The heart of the word, "god," is power. In all religions, God is seen as transcendent power. This is the one idea that all concepts of God share.
Today I picked up an old collection of theological essays, Frontline Theology, edited by Dean Peerman. I read "Religion, Faith, and Power," by Richard R. Niebuhr. I've like Niebuhr for a long time.
In the course of his essay, he says: "If I must choose one word now to indicate the meaning of the word, ‘God,’ it is power. (Of . . . alternatives available . . . This one [power] seems to me the most universally significant.)." That sounds almost like what I wrote above. I would agree with Niebuhr if by, "God," he means "god."
The Christian God is distinguished as the God whose power is love,
whose power is subordinated (sub-ordered, arranged beneath) to love,
whose power is in the service of Holy Love.
The power of love, not the love of power.
About Me
- WRoark
- Professor of Christian Studies and Philosophy for more than thirty years. Author of Think like an Octopus: The Key to Becoming a Good Thinker. Now the blogosphere is my classroom. I am a contrarian, challenger of the status quo, a voice from a differing perspective. When I retired, I took off my watch, my shoes, let others answer the phone, and refuse to hurry, unless life is at stake.
2 comments:
Dr. Roark, i have a question regarding open theism. I have often heard Abraham's test (almost sacrificing Isaac) as an example of "God not knowing". Open Theism says that God knows all past and present but does not know the future (or that he knows everything that is possible to know).
Wouldn't you say that God was testing the state of Abraham's heart? If he was testing his heart, that is the present... not the future. The choice he would make was in the future but the state of his heart was not. So would you say that God cannot know the state of the heart of man?
If you could expound on this i would appreciate it.
Lifelonglearter, I am sorry to be so slow in response, but if you are still around, here it is. If you wonder why I have been so long, see The Saturday blog, "Catch as Catch Can,"" in Roark's Bunch of B's's post.
Does God trust Abraham? Does Abraham trust God? What is their relationship? Is it based on trust, as all healthy and strong relationships are?
Abraham is known as “The Father of Faith,” and “Faithful Abraham,” but these names don’t fit when Sarai became a fruitless old woman, forever barren. When she suggested that he try to have a son by her servant, Hagar, he impregnated her, deciding against God’s promise that Ishmael would have to be the promised son (see Genesis 16).
Again his faith wavered in the presence of Abimelech king of Gerar. He did not trust God to protect him, so he put his wife in jeopardy to shield him from potential danger (see Genesis 20:2). Abraham’s faith in God sometimes slipped. If Abraham does not have complete faith in God, can God trust him?
God has chosen and called Abraham to be his agent in producing a people who in turn would be God’s agent for healing and restoring his entire broken world, a task of unimaginable enormity. It can be done only if Abraham trusts God more than he trusts common sense, reason, emotion, or instinct. Abraham has not always shown such trust.
Genesis 22:1 says that God tested Abraham. The next dozen verses narrate the testing experience. Abraham passed.
I spent thirty-some years as a university professor. I gave thousands of tests. Their purpose was to discover what the students had learned. Tests enable the tester to learn; tests enable us to uncover the mind of the student, to dis-cover that which does not lie open to direct observation.
God tested Abraham, apparently to discover, to learn whether Abraham could be trusted with his divinely appointed mission. As we have seen, Abraham’s faith had faltered on at least two occasions, leaving God to wonder. Thus the extremity of the Genesis 22 test. This was a crucial, a determinative test. Before proceeding any further on his worldwide redemptive purpose, he needed to know Abraham better than he does before this test. At least that is how I see it.
Lifelonglearner, the above is involved in my answer to your question. However, I am not prepared to answer affirmatively to your question. I don’t know the limits of God’s knowledge of the human heart. General knowledge? Yes, he knows. Knowledge of the purity of Abraham’s heart? He seems to have a need to check up on this. He seems not to have certainty about his servant’s faith.
Open theism, as I personally define it, claims that, for God, some of the future is determined, some is open. Which is which is not biblically clear.
Obviously, from the time he left Haran, Abraham has demonstrated awesome faith in God. God knows the heart of Abraham, an as yet uncompleted heart. He knows also his heart weakness. Thus, he is seems not to be sure about where the heart of Abraham will turn under extreme conditions. This, God must learn (unless we are to believe that the entire purpose of the test was to teach Abraham something, i.e., that he can trust God to provide). Of course, he had not learned that when God kept Abimelech from Sarah, nor did he learn it when God opened the womb of Sarai after the birth of Ishmael.
A disturbing thing about the Bible is that it does not give clear-cut answers to all our questions. We would do well to follow Mark Twain’s response to arguments about passages that are difficult to interpret. Mr. Clemens said: “Those parts of the Bible that I do not understand do not bother me. It is those parts of the Bible that I do understand that bother me.”
It is easy to understand that the biblical God enters into genuine relation with the world of persons. It is easy also to see that he does not always relate in the same way, nor in completely predictable ways.
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