We have come to the place where…like Alice, in the denouement of her adventures, waves it all away “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”. Let’s deconstruct the house built of cards. This is always the fun part.
It starts like this: The statement that ‘God is limited’ is patently false.
And after I spent all that time arguing my case…. why do I now say that?
It has to do with the fact that anytime we try to define God from ourselves we will always end up with something false. For several reasons, but I give two that I want to discuss: God represented Himself as “I AM THAT I AM” and that God, alone, is Holy.
So what is wrong with saying that God is limited? It leaves out that God is limited in our estimation by having definitions of character and will. We deny that God should be a Person when we do that. When God has plainly revealed that He is a person and created evidence of it that is residual within ourselves.
The whole argument that is presented in that theodicy idea is built with the premise within the proposition that when we say “omnipotence” we take for granted that all powerful must include the power to be evil. I don’t think that is supported or proven, just presumed. The reason it is so often presumed is because it matches what we know in our present world experience, as power is exhibited through ourselves and extrapolated outward to define God.
This business of thinking we may perfectly derive a picture of God…. even a synthesis picture…. through our intellectual exercises, is an endlessly frustrating business.
If you don’t think so, just try taking a ‘Philosophy of Religion’ class in your local university. The futility becomes striking.
But God, The LORD GOD, is not some Zoroastrian concoction. He is the I AM. And that is how we must come to know Him. As He reveals Himself.
Then we may explain from there. That is the only way it will work without ending up with ‘God is limited’ statements that degrade further into open theism ideas of God somehow being an evolving sort of changeable being. As if He, Himself, were constricted by the things that He has made.
He is a Person who is Holy. He isn’t like anything else we may know or look at. If we want to know Him, we will have to meet up with Him, personally.
Otherwise we are just those seven blind men around the elephant. Who can’t even explain their own tactile experience properly.
Not that we cannot know some things through reason. We just aren’t going to fully explain God starting from ourselves. We are simply the vehicle. We can produce analogies for the revelation, we can apply the principles and formulate its applications to our experience. But we will not fully explain everything there is to know about God. At which point you laugh.
But isn’t that what we are trying to do?
I don’t believe in the “Leap of Faith” , I don’t believe in the emotional response of “Just believe”. I have found that reason will take us far along the way to build groundwork of faith, but then there is a limitation. It cannot fully extend to the degree we demand it should. And I have explanations for that.
One is that verse in the Reminder post. God didn’t choose the vehicle of the Logical and Wise Man to express Himself. Quite frankly I see the wisdom in that. The more I engage in these discussions the more I see the wisdom of that.
But in thinking about this whole idea of God being handicapped is only a manner of seeing the goodness of God. We just do not comprehend the sort of love and consistancy of character that will not abrogate our rights as men to choose and to be ourselves. We do not understand the type of love that will take unlimited power and subject it to restraints for the sake of said love.
But we catch glimpses of it all the time. Things in our experience and inner being respond to this idea of love. But we can’t know how it is truly expressed until we come up close and personal with it in God.
I just had to explain this, that I do not accept the statement that God is limited, and it was not what I was trying to express. It was a limited manner of breaking through our thinking… of working with a deeply held and unquestioned view in modern man that omnipotence must exert its power and must include expression which we call evil.
And obliquely address the fact that we are not god/God, and all things are not in our image and a reflection of us and what we think.
We do not define reality.
And there is the crux of Modern Man’s dilemma.
To which I say:”Get over yourself”.