Warning: Inside (Presbyterian) baseball.
A thought occurred to me as I read Peter Leithart's post here on the Enlightenment's banishing of anger from among the list of "approved" divine attributes. Quoting author Patrick Coleman:
Since in biblical tradition God’s anger was prompted not only by human pretensions to divinity, but even more by the worship of other gods, removing anger from the list of God’s attributes also opened the way to greater tolerance of other religions. It made room for accommodating cultural practices (notably in the realm of sexuality) ... . In all these cases, God is not necessarily banished from the scene; it is simply no longer plausible to think of him as taking offense at human waywardness, now largely redefined as cultural variety.
And if the case in the 18th century, how much more so today? (Check a plethora of posts on Christian Smith's characterization of contemporary attitudes toward God in terms of "moral therapeutic deism" here, here, and here.)
Coleman's statement sounded about right to me but then I recalled that the Puritan and Presbyterian Westminster Shorter Catechism answered the question "What is God?" as follows: "God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." Notable by its omission is anger (or wrath), an attribute one can hardly think escaped the notice of the Westminster Divines. Thence to the sadly underutilized Westminster Larger Catechism (well, not underutilized by everyone--see The Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts (abstract here)). But, to my surprise, not a word of anger there either:
Question 7: What is God? Answer: God is a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, everywhere present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.
And then it struck me that neither answer mentioned God's attribute of love. How can that be? Or, more precisely, why is that the case? Despite popular mythology that treats the Puritans as dour killjoys, they reveled in the knowledge of God's love.
This issue has come up repeatedly in Jewish theology in the last century. There is a contradiction between the medieval conception of God as "perfect being" and the attribution of emotions such as anger and love. These attributes suggest that God wants things, and that he experiences pain upon not getting them or pleasure when he does. This makes God seem to have needs--and how can he have needs if he is perfect? Perfect being theology would appear to contradict the theology of the Hebrew Bible by denying that God can have needs. As soon as you take God's perfection as a touchstone of your religion, the supposition that God loves and is angered becomes an embarrassment.
ReplyDeleteThe standard doctrinal account is that God is without "passions." This is not problematic when right sly understood, i.e., that God has emotions and that they are always appropriate to a particular state of affairs. With respect to love in particular, the standard Christian account (so far as I know) draws on the sense of the Greek term agape, which does not suggest love of what one needs but rather an overflowing of love so that, e.g., God creates those in in his image with whom he shares love; not that He needed to do so but because he desires to. A Trinitarian understanding of God is helpful here (see Augustine's De Trinitate). A fine line, to be sure, but one that can be navigated.
ReplyDelete