Tom,
Thanks for this excellent thread. I have been thinking about these issues in the past few years, because I am teaching at an institution where the evangelical intellectual movement called “open theism” has been prominent. (In fact, it has caused a lot of controversy here.) One of the leading open theist philosophers, William Hasker, is a professor emeritus here and has urged on me considerations very like the ones you raise about God knowing our actions and loving us as individuals.
One of the issues I have with the open theists, and apparently with your position as well, is that I find paradox to be not only acceptable but even desired in any theology. However, I don’t think paradox and contradiction are the same thing. The mark of a true paradox, I think, is that it leaves room for there to be a resolution we cannot understand. We aren’t just stating nonsense.
The Councils do indeed assume God’s impassibility. However, in a sense the actual conclusions of the Councils question God’s impassibility. The whole point of Christian teaching–the thing that led to so much controversy in the early centuries–is that the Christian doctrine of Incarnation posits of God actions that shouldn’t be possible by the theory of impassibility. This is why pagan intellectuals ridiculed Christianity, and probably why St. Paul calls Christianity “foolishness.”
I don’t think that simply chucking impassibility and the other traditional attributes is the answer. I think that then the Incarnation loses much of its meaning. To say that Zeus has a son is not paradoxical and not even very important. Zeus as defined in Greek mythology is a superhuman being with a body of a more “refined” nature than ours, but basically a being of a similar kind to us. To say that an immaterial and impassible God enters history is paradoxical, but for that very reason it’s something worth basing one’s faith on.
That does not relieve us of the responsibility of trying to figure out how to talk about this without contradiction. Here I think your criticisms of Aquinas may have merit–they are similar to those of the open theists. I love Aquinas and am still trying to understand him better and to see how these critiques can be answered. But I think the Eastern Orthodox may have a better approach. I don’t think you are right in ascribing to them the view that contradiction simply doesn’t matter, though no doubt some of them speak that way. Rather, there are two key claims made by the Orthodox that are relevant to the questions you raise.
- God’s essence is unknowable. This is different from the Joseph Smith quote you gave, and even from the position of Aquinas, because it doesn’t simply say that as we are now we can’t understand the reality of God. It posits that even in a glorified state we cannot make positive statements about the divine Essence.
- Orthodox theology makes a distinction between God’s essence and His energies. God’s essence is indeed impassible and even unknowable. But the divine Persons act in history (always as one). This action or energy can be known and experienced–and conversely this allows us to speak of God knowing and loving us as individuals.
This certainly raises questions and difficulties. It’s certainly paradoxical. But I don’t think it’s contradictory, and I think it may help address some of the questions you raise.
If you are interested in exploring Eastern Christian thought further, I’d recommend the following books:
*The Orthodox Church, *by Kallistos Ware. You may know this already–it’s the basic textbook on the subject, covering history and theology.
*Eastern Orthodox Theology: A Contemporary Reader, *edited by Daniel Clendenin. This contains essays by some of the leading modern Orthodox theologians.
*Byzantine Theology, *by John Meyendorff. This is both a historical and theological survey of medieval Orthodox thought.
*The Orthodox Way, *again by Ware. This is a short book on the Orthodox spiritual life, more personal than
The Orthodox Church.
And finally, there are three Byzantine theologians who are particularly important for understanding these issues: Maximus the Confessor (instrumental in the Sixth Council), Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas. (The fourth-century Cappadocians, and the eighth-century theologian John of Damascus, are also very important.)
Edwin
