Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for May 2017

Friend of God? What does that mean?

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A favorite song of many evangelical Christians repeats the refrain:

“I am a friend of God, he calls me, ‘Friend.'”

But what does it mean to be friend of God, or more specifically, of Jesus Christ? The answer to the question leads me to hum that song line rather than proclaim it for fear of presumption.

To be Jesus’ friend is something that he decides based upon the state of my soul:

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.[1]

But on what standard does Jesus call people friends? Just sentences earlier he said:

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”[2]

The particular sort of friendship Jesus wants to strike up with us is quite irregular. Very few friendships work this way. Our typical idea of friendship is basically Aristotelian: those who hold things in common. Friends spend time together, help each other, and think about things similarly. I think that Jesus’ understanding of friendship is similar. But in his case, to be his friend is none other than to be his disciple. In other words, in friendship Jesus doesn’t fit himself into your life paradigm as one who shares in your life, but demands that you alter your life to match his paradigm. Why? In John’s gospel, he is presented as the logos or logical structure behind the world. To be friends with Jesus is, in the final analysis, to be realigned with God and with nature. So, Jesus cannot alter the structure of the universe to you when you’re the one who is sinful. But he can offer friendship with us by offering to transform us. This is a difficult pill to swallow, but alas, it is the medicine Jesus offers.

References

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2016), Jn 15:15–16.

[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2016), Jn 15:12–14.

Workless Society?

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A Guardian article speculates on the sense of meaning in the world about a world beyond work:

You don’t need to go all the way to Israel to see the world of post-work. If you have at home a teenage son who likes computer games, you can conduct your own experiment. Provide him with a minimum subsidy of coke and pizza, and then remove all demands for work and all parental supervision. The likely outcome is that he will remain in his room for days, glued to the screen. He won’t do any homework or housework, will skip school, skip meals, and even skip showers and sleep. Yet he is unlikely to suffer from boredom or a sense of purposelessness. At least not in the short-term.

I suggest that as helpful as virtual worlds, like video games, sports, and fiction are for providing human meaning, there is very little evidence that those worlds provide positive biological incentives for flourishing when they replace the material world. Video games, fiction, and sports add an abundance of meaning to our material lives in the context a larger culture of ritual, story, tradition, and transcendent aspirations. But I do not think that those elements of life can substitute for the larger religious and philosophical stories contained in cultures which have evolved over thousands of years. Replacing them with purely simulated realities which have no history of supporting biological needs such as reproduction, creativity, and feelings physically productive seems dangerous.

 

Narrative and Theology in Scripture

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In the Old Testament there are two ways of speaking about God that cannot be reconciled if both are taken to be literally true.

The Old Testament makes clear that God will not punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty:

The word of the LORD came to me: “What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’? As I live, declares the Lord GOD, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die.
(Ezekiel 18:1-4 ESV)

The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
(Ezekiel 18:20 ESV)

And the Old Testament also makes clear that God punishes the innocent for the sins of the guilty:

David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” And Nathan said to David, “The LORD also has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child who is born to you shall die.”
(2 Samuel 12:13-14 ESV)

So which is it? In this case, I think it’s reasonable to take Ezekiel’s statement as God’s philosophy of punishment, more or less, and 1 Samuel’s narrative as a theological interpretation of the death of David’s child that cannot be accepted as ‘literally true’ theologically. Of course, the question must be asked, “If God doesn’t literally kill the innocent for the sins of others, what lessons should be gleaned from the passage about the death of David’s child? The New Testament says that Scripture is inspired for “training in righteousness.” So, I suggest that we look for meanings/applications like these:

  1. Your sins do affect others negatively, even if you hide them. The Davidic story makes this clear.
  2. Just because you have a special position in life, you don’t have a free pass with respect to sin.
  3. Just because you’re close to God, your family is not exempt from tragedy.
  4. Moral indignation, as David displayed when he heard Nathan’s parable (go refresh if you don’t remember) is not necessarily or ever a sign of moral maturity.

There are several other places in Scripture where such a softening of the text is “necessary.” The big question is, “why would God allow such expressions into Scripture if he was going to say elsewhere that they weren’t precise expressions of his nature or involvement in the events described?”

God’s Eternity

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The other day, I was discussing God’s eternity with my good friend, Chris. The most difficult aspect of the concept is determining how to speak coherently of God’s eternity while also confessing our faith in the Incarnation. Below are two paragraphs from Boethius that help us define God’s eternity in the first place. I read Boethius in undergrad, but I hadn’t thought about these passages until I was reminded of them by Eleonore Stump in her book on the thought of Thomas Aquinas:

(Consolation of Philosophy) That God is eternal, then, is the common judgment of all who live by reason. Let us therefore consider what eternity is, for this makes plain to us both the divine nature and knowledge. Eternity, then, is the complete possession all at once (totum simul) of illimitable life. This becomes clearer by comparison with temporal things. For whatever lives in time proceeds as something present from the past into the future, and there is nothing placed in time that can embrace the whole extent of its life equally. Indeed, on the contrary, it does not yet grasp tomorrow but yesterday it has already lost; and even in the life of today you live no more fully than in a mobile, transitory moment … Therefore, whatever includes and possesses the whole fullness of illimitable life at once and is such that nothing future is absent from it and nothing past has flowed away, this is rightly judged to be eternal, and of this it is necessary both that being in full possession of itself it be always present to itself and that it have the infinity of mobile time present [to it].

(On the Trinity) What is said of God, [namely, that] he is always, indeed signifies a unity, as if he had been in all the past, is in all the present – however that might be – [and] will be in all the future. That can be said, according to the philosophers, of the heaven and of the imperishable bodies; but it cannot be said of God in the same way. For he is always in that for him always has to do with present time. And there is this great difference between the present of our affairs, which is now, and that of the divine: our now makes time and sempiternity, as it were, running along; but the divine now, remaining, and not moving, and standing still, makes eternity. If you add ‘semper’ to ‘eternity’, you get sempiternity, the perpetual running resulting from the flowing, tireless now.

So, God’s eternity is that God’s limitless life is possessed by God all at once without the passing of the past or the anticipation of the future. This was the common definition in the medieval era.

One of the claims Stump makes elsewhere is that God’s eternity means that there is a sense in which Christ is eternally incarnate (see the last section of the review) for us.