And that is as it should be 
I would want more precision and detail, of course; but I think I’d agree with that. 
For example, more precision and detail would alleviate this problem…
Except that the flow of my argument is the other way. 
God in His self-existence involves a group of persons doing such-n-such; therefore when we get to questions of ethics and the behavior of derivative persons we should (in the logical sense of ‘should’) apply back to this feature of reality (among other important features, but this one primarily.)
Not incidentally, in my galumphing huge synthetic metaphysic (that Sword to the Heart thingy linked to at the bottom of my signature for my posts), I explicitly point this out: I’m not in fact starting with human concepts of love and then applying them to God. (I do however spend several chapters aside from the flow of my argument discussing various ethical theories and their strengths and weaknesses; partly to illustrate the problems that crop up when other topics haven’t been settled first insofar as possible. But also to illustrate that we humans do have a pretty strong agreement across philosophies and cultures about moral love being interpersonal cooperation. I think that’s important to synch up with what can be reasoned out, on other grounds, about the ultimate reality we depend on for existence.)
Not entirely sure why, aside from the topical connection to God poofing out of existence. Otherwise it’s pretty different topically. (I’m connecting reason and faith, the jokey anecdote from Hitchhiker disconnects reason and faith, implying God only survives as an idea when divorced from reason; God poofs out of existence for extremely different reasons in each paragraph; and other reality survives the poofing in the joke.)
Contextually, though, those persons who only love themselves are seriously failing ethically. “Self-love” is only a “template” insofar as we ought to be treating other people the way we would want to be treated by them were we in their position.
There is, however, a topical link between that commandment and the idea that a corporately shared existence is as much “our own” existence as our specific personhood is “our own existence”. An idea that is certainly not foreign to the corporate existence of distinct Persons in the Godhead. It has strong links to the Biblical notion of God sharing His own life with us corporately, too.
Sort of–as long as the Persons are distinctly relating to each other within the corporate “I”. (Otherwise it’s only modalism; which would be pointless at God’s own level of existence. Although, God revealing Himself in various roles can have some real point, in communication and communion with derivative persons.)
Btw, I’ve just posted up a link (in the “Articles” category) to a Thanksgiving Sermon I wrote last year on this very topic. It has more than a few connections to trinitarian theism, too.
But for ease of convenience, I’ll repost the link here.
Happy Thanksgiving!!
Jason.
Dude, I’m jealous. I’m retired, and you seem to have freedom for deeper thought on many profound questions than I!! Thanks for the sermon and other connections. I don’t want to quibble and do affirm most of your insights.
But (1), I’ve twice affirmed that a Trinitarian can well reason that God will fulfill righteousness and save all. My complex sentence inviting a syllogism assumed that the conclusion needing demonstration (ever since our original exchange) is whether metaphysical logic can require that a believer in such love must hold that God is multi or inter-personal. Your P3 says, “God is… interpersonal.” I.E. it seems that one of your premises illegitimately incorporates the contested conclusion. As you know, my feeble intuition is that this may be more a question of revelation and faith than proven logic.
(2) If you think “deference to an authority” is vital on doctrines beyond our own comprehension, to avoid being “misled,” how should a person best choose the authority figure they will trust?
Bob,
That’s probably because you have more of a life than I do… 
My apologies for misunderstanding what you were after. I think my confusion about your request came from the fact that my universalism (technically speaking) follows from my orthodox trinitarian theism, not vice versa.
My previous statements in regard to the implications of other types of theism, have always been along the line of:
a.) universalism does not follow as surely from them as it follows from trinitarian theism;
b.) ethicality itself essentially fails to have any ground beyond mere power exertion,if anything less than trinitarian (or at least binitarian) theism is true. (Which has some important relations to hope for universal salvation of God’s enemies by God–or the lack thereof.)
Personally, I recommend grounding a belief in trinitarian theism in other ways (metaphysically and/or exegetically) than as a guarantor of universalism. Which is not the same as denying that trinitarian theism is important, in relation to universalism, as a guarantor of universalism.
In fact, I’m even loath to try to make an argument to trinitarian (or even binitarian) theism via comparison with how it fits to universalism compared to other theistic options. A careful check of my “Saying Grace” sermon, for example, will show that I’m not making that argument there.
But since there are people who start from a hope for universalism in one or another form (my best beloved would doubtless be one of those people 
), and want to get an idea for which kind of theistic claim best provides a hope for universalism; then I do make comparisons of that sort, on occasion. I did so in an informal way last year, for example, in a press release regarding Matthew Murray, the cult/pop-atheistic boy (rebelling against his homeschooling Christian parents) who shot up several churches in Colorado before killing himself after being severely wounded by an armed guard in the last church he arrived at.
The full press release can be found here. But I’ll excerpt and rephrase some portions for my current comment. I’ll even put it in a syllogistic form, as far as I can. 
(Note that the press release itself doesn’t contain the comparison; but comes with a longer text in pdf and doc formats, that does. Keep in mind that the language of the p-r is far more informal. Also, the relative order and spread of propositions is a little different in the p-r.)
P(roposition) 1.) Salvation (per se) of a person requires that the person to be saved must be saved by at least one person.
O(bservation) 1.) P1 requires some kind of interpersonal union between the saving person and the person to be saved (even if the union is minimal).
O2.) The intentions of derivative persons may fail insofar as they may be trumped by the behavior of the ground upon which the derivative persons depend for existence.
C(onclusion) 1.) Other things being equal, a person to be saved has better assurance of finally being saved (whatever ‘salvation’ is supposed to mean) in proportion to the characteristics of the ultimate ground of reality. (from P1, O1, O2.)
P2.) ‘Salvation’ involves doing some kind of good to the person being saved.
C2.) Other things being equal, a person to be saved has better assurance of finally being saved in proportion to the likelihood that the characteristics of the ultimate ground of reality involve doing good to persons. (from C1, P2.)
Subsequent hypotheses shall thus address the result of C2 by considering various ideas about the ground of all reality.
H(ypothesis) 1.) The ground of reality is not personal at all. (i.e. naturalistic or supernaturalistic atheism is true.)
C3.) If H1 is true, the ground of reality offers no assurance at all that a person may be saved. (from H1, C1.)
H2.) The ground of reality is such that a derivative person’s “personhood” is some kind of declension or fall, to be reversed.
O3.) If H2 is true, the personhood of the derivative person should cease to exist eventually.
C4.) If H2 is true, the ground of reality is such that the person to be ‘saved’ will cease to exist eventually instead. (from H2, O3.)
O4.) If a person ceases to exist, that person no longer can be the receiver of good done to that person.
C5.) If H2 is true, the ground of reality offers (less than!) no assurance at all that a person (as such) may be saved. (from C2, C4, O4.)
H3.) The independent ground of some reality is personal, but it has nothing to do with the system of reality in which the person to be saved exists. (i.e. cosmological dualism or some other limited-multiple-IF philosophy is true, with God being one of the IFs)
C6.) If H3 is true, the existence of an ultimate God is completely irrelevant to whether a derivative person in that other system of reality (not dependent on God for its existence) may be saved. (from H3, C1)
H4.) The ground of reality is (somehow) personal and non-personal.
O5.) Any expectation of behavior of the H4 ground of reality is perfectly balanced by its equal and opposite characteristics.
C7.) If H4 is true, the ground of reality offers no particular assurance that a person may be saved. (from C1, H4, O5.)
H5.) The ground of reality is personal, but God refuses to have anything to do with this system of reality other than being (in some way) its originator. (i.e. minimal deism is true.)
C8.) If H5 is true, the ground of reality offers less than no assurance that a person may be saved. (from C1, H5.)
H6.) The ground of reality is personal, but although God is interested in subordinate realities, God refuses to act in regard to the operations of those subordinate realities. (i.e. nominal deism is true.)
O6.) A derivative person, as a derivative person, must exist in a subordinate system of reality, one way or another.
C9.) If H6 is true, the ground of reality offers less than no assurance that a person may be saved. (from C1, H6, O6.)
H7.) Entities more powerful than human persons exist, but the ground of reality is still essentially as stated in one of the previous hypotheses.
C10.) If H7 is true, the ground of reality is at best irrelevant to the salvation of a person; and might offer less than no assurance of the salvation of a person. (from H7, C{3:9})
H8.) Some theism more immanent than nominal deism is true; but God is primarily concerned with the mere exercise of effective power.
O7.) Someone needing ‘salvation’ is at least being threatened by an effective exercise of power (one way or another).
C11.) If H8 is true, the ground of reality offers no assurance that a person may be saved; and maybe even less than no assurance! (from H8, O7, C11.)
H9.) God exists, but is not in Himself a unity of Persons.
O8.) If H9 is true, then God has nothing intrinsically to do with unity between persons.
C12.) If H9 is true, the ground of reality offers (at best) less assurance that a person may be saved, than if God had intrinsically to do with unity between persons. (from H9, O8, C1, maybe also C2.)
H10.) God exists, and is in Himself a unity of Persons; but this unity has nothing to do with His own self-existence.
O9.) If H10 is true, then God could act finally against unity among persons, without acting against the ground of His own self-existence.
C13.) If H10 is true, the ground of reality offers (at best) less assurance that a person may be saved, than if God’s own self-existence had intrinsically to do with unity between persons. (from H10, O9, C1, maybe also C2.)
H11.) God exists, and is in Himself a unity of Persons, and this unity has something to do with His own self-existence (i.e. positive aseity is true, and God exists at least as God self-begetting and God self-begotten).
C14.) If H11 is true, the ground of reality offers more assurance that a person (even an enemy of God) may sooner or later finally be saved, than all previous hypotheses. (from C1, maybe also C2, H11, C{3:13})
Note: one could continue this line of reasoning a bit further to find how trinitarian theism is superior to binitarian theism for such an assurance as well.
O10.) If H11 is true, then any action by such a God that resulted in the final severing and/or non-restoration of unity between persons (whether between Himself and derivative persons or between derivative persons and each other), would involve God acting against His own ground of self-existence.
O11.) An entity that acts against the ground of its own existence, will cease to exist, unless the ground of its existence behaves in such a way as to prevent the cessation of its existence.
O12.) A self-existent entity has nothing to save it from the cessation of its existence if It acts against the ground of its own existence.
O13.) If H11 is true, then all reality, including the past and present existence of derivative entities, depends on God’s continuing existence for existence.
P3.) I am a derivative entity. (ideally should be established by another analysis.)
P4.) I exist. (Self-reflexive claim tacitly necessary for any personally responsible argumentation.)
C15.) If H11 is true, God shall certainly continue persistently acting toward restoration of interpersonal unity, where some derivative entity is acting toward breaking this unity. (from O10, O11, O12, O13, P3, P4.)
P5.) Hypotheses presented in this argument concerning the existence and characteristics of God, are sufficiently exhaustive as relevant options.
C16.) H11 (aside from expansions into trinitarian theism where relevant), if true, offers exclusively certain assurance that God shall persistently act toward the restoration of interpersonal unity, where some derivative entity is acting toward breaking this unity. (from C15, P5.)
I should note in regard to P5 that I have not addressed a few key forms of pantheism in the argument; so the H-list could be expanded to some extent in that regard. Also, some of the hypotheses overlap in regard to multiple principle application.
Was that more of what you were looking for from the syllogism, Bob, topically?
I’m inclined to say that people ought to be trusted by default until and unless you find reason to distrust them (whether on particular topics or generally). Beyond that… that’s just the process of living interdependently with people. It’s probably something people can only learn by experience; I don’t know to what extent it can be taught.
Relatedly, none of my arguments are the same as learning to trust God. They can provide tools to help in learning to trust God, but that’s all.
Jason,
Thanks for your patient re-ordered affirmations! I too sense that logical arguments are only a tool, rather than “learning to trust.”
I followed up to H-11, but O-10 suggests “severing” is impossible for a God whose "self-existence" intrinsically has “something to do with being a unity of Persons” (H-11). I don’t understand this concept, or see why it logically follows. Why would the disunity of (derivative) human beings necesssarily conflict with God (Himself) remaining a unity of Persons? (A feeble human analogy: I might preserve my family’s inter-unity by extinguishing whatever threatens the joy of we who choose to dwell in unity.) Most Trinitarians perceive no difficulty in thinking God severs parts of his creation.
The simplistic reasoning I grasp is: (1) I become convinced of revelation’s claim that God’s essential nature is “love” (such that God would only act consistent with that nature). (2) We recognize true ‘agape’ never destroys or discards its’ object, but pursues its’ ultimate benefit. Then, presuming the Ground of our being has the ability to move us in the direction vital for us, I must assume God will successfully pursue the benefits of salvation for all that God loves.
Again, this fits wonderfully with Trinitarianism. But it appears that the nub is less whether we trust in the metaphysics of God’s complexity, than whether we come to take seriously that the one “God” is truly characterized by love.
If H-11 is true, then persons acting to fulfill non-fair-togetherness with other persons, are acting against their own ultimate ground of existence. Annihilation would be the result, unless the ground of existence itself is behaving in such a fashion as to prevent the annihilation.
In the case of derivative persons, such as myself, behaving thus “un-righteously”, this is the same as saying that the wage of my sin is death, but God in His grace actively keeps me in existence despite my sin.
If God acted as I occasionally do, toward fulfilling non-fair-togetherness, then He would also be acting against the ground of His existence. But the difference is that God is self-existent: which means there is nothing more fundamental that might behave in such a way to keep God in existence anyway.
God may save me, the sinner, if I act to fulfill unrighteousness. But nothing can save God (or anything dependent on God’s existence) if He acts to fulfill unrighteousness.
My arguments are doing exactly the same as your “simpler” reasoning, btw. I’m just being more detailed about it. (Also, I don’t think I’ve argued in this thread that trinitarian or at least binitarian theism should be believed to be true; which would be the more technical version of your (1). My first numbered argument in the thread began with that having already been established, one way or another. My most recent numbered argument compared various positions regarding theism to each other for evaluation of which one technically offers the most assurance of salvation. I recommended not appealing to such an argument for purposes of believing one or another hypothesis to be true, though.)
Certainly! But understanding the metaphysical logic can help people come to take that seriously.
Which brings me back to something I’ve said before in this thread: 100% of the time, when I’m dialoguing with non-universalists, they have always, in my experience, sooner or later, tacitly or even explicitly, rejected doctrines of orthodox trinitarian theism, and/or promoted a doctrine (or doctrines) creating logical incoherence in that set of doctrines.
Very often, if not always, their attempt ends up resulting in logical incoherence in their own attempted doctrinal set, too: a “fair-togetherness” that utterly denies the “togetherness”, to give a recent example, while still supposedly being “fair-togetherness” and not “non-fair-togetherness”. Or, to give another recent example, an “annihilation” that involves lingering continuation of existence, even as still a person of some sort.
Notice that the combination of these two positions also involves claiming that persons originally derivative of God can continue to exist without God keeping them in existence; which is the same as denying that God is the final ground of all reality: something, be it the sinner or whatever the sinner’s existence now depends on, is either more foundationally real than God, or is at least equally foundationally real as God. This, one way or another, is a denial that supernaturalistic theism is true.
That may not mean so much to someone who doesn’t accept supernaturalistic theism to be true anyway! (Though there are serious logical consequences following as corollaries, if supernaturalistic theism isn’t true–for one thing, as you seem to agree, the question of ‘salvation’ of a derivative person as a person at all becomes at best irrelevant to the ultimate truth of reality! 
) But it ought to be a huge glaring emergency light to someone who is elsewhere trying to claim that supernaturalistic theism (much moreso one particular kind of supernat-theism, such as ortho-trin) is true.
Jason… holy crap!
aside from being what you get after eating the Bible, that is my reaction to reading your posts here! I mean that in a good way lol 
You should be a philosophy professor
now buy me some aspirin for my headache!
Jason-
You mentioned the fact that in dialoguing w/ non-universalists, they always reveal an inconsistency in their “theological set”. Can you give me some examples of what this looks like, practically speaking? Maybe how the conversation would unfold or what specific things they say that shows the inconsistency? Thanks!
I may be getting this all wrong but it seems to me that Jason is saying that God’s wrath is contingent to his love only because God as a multi-entity corporation has actual experience of ‘fair-togetherness’ (instead of theoretical knowledge if he were a single entity). Would this mean then that God can have no real understanding of what it is like to be a sinner because he cannot sin. He may have direct experience of being human via the incarnation but because that incarnate being never sinned he has never directly experienced it. I would presume ‘being made sin for us’ at the cross is not the same thing as experiencing sinning.
F&B,
I could actually quote some correspondences, but I’m a little too depressed (personal reasons, tends to be worse this time of year) to go pick on other people particularly right now. I’ve already provided several examples in principle in the preceding material, though.
For example, some nominally orthodox non-universalists present the sacrifice of Christ not only as involving a distinct Person of God (that would be orthodox enough), but to treat the Son as being of a different mind than the Father on the topic of salvation. That’s an intentional schism, and would be the same as the Son rebelling against the Father (or the Father rebelling against the Son and being pulled into line by the Son!!) That could be true if various kinds of polytheism are true, or maybe even if some kinds of Arianism are true; but it cannot be true if orthodox Christian theism is true.
Again, one of the commonest things in non-universalistic soteriology, is to hear that the hopelessly condemned soul is completely separated from God. As I mentioned (at some length ) previously in this thread, this and any kind of supernaturalistic theism cannot both be true–not if the soul is supposed to nevertheless continue existence. That would mean the soul is now an Independent Fact of its own, like God (achieved by rebelling against God???); or exists now in dependence on some other IF than God (either of which would be at least cosmological dualism); or else the soul and God are actually both dependently existent within some more fundamentally real overarching reality, with this other reality being the true IF, not God–which is what any remotely practical claim of cosmological dualism (or other limited-multiple-IF proposal, such as the tri-theism we are often accused of believing by other monotheists) also comes to eventually.
That claim not only denies God’s omnipresence, but also God’s omniscience. Not coincidentally, some Christians, wanting to divorce God from any responsibility in the fate of the damned, look for ways to claim that God in effect exists only within the same overarching temporal reality that we do, so that while He has sufficient ability to foresee all possibilities, He does not foresee all actualities, and therefore cannot be charged with creating entities whom He already knows He will hopelessly abandon even trying to save from sin either from the outset, per Calvinism, or eventually, per Arminianism. Though this defense is more common to Arminians, who rightly want to defend the real existence of the loved person and thus the free will of the person, but who follow many Calvinists in not consistently thinking of God as acting at right angles to natural history (analogically speaking) but acting “in advance” from within history instead.
This attempt at trying to exonerate God from responsibility in sin is linked to the correct idea that God is not a doer of iniquity. But so long as final hopelessness remains in a theology, so that God does not try to save the sinner from sin, then either God must (at least) share responsibility in the final victory of evil (Pyrrhic though that victory may be) or else something is more fundamentally real than God, to which God must be Himself surrendering, unable to do any more. Neither of those are tenets of orthodox Christian trinitarianism; both positions in fact deny that orthodox Christian trinitarianism is true. But both are tacitly or explicitly advocated by various proponents who would otherwise want and would try to affirm orthodox Christian trinitarianism. So sometimes, in order to avoid that result, the proponent will simply make a mental leap between the incommensurate positions and proceed on as though this leap makes no difference to the coherence of their theology.
While I was checking back through Talbott’s book Tuesday on another topic (um… mental note to myself, post a brief comment on what I found or didn’t find rather… ), I ran across an interesting example of the kind of thing I’m now talking about, in Calvin’s Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles (p 239 of the Eerdsman 1948 edition). (Talbott’s reference can be found on pp113-115 of Inescapable Love.)
Calvin states that he takes it as granted as a general principle or truth, in his commentary on 1 John 4:8 and 16, that God’s nature is to love men; thus God is the fountain of love, with that effect flowing from him. So far, so good.
Calvin then draws a comparison between this statement and the statement that God is light, intending to draw a parallel thusly, that just as God may not be perceived as light by all men (even though there is nothing dark in Him), in the same way the love of God is diffused wherever the knowledge of Him comes. Still okay, if this is taken to mean that even though God is love, and loves all things by His inherent lovingness (as He illuminates all things by His brightness, analogically speaking), the non-elect may not perceive Him as such yet. (Or maybe shall ever perceive Him as such, if Calvinistic soteriology is true.)
But Calvin’s purpose in mentioning this analogy is not to agree (despite what he has just said regarding God’s nature) that God is essentially love. In fact, he explicitly repudiates this in the next sentence: “Here then [St. John] does not speak of the essence of God, but only shows what He is found to be by us *.”
Calvin has to repudiate this notion because, of course, if he claimed that God was essentially love but then claimed that God acted with no love at all toward the non-elect, then that would be too obviously self-contradictory. (Consequently, I have seen some non-universalists, like John Piper, try to get around this by granting that God shows some secondary kind of love to the non-elect, but not “saving” love. Though even they are hard pressed to allow that God is still acting in even this secondary love to the hopelessly condemned non-elect; typically when I’m talking with them, they’ll eventually admit and even insist that God is acting completely without love to those people once they’re in hell.)
But in repudiating this notion, Calvin makes a hash of the material not only in the prior portions of the paragraph, but even between the clauses of his own sentence! What God is “found to be” by “us”, is not in fact what He essentially is, but only what we perceive Him to be because we’re “elect”. This is exactly like saying that God being light and absolutely not darkness is really only a mere perception of ours that we happen to have because we are of the “elect”: He isn’t really illuminating all things whether or not we’re able to perceive that illumination thanks to current spiritual blindness on our part.
Calvin wants to have it both ways. He wants God to really be light and not darkness at all; really illuminating all things, if only we had the eyes to see. But he cannot accept God being love in the same fashion, and loving all as He illuminates all, if only we had the eyes to see. Otherwise, his interpretation of God’s intentions toward the non-elect would be severely threatened! He explicitly invites the comparison, but then switches off at the last moment and goes completely the opposite way; on no ground, really, other than it would blow his thesis about damnation elsewhere.
In short (as Talbott points out), Calvin himself agrees that the statements “God is light” and “God is Spirit” are to be understood as affirmations about God’s essence. (In the Institutes, Bk1, ch13, 20, Calvin emphatically avows that “the whole essence of God is spiritual”.) But the exact same grammatic structure concerning “God is love”, in the same epistle, is supposedly not to be taken that way–despite an explicit warning in the same verse that he who is not loving did not know (or does not yet know) God: for God is love.
(To be fair, Calvin gets around that injunction by appealing to brotherhood under God in a limited conceptual way: since the same portion of scripture talks of all this in regard to loving brethren, and being children of God, begotten of God, in our proclamation that Jesus is Lord, then that means we are only to love our Christian brothers, ultimately, right? But then this requires Calvin elsewhere to deny that the eventual profession of Christ as Lord is either worthlessly venial or else does not in fact have the universal eschatological scope it might seem to be implying. Otherwise all those rebels who eventually confess Christ as Lord would also be our brothers whom Christ has redeemed, and whom the Holy Spirit has led, to the glory of God the Father! But then there’s no hopelessly condemned non-elect. And the error cannot be with Calvin and the interpreters he’s following, ja? )
From Calvin to a modern Calvinist, John Piper: one of his most popular docs over at desiringgod.org, is What We Believe About The Five Points of Calvinism. There are similar evasions and reversals of principle here. For example, Piper rightly wants to affirm that “if a person becomes humble enough to submit to God it is because God has given that person a new, humble nature.” What if a person doesn’t become that humble? Then that must be because “that person has not been given such a willing spirit.” Very well; but Piper has previously connected this, in the immediately prior paragraph, to the retort of St. Paul to his (imaginary?) opponent in Romans 9 who asked, in regard to those hardhearted rebels, “Why then does [God] still find fault? For who can resist His will?”
Piper, like most (all?) Calvinists, wants to interpret St. Paul’s answer as meaning that God has made the pottery thus, and the clay has no right to answer back. (Piper, like all Calvinists, or any non-universalists really, has to either ignore the original context for this quotation from Isaiah, or else has to interpret that context rather radically; but we’ll skip over that for now. ) But then Piper, like some (though not all) Calvinists, wants to divorce appeal to that prooftext from the idea that God is at much behind the hardheartedness of the rebels as He is behind the humility of the elect. Which is why Piper doesn’t answer the question ‘what if a person doesn’t become humble?’ by saying, ‘it is because God has given that person an unhumble nature, from the beginning’.
This is highly inconsistent. But it’s necessary for his theology.
I could continue at vast length on this sort of thing. I may go back and address some arguments and speculative hypotheses made by one of our correspondents (not in this thread, though I’ve mentioned them in this thread), as an example, eventually. (It’s on my list of things to do. But probably not today. I’m not much in the mood… 
) When-if-ever I do, I’ll leave a note here for topical link purposes. More likely, I’ll have something to say on this topic when I look more directly at the seminary professor’s evaluation of universalism (brought up in relation to The Shack, which “Charizoe” recently brought to our attention in another thread over at the “discussion negative” category.*
That would be included, too. But what I’m actually saying is that God’s wrath is necessarily contingent to His love if and only if God is a multi-personal entity Whose own self-existence involves those Persons acting in fair-togetherness toward one another. In Christian parlance, if God is self-begetting and self-begotten, Father and Son (analogically speaking), in regard to His own active self-existence, then God’s wrath must necessarily be contingent to His love.
That would of course also involve actual experience of fair-togetherness. But if this experience is itself only contingent to God’s existence, and not constitutive of God’s self-existence, then His wrath might not be contingent to His love. Many otherwise nominally orthodox Christian non-universalists try to get around or out of acknowledging that God is love this way: sure, God is a multi-personal self-begetting self-begotten entity, but so what? That doesn’t have anything to do with God’s own self-existence, so that doesn’t mean that God is in essence love. (i.e. they affirm privative, not positive aseity, to be true. Leaving the terminology of begettingness just sitting there meaningless, or maybe only applied to the Incarnation.) When we sin, we sin against the “infinite value” of God, or somesuch thing; not against the actual active ground of our own existence.
Such Christians wouldn’t necessarily continue maintaining this in other venues; they might easily turn around and affirm that God is intrinsically love, in very strong language, and that when we sin we sin against what God Himself intrinsically is and thus against the ground of our own existence (whence proceeds annihilation but for the grace of God). But when it becomes obvious that God would also be sinning to act similarly toward fulfilling non-fair-togetherness, then they either drop or outright deny this affirmation; or they retreat to claiming God fulfills some kind of fair-togetherness which has nothing at all to do with togetherness; or they appeal to inscrutable mystery; or they complain about humans using reasoning (as if they themselves aren’t doing that, too, when they’re doing interpretation to arrive at doctrine); or, like Calvin (who is far from alone in this) they treat challenges to their interpretation as being challenges to God Himself instead; etc. etc. etc.
I think in any case, God’s omniscience would allow Him access to the interiority of a sinning person’s experience. Indeed, I don’t know how He could avoid that if He wanted to, without either flatly preventing any actuality of sin or else relinquishing omniscience at the level of His own fundamental existence. (This wouldn’t require Him to be Incarnate first, in order to have this immanent perspective on sin and the state of fallen humanity. And, after all, it is typically agreed by orthodox Christians, including myself, that the Son Incarnate is not Himself a sinner, but remains the Righteous One.)
But I have also been claiming pretty steadily that God can possibly sin; the Father has the ability to abandon the Son, the Son has the ability to betray or otherwise rebel against the Father. I have been saying that this does not and never shall happen (otherwise all reality, including ourselves and our history, would cease to exist; and here we still are). What is impossible is for God to act toward fulfilling non-fair-togetherness and still continue existing–if positive aseity is true. (Which I would argue it is.)
That’s a very interesting verse; and a very challenging one. Any theology that cannot feasibly or coherently take it into account, must either suppose the author wasn’t St. Paul, or that the author (even St. Paul) was wrong to make the claim, or that the author didn’t have authority to make the claim, or that the translation has been bolloxed somehow, or else the theology will be at odds (to this degree at least) with a canonically derivable theology. (Or must simply surrender claim to coherency.)
I don’t recommend any of those options; and fortunately I think my theology can feasibly and coherently take it into account. But it would take a while for me to explain why.
I can, however, agree that “being made sin for us” is not the same thing as experiencing sinning by actually sinning Himself. I would affirm, though, that it does involve experiencing sinning, and especially involves exhibiting the experienced consequences, to God (voluntarily accepted by Him for our sakes), of our sinning. I would also say, without going into the details here (which would require a massive amount of preliminary analysis and discussion), that this experience is not limited to the crucifixion event itself.
(My position has many links to the notion that whenever we sin we crucify Christ, which many Christian theologians throughout history have also affirmed and taught.)
Jason,
Again much food for thought - I will try and digest in bite-sized chunks.
Thanks.
I’m not sure I even get this? Can you possibly bring this to a 7th grade level
Aug
Not sure I can… I was already summarizing several pieces of previously mentioned argument with that relatively short sentence.
I’ll try to present a limited visual analogy later. (I have a great mythopoeic illustration for positive aseity, and the distinction between God, loyal servants, and rebel servants, that I’m saving for a later book in the Mikonese Saga; but it wouldn’t work very well for illustrating the particular principle I’m talking about here.)
Right, then. Sorry for the delay: pre-Christmas busy-ness elsewhere…
Having thought about how to try to less-technically illustrate what I’m talking about, maybe it would be better after all to start with some visual analogies to “positive aseity” and then go from there.
(Note: I strongly disrecommend arguing from the following analogies. They’re presented for limited illustration purposes only. Arguments to the position should be arrived at by another route.)
I’ll start with a complex but colorful (and still very limited and in some ways inaccurate) image; and then proceed to a simpler one that nevertheless adds an important detail or two.
Okay, eventually in my novels, it will be revealed that there is a stretch of mountains practically inaccessible to most of the Mikonese races; but the Corvs (humanoid avians) can go there, and they treat it as a popular place to go for a honeymoon. (The females are the ones who can fly, and go there ahead of time to build a little lovenest for after the wedding. Then they carry their husband there for the nuptials. )
The reason this stretch of mountains is so popular with them, aside from the fact that only they can get to it (so it’s a safe place to go for cuddling and also as a sort of statement that “this is who we are, only we can do this”), is because this row of mountains has been artificially smoothed into one long sheer cliff (very long ago, before the Corvs ever found it, or even existed to find it). On this cliff, dozens of miles across, figures have been etched; and though erosion has worn them largely away, the original shapes and colors still survive enough to get a basic idea of what the figures are.
The figure that has best survived is the largest one.
This figure, like the others, is some sort of dragon. Unlike the others, it stretches around the whole length of cliffs, enclosing all the other figures.
The dragon’s head is at the top of the central portion of the engravings, facing rightward, and the dragon is breathing what looks like fire. This fire extends along the length of the smoothed mountain facing, then at the far right-hand side it goes down the face of the cliff, and then turns back along the whole length of the facing until at the far left-hand side it turns upward again.
Eventually, if the fire is followed long enough, it can be seen that the fire is itself the dragon, who is thus constantly breathing himself into existence.
That’s a visual picture of “positive aseity”.
By contrast to this dragon, there are thousands of other smaller dragons inside this framework; and they are divided into two basic types. (I haven’t decided yet which ones would be most thematically appropriate on one or the other side, or whether they ought to be generally mixed, btw.) One type has all kinds of variation, but all of them are breathing fire. But they aren’t the fire they are breathing.
The variations of the other type are mostly obscured; and the main reason the variations are mostly obscured, is because all of them are busily trying to devour themselves, tail first.
That’s a visual illustration of the difference between two kinds of entities who are not self-existent. One kind is breathing the power of the self-existent One, but they are not trying to be self-existent themselves. The other kind is trying to be self-existent, too, but they are only succeeding in hurting themselves by trying.
There are a number of inaccuracies in that illustration: for example, the self-existent One is being pictured within a framework Himself, whereas He’s supposed to be the framework. As another example, the rebels do also have the power of the life of their creator, which they’re abusing; but because of the way the illustration is set up this cannot be seen. (Trying to visually represent it would make them look like they are succeeding at being self-existent! Though that would have some suggestive links to their self-perception as rebels, too…)
The main inaccuracy for my present purpose, though, is that the illustration doesn’t include a visual representation of the distinction of a person Self-Begetting and a person Self-Begotten being the same entity. This is even more difficult to visually represent, but one way to do so is (paradoxically) to simplify the illustration attempt.
So, to the second kind of illustration: this involves a circle with two ‘heads’, pointing in the direction of the same ‘flow’. The one at the top represents the distinction of self-begetting. The one at the bottom represents the distinction of being self-begotten.
This is the classical picture of active self-existence. (The previous illustration is similar to the orobouros, a pagan motif of history being represented by a snake eating its tail. That in itself wouldn’t be self-existence, but it rather aptly illustrates what theists often claim “the prince of this world” is doing! )
Even though the two Persons are, corporately, the same entity (as the Jewish Shema puts it, YHWH is AeCHaD, a compound unity, not YaCHiD, a sheer singularity), a dynamic cooperation between the two Persons is necessary for the existence of the entity to continue. If the Father is not self-begetting, or if the Father acts against the Son, then the existence either ceases or otherwise won’t be happening. If the Son rebels against the Father or tries to go His own way without surrendering in loyalty to the Father, then the existence either ceases or otherwise won’t be happening.
This idea is distinct from the notion that God simply exists statically, without acting to self-exist. That idea is technically known as privative aseity. In that case, it wouldn’t matter whether one or the other Person rebelled against or betrayed the other; they still would continue in existence though in schism (and now cosmological dualism would be true–but there would be no common framework for the entities to exist distinctly within! So at best one or the other entity might as well not even exist anymore.)
Privative aseity also involves the idea that rational action is not an intrinsic characteristic of God. He may rationally act, but His self-existence is purely static. But then, if purely static non-action is the heart of God’s existence (so to speak), then any claim of any kind of action at all on His part would involve, at best, claiming that action comes from inherent non-action. An atheist can (and in principle does) avow that idea just as easily, and somewhat more self-consistently. Whereas, if I was an atheist, while I might be willing to avow positive aseity to be true as the ground of all reality, I’d be frankly a little suspicious about the idea: it smacks more of theism than atheism.
In strict logical progression I would begin talking here for a long time about variations in the action of a positive aseity God, and how this is related to creation of not-God entities, and how this would involve some amount of self-sacrifice of the 2nd Person, and how that self-sacrifice is related to the self-sacrifice of the 2nd Person as part of the actively continuing existence of God, etc. (This would eventually have a lot to do with the Incarnation, self-sacrifice and Resurrection of the 2nd Person, too; including with reference to God helping save sinners from our sin, though like many theologians in Christian history I would expect the Incarnation, Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Son Incarnate to happen in our human history in solidarity with us even if there were no fallen persons: it would still be done for sake of communion with us, and for the glory, or Shekinah, of God the Father.)
But skipping over all that, my point in regard to ethics would be this: that when we, who depend on the fair-togetherness of Persons as the foundation of all reality, act against the fulfillment of fair-togetherness between persons (whether versus each other or with us versus God–though neither kind of unrighteousness, or non-fair-togetherness, can be done without the other, as the scriptures also frequently teach), we’re doing something that would result in our ceasing to exist, but for the grace of God. God would be breaking that circuit of His own self-existence, too, if He acted against the fulfillment of fair-togetherness, in contravention (like a human sinner) to the ground of reality on which we all depend (even God Himself, being self-existent).
Consequently, even His oppositional wrath to rebels against fair-togetherness must have reconciliation and salvation of those rebels as His goal – if positive aseity is true. Otherwise God would be, like a human sinner, acting in contravention to the fair-togetherness of the Father and the Son which grounds the existence of all reality. In God’s case, since nothing more foundational than God exists to act toward saving Him, that means He would cease to exist–along with everything else in reality.
If privative aseity is true instead, then (assuming God could even be said to exist and, more importantly, act) there would be no problem with God acting sooner or later toward fulfilling non-fair-togetherness with anyone, rebel or not. God could do that without ceasing to exist Himself.
(Not incidentally, most Christian theologians throughout our history have been, in effect, privative not positive aseitists.)
Is that more helpful for understanding what I’m talking about?
See Topic Split
[Just what IS “orthodox Christian theism”?)
‘Just what IS “orthodox Christian theism”?’ in General Theology
by Paidion on Sun Jan 11, 2009 9:27
No, logically, his anger could only be satisfied by man’s payment - which man was not able to pay, and one which God did not owe. Anselm’s argument, in other words. The Trinity only makes sense (and our resurrection) if there is a God/man in the mix and truly is both God and man eternally. The real mystery of the Trinity is that it is human.
Hey Jason, wow!
You’ve written some really great stuff here.
Thank you.
( I hope to contribute something more than an “amen” to what you’ve written when I have the time. )
God Bless.