Hard Questions

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Nickkname

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God is eternal. God is love. God is perfect. This we know. From these truths comes my questions:
  1. A certain saint once said, I think, “Where love dose not work, there is no love.” God has not worked forever, so there was a “time” when he was not working. So, if what the saint said is true, than how can God be love?
  2. If God cannot change, how than could God create the universe, for if by working, he would be changed? Not in the sense that he changed himself, but his immobility. Granted, you could very well say, “God is simple and unchangeable, so he did not change himself,” but the fact that he did not create, than did create, means he changed his immobility. Unless God has always been mobile, via the communal of love that is the Holy Trinity?
  3. God has always been, so was there ever a “time” he did not think of us?
  4. How is the Son and the Spirit, the very Word and Breath of God, eternall begotten of God and proceeding from God? In essense, how is God eternally begotten of and proceeding from God? Begotten and proceeding are actions, so there has to be a “time” when they were not? Yes, I know, we can only use human languages to speak of God, so our understanding of God is very imperfect, but, how can the second and third Persons of the Holy Trinity be eternally begotten and eternally proceeding? Unless “eternally” is used in reference to the eternity of God, i.e., not in the sense of always having come from God but in the sense of coming from an eternal God? (I hope this isn’t coming off as me thinking there are three Gods; I believe in only one God, the Holy Trinity).
 
Ecclesiasticus or Sirach. 3:
17. My son, perform your tasks in meekness; then you will be loved by those whom God accepts.
  1. The greater you are, the more you must humble yourself; so you will find favor in the sight of the Lord.
  2. For great is the might of the Lord; he is glorified by the humble.
  3. Seek not what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power.
  4. Reflect upon what has been assigned to you,
for you do not need what is hidden.
  1. Do not meddle in what is beyond your tasks,
for matters too great for human understanding have been shown you.
 
I don’t know any of that, and your questions really aren’t too nasty compared to some (problem of evil, say), but I’ll help as best I can 🙂
  1. Time is a human concept, our way of avoiding information overload. God does not work within time; rather, the divine is outside time and unbound by it. From our point of view, God has worked, is working, and will always work; from an eternal standpoint, it might be said that the divine is its Work, or at least the supreme Origin.
  2. Same deal, really. When time started up, some things were created in a new frame of reference, but others already had one. God doesn’t have to give a rip about time. The question of God acting is a good one, but again, that’s trying to shoehorn the divine into a framework manageable by humans, and isn’t really valid. A deity does not start acting, or, for that matter, stop. Am Anfang war die Tat – In the beginning was the Act, as Goethe put it.
  3. No. The divine does not change state, since as you rightly imply, to change state is to say that one state or the other is imperfect. And since you subscribe to a vision of creation that all leads up to the making of humanity (how anthropocentric! 😛 ), Time itself is only a step towards that end goal.
  4. ‘Eternally begotten’ makes as much sense as anything else about Christianity when read as ‘ever-proceeding’. Remember, you’re dealing with a non-temporal state here. Look at the introduction to John’s gospel: In the beginning (nb: don’t think that means a temporal beginning) was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. The second person of the trinity is the word of creation: let there be. Logos, in the Greek – the voice of God is God, the Son, that which proceeds from the Creator. Same with the love of God, the Spirit, the petty argument about the origin of which made you guys start a feud with the Orthodox that has yet to be resolved after well over a millennium. ‘Always and ever’ is about as close to eternity as the human mind can come and remain un-shattered, but it’s not exactly what it really means. It’s timelessness, not ‘forever and ever amen’.
 
Nickkname said:
God is eternal. God is love. God is perfect. This we know. From these truths comes my questions:
  1. A certain saint once said, I think, “Where love dose not work, there is no love.” God has not worked forever, so there was a “time” when he was not working. So, if what the saint said is true, than how can God be love?
Click to expand...
The saint in question seems to have been referring to love as experienced by humans, not the love of God. This saints words bear a striking resemblance to James 2:18: Demonstrate your faith to me without works, and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.

We will have to address the notion of “time” a little later. Suffice it to say for now, that there was never a time when God did not love because time came into existence with creation. If God’s love is at work in creation (i.e., from the beginning of time), there was never a time when he did not love.

Moreover, God’s love is eternal precisely because:
(1) God knows and loves himself (I will avoid the reference to the Trinity here)
(2) God is eternal
(3) It follows that God’s love is eternal.
(4) And since all that can be predicated of the divine nature is identical to the divine nature (absolute simplicity of God), God is love.
  1. If God cannot change, how than could God create the universe, for if by working, he would be changed? Not in the sense that he changed himself, but his immobility. Granted, you could very well say, “God is simple and unchangeable, so he did not change himself,” but the fact that he did not create, than did create, means he changed his immobility. Unless God has always been mobile, via the communal of love that is the Holy Trinity?
Click to expand...
It may not make sense to us, but God’s act of creation is in a sense an eternal act. Before creation, there was absolutely no composition because (a) God is not composed and (b) there was nothing but God. Therefore, there was nothing that could be consider “before” or “after” or “one” and “another” or “this” and “that.”

Moreover, the act of creation itself was not technically a change. For change to occur there must be some change from some state of affairs to another, with some underlying continuity. For example, when a leaf changes color, the underlying continuity is the substance of the leaf. What changes is the color. This is called an accidental change. Another species of change is substantial change: one thing is corrupted while another is generated. For example, the leaf dies. It was once a living substance. Upon its death, it ceases to be a living substance but is resolved into its constitutive elements which no longer act as an integrated whole. So, we begin with a living leaf, and we end with a collection of chemicals, minerals, etc. But there is still an underlying continuity, matter itself. (Specifically, in this case, prime matter.)

Creation could not have been a change because there was nothing underlying it that remained permanent. (And nothing-ness does not count. Nothing-ness is not a real being.) If we use the word “change” we can only use it analogically. What changes is a “relation,” a metaphysical category that indicates a relatedness of one thing to another, or two things to each other, for example. But since God is not a subject which admits extrinsic related-ness to another, creation is a change of relation to Him. Therefore, creation is a change of relation.

In fact, there was a medieval dispute about whether a moment of creation could be proven. St. Bonaventure said that it could be. St. Thomas Aquinas said that it could be neither proved nor disproved because the concept of eternal creation is a possible one. Rather, a moment of creation was to be taken on faith.

Thus, we see that God (being simple) cannot be the subject of no relation, then subject of a relation. Rather, creation in its entirety is the subject of a relation to God. That is, creation is related to (as in depending upon) God, but not God to creation.

This is born out in other ways. We see the world and interpret it according to definitions that we form. Definitions are composed of genus and specific difference. For example, human beings are in the genus of animal but have a specific difference that differentiates us from other animals, rationality. Thus, human beings are ‘rational animals.’ God, not a feature of the world, is not capable of definition because not only is (a) God not in a genus (according to the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas) but (b) God is not a genus either. God transcends creation so as not to be a mere feature of it. God is not a feature of our experience.
  1. God has always been, so was there ever a “time” he did not think of us?
Click to expand...
We have just seen that creation did not take place in time. Time itself is a creature. Time, as a matter of fact, only exists as a relation itself. It is the relationship of a certain type of change (change which has succession that can be numbered) to a rational mind which does in fact number it.

We have also found that God knows himself eternally and perfectly. God’s perfect knowledge of himself involves knowing how creatures could imitate, be patterned after, some aspect of his divine nature. Therefore, in knowing himself, God knows us, and for all eternity. So there never was a “time” when God was not thinking of us.
 
  1. How is the Son and the Spirit, the very Word and Breath of God, eternall begotten of God and proceeding from God? In essense, how is God eternally begotten of and proceeding from God? Begotten and proceeding are actions, so there has to be a “time” when they were not? Yes, I know, we can only use human languages to speak of God, so our understanding of God is very imperfect, but, how can the second and third Persons of the Holy Trinity be eternally begotten and eternally proceeding? Unless “eternally” is used in reference to the eternity of God, i.e., not in the sense of always having come from God but in the sense of coming from an eternal God? (I hope this isn’t coming off as me thinking there are three Gods; I believe in only one God, the Holy Trinity).
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Please allow me to propose a helpful analogy (though all analogies fail to capture what God is). Imagine an eternal flower. The root is the Father. The stem is the Son. The blossom is the Holy Spirit. They are all related to each other. Although the flowering plant is eternal, the stem in some way is related to the root, “eternally begotten” of the root because eternally related to the root. The blossom is eternally related to both the root and the stem as coming from one principle (the root-stem) so is related to them both eternally as to a single “source.” Though the flower is eternal, there is a certain sense in which each “person” of the flowering plant is eternally begotten by being eternally related.

This is the best analogy I could come up with. I apologize.
 
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