God has no potentiality - so He can't take on a human nature?

[rose321]

It is a question. If God is changeless, how can He take on human nature? 3000 years ago, God did not have a human nature. However, 2000 years ago, God did have a human nature. But God is changeless.

Respectfully opinion when pondering
Maybe Our Heavenly Father does change?

For he created Human Beings of flesh, animals of flesh, being the Creator of all

Has he not spread all his creation, his Kingdom, upon the earth?
Has he not>> manifested himself, his changes in all that he has created?
Has he not manifested his Infinite Image, in all life forms?
Has he not there forth given knowledge and understanding>>> in what is written>>>> I am what I am>>>>> in all that I have created, would this be true?

Who can create an image of all that I Am? Interesting is it not?

For no one lights a lamp, puts it under a bushel, nor does he put it in a hidden place. unquote

Rather he puts it on a lamp stand so that everyone who comes in and goes out will see its light. unquote

I am the light that is over all. I am the All.
The All came forth out of me.
And to me the All has come–
Split a piece of wood I am there
Lift the stone and you will find me there unquote

Know thyself one needs not to look far>> I am right where you stand > unquote

If flesh came into being because of the Spirit, it is a wonder…
But if the spirit because of the body, it is a wonder of works…
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth had taken up residence in this poverty…unquote

Pondering on respectfully toward. Peace

 

[mrsdizzyd]

Being a person or not, my point remains.

I must respond.

Here, I think you misunderstand what I mean by “person”. I am using St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition. Pay close attention to how he defines the person and how this applies to God:

Person has a different meaning from “nature.” For nature, as has been said (Article 1), designates the specific essence which is signified by the definition. And if nothing was found to be added to what belongs to the notion of the species, there would be no need to distinguish the nature from the suppositum of the nature (which is the individual subsisting in this nature), because every individual subsisting in a nature would be altogether one with its nature. Now in certain subsisting things we happen to find what does not belong to the notion of the species, viz. accidents and individuating principles, which appears chiefly in such as are composed of matter and form. Hence in such as these the nature and the suppositum really differ; not indeed as if they were wholly separate, but because the suppositum includes the nature, and in addition certain other things outside the notion of the species. Hence the suppositum is taken to be a whole which has the nature as its formal part to perfect it; and consequently in such as are composed of matter and form the nature is not predicated of the suppositum, for we do not say that this man is his manhood. But if there is a thing in which there is nothing outside the species or its nature (as in God), the suppositum and the nature are not really distinct in it, but only in our way of thinking, inasmuch it is called “nature” as it is an essence, and a “suppositum” as it is subsisting. And what is said of a suppositum is to be applied to a person in rational or intellectual creatures; for a person is nothing else than “an individual substance of rational nature,” according to Boethius. Therefore, whatever adheres to a person is united to it in person, whether it belongs to its nature or not. Hence, if the human nature is not united to God the Word in person, it is nowise united to Him; and thus belief in Incarnation is altogether done away with, and Christian faith wholly overturned. Therefore, inasmuch as the Word has a human nature united to Him, which does not belong to His Divine Nature, it follows that the union took place in the Person of the Word, and not in the nature.

The fact that the union occurs in the person is the very hinge of the argument that the incarnation is reasonable. It makes a very big difference.

St. Thomas Aquinas continues:

Although in God Nature and Person are not really distinct, yet they have distinct meanings, as was said above, inasmuch as person signifies after the manner of something subsisting. And because human nature is united to the Word, so that the Word subsists in it, and not so that His Nature receives therefrom any addition or change, it follows that the union of human nature to the Word of God took place in the person, and not in the nature.

 

[mrsdizzyd]

Continued

And, so we end up back here with St. Thomas Aquinas again:

Since the Divine Person is infinite, no addition can be made to it: Hence Cyril says [Council of Ephesus, Part I, ch. 26]: “We do not conceive the mode of conjunction to be according to addition”; just as in the union of man with God, nothing is added to God by the grace of adoption, but what is Divine is united to man; hence, not God but man is perfected.

Human nature is united to God by way of the union of the person. God subsists in this, but He is not receiving any additions, He is not changing. As HarryStotle points out, everything already exists in God. There is nothing within God to be perfected. Again, He is infinite.

 

[Lucretius]

I like to think of God to be like a road sign. It does not change. Yet it is causing so much change outside of it.

I’m not sure how to apply that analogy to creation. The road sign directs our motions by imputing onto our driving a common order.

But the act of creation is not merely a standard of order, and God is not merely a standard for perfection.

Our understanding of the perfection/unchangingness of God has to overcome analogies to inanimate rocks. The first natural step, I think, is to look at the animate, where we get the soul-body analogy.

But this analogy is also imperfect (as you yourself see), because living things, even though they move themselves, are still their bodies and require them. That said, it is still a useful analogy in so far as it brings to mind the exercising of powers that don’t completely move the living thing in their exercise.

Inanimate substances doesn’t act, they interact. The petals of my bike are moved to move the wheels. Newton’s third law indicates that any inanimate motion involves being acted upon just as much as it means acting upon. Relativity implies that active and passive motion are only relative. Reactants and products in chemical reactions are called so relative to our needs, not the motion itself.

But animate substances, the exercise of these powers involve a real asymmetry. In animate substances, even though they are moved in so far as they are physical bodies too and are using physical bodies to move, they move things through activity that, in itself, is not moved by physical substances.

This is clear in how interactions between physical bodies are reversible, but in volition, my will moves my hand, but moving my hand does not move my will. But this is true in all living things: messing with the chemistry of a living thing’s metabolism may frustrate the exercise of the operation, but this doesn’t change the living thing’s actual possessing the power of metabolism, which is clear in how the living thing begins metabolizing again after the chemical changes are corrected, and yet a dead body with all the same bodily structure doesn’t metabolize.

Living things then in a sense use physical bodies for their own purposes that transcend mere physical activity even if they are very dependent on the physical for their exercise and stable existence.

Continued below…

 

[Lucretius]

Continued…

God is like this insofar as he too transcends mere physical matter in his nature and his operations, with an unchanging soul moving and not being moved by physical matter (this is a hint also why the objection that the classical idea of God is impersonal fails, by the way: God is pure activity, and as we can see here, the higher the activity, the more immanant, creative, and intelligent it is).

The problem with the pantheist is that he doesn’t realize that God transcends even life, and that his operations do not need to be mediated through matter at all. In fact, the very existence of matter is a result of his immediate operation!

But the pantheist is seeing something right, that even though God’s activity is immediate, he can choose to mediate it in matter and creatures.

In fact, this is just what creation is, for in creation God’s activity is the source of creatures’ (this is one of the conclusions from the First Way). God doesn’t need creation at all for his activity, and yet he choose to mediate and share being and activity and existence and happiness in and with creatures. The Incarnation is the ultimate fruit of the act of creation: God sharing even his Divine nature and operations with spiritual animals. This us why the Scripture likens Christ to a new creation or a rebirth, and that, through Christ, we will see God as he sees himself.

The real problem with pantheism is that they believe that God is dependent on physical matter. Creation might be likened to a body in so far as God is the ultimate source of its existence, nature, and activity, just as the soul is the proximate source of a living body’s existence, nature, and activity, but it can also as easily be likened to artifacts, where the artifact and user are clear distinct in nature and power, even though the analogy is still imperfect, for our artifacts are not so dependent on us that they couldn’t exist without our immediate operation, even in terms of material causality. Creation (and Incarnation), then, is “God’s body,” but it isn’t a body he needs but one he freely creates and takes upon himself by choice, not by nature.

We have to remember that analogy to the relationship between soul and body and user and instrument both approximate the Reality that transcends then both. They may be contradictory on our level of existence, but they are unified on higher levels, just as cats are multiple in the natural world but one unified concept “cat” in the mind.

Continued below…

 

[Lucretius]

Continued…

As you can see here, this approach ties in nicely with HarryStotle’s insight that God possess all the perfections of creatures, as we have seen, the perfection of inanimate creatures, living creatures, intellectual creatures, etc., and yet transcends them all, and yet even more surprising, chooses to work within creatures and creation despite this.

So, rather than the Incarnation being a kind of pantheism, it actually helps better approximate why a perfect God who doesn’t need to create would bother to create in the first place. He does it because, as saint Thomas says, higher beings communicate themselves to lower beings, rather than hord up their perfections like the French King horded up his power in Versailles. In other words, perfection is infinitely humble and generous:

Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.

Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

God is the rich man, the riches, pure act, who is so generous that he shares being and act and existence even with nothing, as being nothing is the poorest anything can be.

Christi pax.

 

[Lucretius]

What I’m trying to get at with all this is that you seem to be imagining God like a stationary rock, unmovable by our power, while you should also be imagining God, more so even, as perfect living operation, dynamic, moving material parts from within them without itself being moved by them.

Having no potential means not being moved by anything, it doesn’t mean not moving. The heart is dynamic and moving, and yet is unchanging (if it changed it would stop, and I would die).

I think your image of “unchanging” is getting in the way of understanding what it means for God to be unchanging. Images are tools for understanding: and much of the time we need to negate our analogies as much as we use them, and never reduce our understanding to one analogy completely, especially the higher the kind of being we are trying to understand is, otherwise we will fall into many errors.

Statues of Christ are tools for worship and contemplation, just as images in imagination are. But if we aren’t careful, images can become idols as much as statues can.

Christi pax.

 

[MonteRCMS]

What I’m trying to get at with all this is that you seem to be imagining God like a stationary rock, unmovable by our power, while you should also be imagining God, more so even, as perfect living operation, dynamic, moving material parts from within them without itself being moved by them.

Having no potential means not being moved by anything, it doesn’t mean not moving. The heart is dynamic and moving, and yet is unchanging (if it changed it would stop, and I would die).

I think your image of “unchanging” is getting in the way of understanding what it means for God to be unchanging. Images are tools for understanding: and much of the time we need to negate our analogies as much as we use them, and never reduce our understanding to one analogy completely, especially the higher the kind of being we are trying to understand is, otherwise we will fall into many errors.

Statues of Christ are tools for worship and contemplation, just as images in imagination are. But if we aren’t careful, images can become idols as much as statues can.

Christi pax.

Start with that … but add an IQ of INFINITY.

 

[BridgetN]

God can do anything…anything, if He wants to take on a human nature, then He can.
It all boils down to how much do you believe in God’s power?

 

[HarryStotle]

I’d like to thank HarryStotle for reading my points very carefully, because everyone else are ignoring some key points. For example, people are repeating that the only change is in the human nature even though my original post wrote of a form of pantheism that has God as a changeless soul of a changing universe. The hypostatic union has a parallel to the universe being a union of divine and physical to make the universe to be God.

You do understand that pantheism is ruled out by Aquinas’ point? God is not the “soul” of the universe because the universe has no soul.

The existence of the universe is dependent upon God but God is not to be equated with the universe. Pantheism claims that the universe, in a final sense, is God. That is not Aquinas’ view.

 

[AlNg]

Having no potential means not being moved by anything

Do our prayers move God to help us ?

 

[TheOldColonel]

You claim to not understand and then challenge others to prove you wrong. So which is it you seek… guidance or a debate?

 

[StAugustine]

Do you believe God is a person? I will assume yes.

If God is a person, an hypostasis, an actually subsistent, albeit incomprehensible substance, then a unity on the level of Hypostasis introduces no potentiality into the divine essence, for it is not an essential union, but a Hypostatic one, on the level of personhood.

So in other words, the humanity God creates in the womb of the Virgin Mary, he makes this his own humanity and identifies it with himself, but without a fusion of natures. He therefore remains ineffable pure act AND True man existing in two Modes, but without division and without fusion. He therefore experiences the potentiality of humanity as his own without introducing it into his nature.

 

[TheOldColonel]

If the nature of God is “incomprehensible substance,” then how would you know so much about it? Your argument falls apart the moment you make that claim.

 

[Dovekin]

Do our prayers move God to help us ?

God is moving to help us before we pray. In the womb before we were born, in the beginning, God hears our prayer and does what we see as happening now.

Anything we say about God is an analogy based on our time and space bound conceptions. In our lives, “actions” change things, moving them from potential to real. In God, all is “action.” The world changes to accomodate that action and we describe it as something God does.
The sun rises, but in fact the Sun stands still while we fly around it.

 

[Aulef]

Pope Saint Leo the Great said, neither the glory of the superior nature destroyed the inferior, nor the elevation of the inferior nature diminished the dignity of the superior.

To challenge one of the misteries revealed by God because one doesn’t understand it is a bad move. No one understands His misteries, you see? We simply accept them as Truth.

We can look at are the boundary conditions and consequences in order to grasp a little bit of it. There are some of these below.

• This is a mistery. We don’t understand them, as mentioned before. We give glory to God for being able to know them.
• If Jesus Christ didn’t have a human nature, His sacrifice wouldn’t open Heaven to us.
• The Word (or Son), second person of the Holy Trinity, didn’t add anything to His being when He incarnated. It was the created human body that gained divine virtues.

Meditate on Saint John 1, 1-15, to begin with…

 

[StAugustine]

Because we only know what is revealed to the degree it is revealed.

Incomprehensible does not mean utterly unknowable. It means incapable of exhaustive and complete knowledge.

Therefore your claim does not follow.

 

[AlNg]

Anything we say about God is an analogy

This might be why so many people are agnostics.

 

[StAugustine]

Why would that be? Analogy does not mean a perfect imitation, but “like-but-more-than” or “like-and-unlike” or “like-but-beyond.”

Agnostics err in denying the reality of revelation as a starting place.

 

[AlNg]

Agnostics err in denying the reality of revelation as a starting place.

Not necessarily. They are just not sure. Since there are so many analogies, metaphors, hyperboles, etc., they say that they cannot know for certain.
Take for example, the statement that if your eye causes you to sin, then pluck it out. I don’t see too many Christians plucking out their eyes.
Or the case when God changed his mind. Exodus 32:14.or Jeremiah 26:19