Mudfrog, how can God change when He already knows everything that ever happened and ever will happen? It's not like He's ever going to be surprised. He already knows what He is going to do. I guess we can have a Jorge Luis Borges-style argument about whether God's knowledge about what He is going to do prevents God from doing something different. I would agree with the whole "God doesn't make decisions or move from inaction to action - He is an eternal act." arugment of IngoB, but I think that you can always argue against any "God can't do something logically impossible" statement with some "God isn't limited by language or logic or any of the laws of this universe He created" argument. My head hurts again...
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras. Happy to be in the same ballpark and ballgame with you. My brief possession of the ball is more than enough, your more concerted play is worth all the commentary, to try and keep the metaphor going lamely; where you are player and commentator.
cliffdweller, there is nothing indirect about God's omnipathy. He sustains our autonomous feeling, being, experience in the first place, feels it completely, inseparably, helplessly, vicariously as if we were each fully Him, He was only each of us. Ian M. Banks GCU Grey Area in Excession comes close. He's not remote. As the Muslims - blessings and peace be upon them - say, He is as close as our carotids. DEEP and hot within us.
And yes, His perfect emotions draw ours to Him.
And Lietuvos Sv. Kazimieras, please do put it how you would. (I can't believe that I've been snotty with you over the years).
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
cliffdweller, there is nothing indirect about God's omnipathy. He sustains our autonomous feeling, being, experience in the first place, feels it completely, inseparably, helplessly, vicariously as if we were each fully Him, He was only each of us. Ian M. Banks GCU Grey Area in Excession comes close. He's not remote. As the Muslims - blessings and peace be upon them - say, He is as close as our carotids. DEEP and hot within us.
Sorry, I don't see it that way. But I'm from the complete other end of the spectrum-- open theism-- so that's not surprising.
What I do dislike is the tendency among those espousing classical theism is to describe in a "just so" way-- as self-evident, when in fact it is highly debatable. Just sayin'. I know I'm out on an unpopular limb here folks, but it's not without reason.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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mdijon
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# 8520
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Posted
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Originally posted by anteater:
I'm not sure I see the problem, at least from a practical-devotional view and it surprises me that RCC priests are not meant to say "God feels our pain".
If I follow IngoB's detailed explanation correctly then it is not as simple as that. One could say that God feels our pain, but if one wants to get into the details of what that means then it excludes passion, but does not exclude being moved and motivated.
Leading to the Passion but not to any old passion.
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mdijon nojidm uoɿıqɯ ɯqıɿou
ɯqıɿou uoɿıqɯ nojidm mdijon
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
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Posted
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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
As He's omnipathic He feels all emotion. With His empathy too. The Spirit groans.
That's simply abuse of scripture. St Paul in Rom 8:26 is clearly talking about what the Holy Spirit causes within us so that we can correctly interact with God: "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."
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Originally posted by anteater:
I'm not sure I see the problem, at least from a practical-devotional view and it surprises me that RCC priests are not meant to say "God feels our pain". After all, they are more than allowed to say that Mary is the Mother of God, without having always to add the footnote that this pertains specifically to God Incarnate and does not imply that Mary was the source of the Eternal Divine Nature.
I'm not sure who said that about RC priests, but they are definitely not listening in practice... However, there is a clear difference. If Catholics paid any attention to their faith whatsoever, then they will have noticed that Jesus is claimed to be God, and that Mary is claimed to be Jesus' mother. Thus a correct understanding of "Mother of God" is available to them, and indeed it is the most likely response of the theological clueless. Whereas the worries about a misinterpretation of this label are theologically sophisticated. On the matter of God feeling emotions, however, a correct understanding requires theological sophistication, most Catholics will not have a sufficient background in theology and philosophy, the correct answer is emotionally repugnant to most people (because a "cold" human is) and the uneducated, spontaneous response is an illogical idolatry (basically turning the Father into a Hebrew Jupiter).
Frankly, "God feels our pain" is mostly used as an emotional shortcut to engaging with people in their (potential) distress. It is filled with meaning, both practically and theologically, by the human person saying it, in particular so if that person is a priest. It is not wrong, and it may even be the right thing to say in the circumstances. Problem is that if people always only get to hear that sort of thing, then it ends with this kind of thread celebrating the empathy of a Hebrew Jupiter called Yahweh. I guess it is better to hear about that god incarnating to save us, rather than to screw pretty women. But only just...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
That's simply abuse. And a bizarre straw man concerning a Hebrew Jupiter, which ...
And cliffdweller, I'm completely open theistic. I see no polarization at all.
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Love wins
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Steve Langton
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# 17601
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Posted
The following post from my blog a bit ago may be relevant to this one;
A Passionate God??
I was recently in an online forum and another participant mentioned how many early creeds etc. said that God was ‘without passions’ and so presumably had no emotions. I’ve come across similar interpretations in other recent books and discussions, seeing this as an abstract philosophical depiction of God as what we’d call a ‘cold fish’ – remote, distant, uninvolved, unmoved, with nothing much corresponding to our feelings and emotions. And rightly, this is rejected – God is not like that. But then, in an attempt to attribute passion and feeling to God, modern writers and speakers somehow slip into the idea of a rather weak and vulnerable God.
This couldn’t be more wrong; just read some of Augustine’s words where he prays to God and celebrates God’s love for him. Now I agree that in modern English usage it is broadly right to talk about a God who has ‘passions’ and who ‘passionately’ cares about things. The trouble is, the older theologians whose ideas are being questioned were Latin (or Greek) speakers, or later theologians trained in ‘classics’, for whom the connotations of ‘passion’ and its related words were very different. Like ‘gay’ in modern times, ‘passion’ has somewhat changed its meaning over the years ….
In the ‘classic’ languages, ‘passion’ is associated with ‘passive’ and with a whole notion of ‘suffering’. In this context a ‘passion’ is something that happens to you; something overpowering from outside that takes you over, that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drags you along to do something. Now the limited gods of paganism could have passions in that sense – look at Zeus, only has to see a pretty girl (or boy) and he is smitten and out of control, and cannot be satisfied till he’s had that pretty young thing in bed (often he’s too impatient to actually make it to a proper bed!). He cheerfully betrays his own goddess wife, Hera, and often not merely seduces but kidnaps and rapes, or deceives, the object of his ‘passion’. In other contexts also the pagan gods are portrayed as indeed moved by ‘passions’ – losing control and acting pettily, meanly, and with fickle inconstancy from one day to another.
However, when you think of the one true God, the Creator, the fount and origin of all things, the perfect being, can you really think of him having that kind of passion? If God could have that sort of passion – or rather, that sort of passion could have God – then there would be something(s), and likely not very desirable something(s), more powerful than God, able to frustrate his intentions and drag him into things against his better judgement. If God is truly God, there cannot be other things outside him that can so affect him. God is not a passive victim of wildly inconsistent passions. That was the real point being made by these ancient theologians.
But they did not depict God as cold and remote and unfeeling – far from it. They depict a God of warmth of feeling, of white-hot caring, way beyond human ‘passions’ in their sense of ‘passion’. But they didn’t see God as ‘passive’ in his feelings; God’s caring is all active, he takes the initiative and actively throws his whole magnificent wonderful self into his caring. Not that some external force grabs him and controls him, but that he himself is the very embodiment of that caring, that it flows out of him in majestic generosity. God is active love, not the passive victim of forces beyond his control. I’m tempted to coin a new word to get across the difference between our usage and the usage of those wise Latin-speakers. They would not, with their usage of words, describe God as ‘passionate’ – what they wanted to say about God might rather be conveyed by the word ‘actionate’.
Our God is Love!!
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
And cliffdweller, I'm completely open theistic. I see no polarization at all.
Really? Can you say more about that? What does it mean to be an Open Theist and yet argue for immutability or impassivity? The passion of God and refutation of classical/Hellenistic paradigms-- particularly immutability and impassivity-- are essential tenets of Open Theism as laid out by Pinnock, Sanders, et al (see, for example, The Openness of God) and more recently by Greg Boyd and the new wave of Open Theists. That's why AAR puts Open & Process theology under the heading of "relational theologies". I'm interested to hear what Open Theism would look like w/o those foundational principles.
[ 12. March 2014, 13:22: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Steve Langton:
The following post from my blog a bit ago may be relevant to this one;
A Passionate God??
I was recently in an online forum and another participant mentioned how many early creeds etc. said that God was ‘without passions’ and so presumably had no emotions. I’ve come across similar interpretations in other recent books and discussions, seeing this as an abstract philosophical depiction of God as what we’d call a ‘cold fish’ – remote, distant, uninvolved, unmoved, with nothing much corresponding to our feelings and emotions. And rightly, this is rejected – God is not like that. But then, in an attempt to attribute passion and feeling to God, modern writers and speakers somehow slip into the idea of a rather weak and vulnerable God.
This couldn’t be more wrong; just read some of Augustine’s words where he prays to God and celebrates God’s love for him. Now I agree that in modern English usage it is broadly right to talk about a God who has ‘passions’ and who ‘passionately’ cares about things. The trouble is, the older theologians whose ideas are being questioned were Latin (or Greek) speakers, or later theologians trained in ‘classics’, for whom the connotations of ‘passion’ and its related words were very different. Like ‘gay’ in modern times, ‘passion’ has somewhat changed its meaning over the years ….
(snip)
Our God is Love!!
This sounds very much like the Open view.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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stonespring
Shipmate
# 15530
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Posted
FYI, the Catholic theologian who got in trouble for the idea that "God feels our pain" (and a whole lot of other things) was Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ. I'm not defending anything she wrote, but I was saying that the impassivity of God can be one reason (among others) for Magisterial disapproval of a theologian's work in the RCC.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by stonespring:
FYI, the Catholic theologian who got in trouble for the idea that "God feels our pain" (and a whole lot of other things) was Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ. I'm not defending anything she wrote, but I was saying that the impassivity of God can be one reason (among others) for Magisterial disapproval of a theologian's work in the RCC.
Well, that one was about a well-known RC theologian publishing a book on doctrinal advances, see here. That's an entirely different ballgame to some RC priest saying something like this in a pastoral context.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
cliffdweller. ! I COMPLETELY agree. There is no way God is impassible. Which is what I thought I was saying. He doesn't have disordered passions and He comes to the party with perfect feelings and nothing that happens at the party (which is actually happening autonomously in Him) can change that. All feelings will be aligned in His, in Him. But it'll hurt. Everyone. Which it does, does it not? And just in case we can't believe that He feels our pain 110% as if He were only, fully each of us, He incarnated (squeezed in to an empty skull) and was killed (yeah, yeah, yeah shared in, partook of, being killed), by our pain, perhaps psychically. He became weak and vulnerable and ... disordered in His passions. Being human will do that to you. Or you're not human. Let alone one dying a vastly existential death robbed of psychic connection with God, utterly alone for the first and last time in mind robbing agonies.
And how did His Dad feel about that?
Of course He feels. How did I fail to communicate that? What made you think I don't know that?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
cliffdweller. ! I COMPLETELY agree. There is no way God is impassible. Which is what I thought I was saying. He doesn't have disordered passions and He comes to the party with perfect feelings and nothing that happens at the party (which is actually happening autonomously in Him) can change that. All feelings will be aligned in His, in Him. But it'll hurt. Everyone. Which it does, does it not? And just in case we can't believe that He feels our pain 110% as if He were only, fully each of us, He incarnated (squeezed in to an empty skull) and was killed (yeah, yeah, yeah shared in, partook of, being killed), by our pain, perhaps psychically. He became weak and vulnerable and ... disordered in His passions. Being human will do that to you. Or you're not human. Let alone one dying a vastly existential death robbed of psychic connection with God, utterly alone for the first and last time in mind robbing agonies.
And how did His Dad feel about that?
Of course He feels. How did I fail to communicate that? What made you think I don't know that?
Agh. Either I misread your post, or confused your post with that of another shipmate's. My apologies!
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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stonespring
Shipmate
# 15530
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by stonespring:
FYI, the Catholic theologian who got in trouble for the idea that "God feels our pain" (and a whole lot of other things) was Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ. I'm not defending anything she wrote, but I was saying that the impassivity of God can be one reason (among others) for Magisterial disapproval of a theologian's work in the RCC.
Well, that one was about a well-known RC theologian publishing a book on doctrinal advances, see here. That's an entirely different ballgame to some RC priest saying something like this in a pastoral context.
In my OP, I said theologian, not priest. I didn't say anything about priests saying "God feels our pain" in a pastoral setting. If Pope Francis started writing all that he says "pastorally" in encyclicals, that would be interesting, to say the least. But he doesn't and I doubt he ever will. I don't think it's what he intends to do as Pope. That's a tangent, though.
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