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Valke2
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That’s a good Idea. I’ll call it “Midrash” (name for stories that highlight a teaching of Torah).Hey Valke2, why don’t you open a thread of inspiring stories?? thx
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inJESUS
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thx 
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Mystophilus
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This certainly does represent a significant difference between them, and is a major component of the issue itself.
God delivers a series of questions which illuminate the very finite limits of Job’s knowledge, and his understanding, but never rebukes him simply for asking questions. Job’s mistake was the formation of conclusions based on ignorance (42:3), not the argument itself.
Notably, the NT says a very similar thing to the OT passages, when Paul directs the Thessalonian believers, in Thessalonians 5:21, to ‘test everything’.
Abraham, Moses and the angel, likewise, all questioned the validity of God’s actions as compared to some external schema of ‘right’ actions: they judged God according to a standard which was independent of God, and God did not object, perhaps because, as you noted, their motives were pure.
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Adonia
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Amen brother! I did the same - God won! ( His will be done.)
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Mr.Ex_Nihilo
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I agree almost 100%-- except the part that they judged God according to a standard which was independent of God. God, when using the principles of non-contradiction, must not act indepentantly of the principles that he asks us to adhere to.
More to the point, God more or less, appears to embody the very essense of the fulfillment of the law. In other words, if you take the 10 Commandments and phrase them in a positive form, you get a picture of what God is.
So for example, if one looks at the commandment, thou shalt not kill and reverses it to thou shalt live, one is given an aspect of God that he must always be: alive. In fact, in God, we obtain eternal life.
But God is not just the source of our eternal life. God is our eternal life-- which is why he asks us not to kill in the first place. To do so, in my opinion, contradicts his very essense and being.
Therefore, they didn’t necessarilly judge God according to a standard which was independent of God. They judged God according to God’s own essense and called him upon it-- which is what he asks us to do.
And if he failed to live up to his word, that would make him out to be a liar-- and God’s not a liar. God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?
God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged.
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b_justb
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For all of the theological differences I have with the American Evangelical Community one of things they have exactly right on is the idea that Christianity is about a “personal relationship with Jesus.”
If one is going to have a personal relationship with another person and that relationship is going to be real; then there will be up’s and down’s. Laughter and tears. Commonality and arguments.
However, I like Carol Marie’s remarks: “No name calling.” Very good advice
If one is going to have a personal relationship with another person and that relationship is going to be real; then there will be up’s and down’s. Laughter and tears. Commonality and arguments.
However, I like Carol Marie’s remarks: “No name calling.” Very good advice
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Mystophilus
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The standard is independent of God because it contradicts God’s words. God says, “I will do this.” The human, or angel, says, “No, God, that is not right.” In so doing, they raise up a value system which is independent of the revealed will of God: in this system, an action is right or wrong regardless of God’s preference for it.
If God is omnipotent, and therefrom omniscient, then God knew what they would say before they said it, but that only makes God’s action more important: God gave the them the opportunity to do what was right rather than what was safe. Had the young Moses disagreed with the Pharoah in that way, the Pharoah would, most likely, have given him to the crocodiles.
This answers Socrates’ question to Euthyphro: in the Bible, God does what is good because it is good; it is not good because God does it. Of course, the fact that good is not merely a derivative of God’s will is something that more clearly defines the goodness of God: rather than being a tyrant who performs an act and then ratifies it by the sanction of personal power, God chooses to do what is right even though there is no one who could punish God for doing what is wrong. Despite having absolute power, God remains absolutely uncorrupted.
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PaulDupre
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Man, I hope so…or I’m in big trouble!
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Mr.Ex_Nihilo
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Can God actually choose to do evil?
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Valke2
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According to Judaism, Nothing is outside of God. God created both good and evil. We can choose whether to engage in a good or evil act.
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Tantum_ergo
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According to what I understand of the Catholic position, God created GOOD. Evil is the “absence” of good; evil is NOT something which is created. Unlike say the idea of day and night, for night is NOT just the “absence of day” and vice versa. When God created good (and you will note in Genesis or in the first book of the Torah that, after every creation, ), there was always the option for a being with free will to CHOOSE either the ‘absence’ of good or to choose the good. But unlike the Zoroastrian concept of two equal but oppositional beings and actions of “good” and “evil”, our God is not only ALL GOOD Himself but has only created good. If by any stretch in reading one of the wisdom literatures one sees something like “I the Lord created good and evil” it can be understood as God through his creation of good thus allowing the corollary of “not good/evil” as a free choice, with the divine understanding AND capacity that any being who choose the evil would somehow by God’s infinite goodness and omnipotence have that evil be ultimately turned to good. (<Oh happy fault, oh necessary sin of Adam that won for us such a glorious Redeemer> would be a case in point).
But for God to “create” evil? How could He? Nothing that is all Good can create evil; it is impossible, and by impossible I mean illogical and unreasonable. Like the old connundrum of “Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift”, the answer is simply that if something is not REASONABLE then God WILL NOT do it. “Can” or “cannot” have no bearing here. God is not bound by human reason but God will not have a Divine reason that CONTRADICTS human reason. IOW, God tells us “thou shalt not kill”. Therefore, though God’s reason is infinite and ours limited, God’s reason is NOT going to have Him saying, “I can kill, but you can’t”, making HIS reason CONTRADICT our own. God’s law is perfectly just and true for ALL.
Just my 2 cents here. . .
But for God to “create” evil? How could He? Nothing that is all Good can create evil; it is impossible, and by impossible I mean illogical and unreasonable. Like the old connundrum of “Can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift”, the answer is simply that if something is not REASONABLE then God WILL NOT do it. “Can” or “cannot” have no bearing here. God is not bound by human reason but God will not have a Divine reason that CONTRADICTS human reason. IOW, God tells us “thou shalt not kill”. Therefore, though God’s reason is infinite and ours limited, God’s reason is NOT going to have Him saying, “I can kill, but you can’t”, making HIS reason CONTRADICT our own. God’s law is perfectly just and true for ALL.
Just my 2 cents here. . .
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Mystophilus
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Interestingly, in the Hebrew, the second day is not described as good. The habit of English translations to include that in v.8 is from the LXX. One rabbinical comment has it that the second day was the day on which Hell was created, and, thus, God could not see that it was good, because Hell is not.
I like your explanation, but I would point out that this does not remove the fact that an omnipotent-omniscient God who creates a creature which will perpetrate evil is, while not actually creating evil or performing the evil act, allowing that evil act to occur, with full foreknowledge and complete power to prevent it.
Yet God does exactly that. God says, “I can kill, but you cannot”, hence the Flood, the plagues, the judgements, etc.
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Valke2
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Hashem created the inclination to do good and the inclination to do evil. He created both good and evil. I agree.
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Mr.Ex_Nihilo
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Rambam seems to think that evil is the absense of good if I recall correctly. More to the point, he seems to believe that evil is the absence of good and perhaps nothing substantive in itself.
One Jewish man, Micha Berger, seems to have captured some possible extentions of this thought very well. He asks the approriate questions that one is forced to consider if one is viewing God in this way…
In this sense, however, if Rambam’s thoughts are taken to the extreme, it seems as though one cannot define reality beyond the negative. In other words, God, at least in some sense, become such an ultimately reality, that all else, perhaps both good as well as evil, is akin to a kind of non-existent state when compared to God.
It’s not that reality itself does not exist. Rather, when compared to God, who is considered by Rambam to be utterly transcendent beyond what we can imagine, reality itself seems to become nearly meaningless when contrasted to the ultimate reality of God himself. In other words, not only is good considered the absence of evil, but also even basic goodness cannot be used to describe God since he is ultimately beyond all description.
In his struggles with the problem of evil, St. Augustine also seems to argue that evil is not something fully real. Unlike Rambam’s thoughts, however, it appears to be only something dependent on that which is more real, as disease (which is an evil) can exist only in a body (which is a good). Thus, in St. Augustine’s view, God as the source of all that is is not in a contest with a positive being or an ultimate reality which is evil and would be his counterpart. Rather God is merely struggling with the absense of his presence.
Tantum ergo seems to give a very excellent understanding of this Augustinian view to be honest-- a view that I, along with St. Thomas, strongly agree with. In other words, the principle which inspired Augustine’s philosophical activity was identical with the fundamental tenet of Scholasticism: there can be no contradiction between the truths which God has revealed, and the findings of the human mind in science and philosophy.
Rambam held this view too. In fact, his theodicy was geared specifcally toward the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil, with the premise that an omnipotent and good God exists.
Unlike Christianity, however, in his solution of the problem of evil, Maimonides seems to follow in the direction the neoPlatonists in laying some kind of overlapping stress on matter itself as the source of all evil and imperfection. This isn’t to say that Rambam thought that material was evil as the gnostics claimed for example.
Nonetheless, on the question of the nature of God for example, he apparently rejected the Aristotelean doctrine that God’s provident care extends only to humanity-- and not to the individual. Maimonides also excluded somwhat to their detriment this thought that Catholic Scholastics later picked up on-- and yet he undoubtedly positively influenced them as well. In other words, Rambam seems to have been led by his admiration for the neo-Platonic commentators and by the leaning of his own Jewish mind to maintain many doctrines which the Scholastics could not accept.
Like most theists, Maimonides believed that none of our verbal descriptions adequately describe God. He emphasized, however, the negative approach to God’s attributes too far-- at least in my own opinion.
For example, he seems to have stressed the principle of negative predication in regard to God. The Scholastics, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, actually agreed with Rambam that no predicate is adequate to express the nature of God. But they did not go so far as to say that no term can be applied to God in the affirmative sense.
In other words, the Scholastics admitted that while phrases such as eternal and omnipotent, as we apply them to God, are inadequate-- at the same time we may still nonetheless say that God is eternal and do not need to restrict defining God, as Rambam did, with the negative “God is not not-eternal” for example.
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puzzleannie
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Job did not argue with God as with an equal, and when he tried, God put him firmly in his place.
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Mr.Ex_Nihilo
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It’s also interesting to note that the original text of another passage within the Hebrew Scriptures goes something to the effect of…
Interestingly, the original Hebrew does not specfically link knowing good and evil with God. Rather, it seems to link this knowledge with whomever the unique one is.
Traditional Jewish, Christian, and even Islamic understandings have, for ages, interpretted these passages to imply God as the unique one. However, the Scriptures do not specifically state that the unique one was God. It apparently does not specifically say that the unique one, a phrase that is apparently nowhere else used of anyone, including God, is anyone in particular in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Consequently, if one views this unique one as the adversary of God, the passage suddenly makes a lot more sense when God himself, for their own protection, removes Adam and Eve’s ability to reach out and partake in the tree of life.
Could he really prevent it?
First of all, knowing the future =/= making people do something against their will.
Furthermore, it may even be possible that God cannot even look upon evil, let alone think of it.
In other words, if he is not aware of evil, then he cannot be held culpable for allowing it to occur either. In this sense, it is entirely created by those who rebel against his will when they fail to trust him.
Although, in the end on the final judgement, all things will be revealed, the Scriptures do make quite a few allusions to God not being able to look upon sin.
In one sense, God is most certainly aware of pure matter-- because matter is generally neutral without intention, and yet, by God’s own design, matter reflects the splendor of his own glory.
Therefore we have passages like this…
In the other sense, on the realm of the spiritual, it remains very possible that God may not be able to see the evil intentions.
Admittedly, there are passages which speak of God searching out for pure hearts-- searching for people’s intentions. There are also passages which speak of God thwarting the schemes of the wicked.
But, in doing this, he seems to rely upon goodness to do this. In other words, he allows evil to self-destruct precisely because they have sinned against God and fallen outside his grace. And his search seems to be like a sonar bouncing along all good things in his spiritual creation.
It seems as though that which is good in spirit is clearly seen and understood by God. That which is evil in spirit, however, seems to produce a strange response from God.
He actually appears puzzled by this void of his presence that he encounters-- and he always ends up asking questions to understand this strange void he encounters in the souls of men over and over again.
Myself, I tend to think that freewill is a bit over-rated myself. Others might disagree.
Yet God, in reality, does exactly the opposite. God says, “I can’t kill, but you can kill me”, hence the thorns, the nails, the spear in his side, etc.
In other words, the Flood, the plagues, and the judgements all seem to be man’s invocation of God’s wrath when we go against his will.
I think it depends on someone’s perspective.
But, for me anyway, whenever I sin against God, my unconfessed, unforgiven actions transcend time and space to assist the Roman soldiers hammering the nails into the wrist of our Lord.
We have all sinned before God and participated in the murder of his son.
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Valke2
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I agree with a lof of what you posted. Judaism does not hold that good and evil are seperate powers, as nothing is outside of God. However, I need to go back to and see if Rambam’s view of evil was the absence of good. I don’t recall that.
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Valke2
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I don’t think that’s an accurate statement. It seems to be based on Rashi’s commentary which explains the passage as saying man is unique as I am unique. There has never been any question within Judaism that the verse is being “spoken” by God.
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Mr.Ex_Nihilo
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I know.
That’s why I said that this [emphasis now mine]…
I’m a bit of a Maverik on this one-- because the church does traditionally view the Unique One in the Genesis account as a reference to God (and even infer the Trinity from this phrase). Even still, I would never explicitly teach another person that the unique one in Genesis is a reference to the adversary of God. I’m only pointing that the text seems to make more sense when read this way.
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Valke2
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I’d like to get the hebrew word used in that verse. Hebrew is definately not my strong suit.I know.
That’s why I said that this [emphasis now mine]…
I’m a bit of a Maverik on this one-- because the church does traditionally view the Unique One in the Genesis account as a reference to God (and even infer the Trinity from this phrase). Even still, I would never explicitly teach another person that the unique one in Genesis is a reference to the adversary of God. I’m only pointing that the text seems to make more sense when read this way.
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