“God’s will” does not refer to anything except our anthropomorphic conception of God. God is not described by will, passion, nor subjectivity. Nevertheless, the Christian revelation is not so snobbish as to reject anthropomorphism – we cannot but reduce the concept of God by talking about Him, and yet our words can nevertheless approximate something true. You’ll see similar anthropomorphisms even in Plato’s description of the Good; that’s how we talk when we talk about the divine.
I think you are still having trouble seeing Plato outside of the lens of Paul and other hellenized Chrisitians. Consider Protagoras, one of Plato’s intellectual heroes, famous then and now for his claim that “man is the measure of all things”. In *Protagoras, *we see Plato’s idea that Protagoras, the original relativist was so disposed because Protagorist was driven by the virtue of courage, and this inclined Protagoras to embrace the idea that sublime truths were not knowable, for
this was a a realization that demanded heroism and courage to acknowledge and accept. Protagoras found in his relativism an expression for his noble self, according to Plato, for a world where such truths were unknowable demanded the virtues that Protagoras admired so deeply – courage and fortitude.
The divine and sublime for Plato are decidedly
impersonal on that view, not “relational”, not dealing with man’s connection to God – a foreign concept in Plato – but with man’s disposition towards true virtue, which in Plato’s foundationalist perspective was just as “man-centered” as Protagoras’ view, Protagoras being decidedly relativist by comparison. On all sides here, the
object of man’s pursuits is impersonal principle – sublime virtue. Whatever anthropomorphic language gets invoked does not personalize the idea of “courage”, beyond it’s being a
human virtue, for example. Courage is not god, but something the gods esteem, as do better men on their better days.
When Paul says “God is Love”, there’s a much different kind of anthropomorphic language being invoked. For Paul, God is
personal, and to esteem “love” without a relationship to God-as-a-person is to miss out on sublime, divine love – to settle for
phileo when (Christian)
agape is available in the
person of God. This is anthropormorphization on a whole different level. It’s not just useful language, Paul is anthropomorphizing, personalizing love itself – see the continue of that verse in 1 John 4: “whoever lives in love lives in God and God in him”.
Why did Plato talk so glowingly about it, then? His attitude was not that of a man with a bus ticket to where he wants to go.
Sorry, didn’t get this – missed the bus ticket reference. Maybe you can rephrase this?
OK, but your point was that Paul, when faced with Euthyphro, said that God and good were identical. A quotation from someone other than Paul isn’t relevant. Furthermore, the quotation doesn’t indicate that Jesus considered the Father identical with good, only that Jesus considered the Father perfectly good. The word is being used to predicate, not to define.
This goes right back, then to my original citation of Roman 3 – “No one is righteous”, according to Paul. Whether one adopts an “infused righteousness” model, as Catholics do, or an “imputed righteousness” model, as Protestants do, righteousness comes from God and is sourced in his character. Whether one see righteousness as a matter of legal standing with respect to God’s covenant – being a good human, covenantally – or as an infused moral/religious quality – being a good human through partaking in God’s righteousness – the ultimate source of the good is God. This is Paul’s point in invoking Isaiah.
How is following God’s will not enlightened, rational self-interest, if God is the one who decides your fate?
That’s Paul’s entire point – there is no “self-interest” for man apart from “God-interest”. This was not Plato’s view at all, which is the point I keep coming back to here. One might as well say young earth creationists are promoting scientific rationalism, because, really, the most rational, scientific view is the
true one, which is that the Bible is inerrantly true in its literal, face-value reading, and the earth is 6,000 years old.
Real rational thinkers accept a young earth, doncha know.
This is co-option, the subordinating of human ideas of the noble and sublime to the sovereignty of personal deity, the replacing of principle with personality at the top of the moral hierarchy.
Likewise, the most convincing interpretation of Paul is this: extraordinarily few people have the background nor the sincerity nor the faith to see God in this life. But if they did, they would.
Agreed, but that’s just a practical matter, as I said before. People, by nature, are conflicted, and get bogged down by their appetites and “empirical interests”. This is a pragmatic limitation, not the object of man’s “real interests”. Even so, your summary of Paul is indicative of his divergence from Plato. Plato saw “virtue” in the actualized man. Paul sees “God in his life”. Christians are typically so steeped in a “Paulified”, or more generally a “Christianized” Plato, that they do not see the difference. Reading Plato, though, this comes through clearly.
But you had said that in the passage God “doesn’t love the good because the good is good, but is good because that’s his nature, to define good.” I don’t see that in Acts 17 at all.
Ah, I thought you were referring to the “unknown god” reference I made in that comment. Paul makes no such claim in the Mars Hill appeal. I was pointing to Paul’s connecting the “unknown god” with Yahweh as an indication of his objective to co-opt and subsume hellenistic theology, “Christianizing” it, or more precisely “Paulifying” it.
-TS
