Wednesday, December 23, 2015

I don't always post, but when I do it's randomly and about religion

I don't know if you all remember, but my Dad and I don't discuss religion. Mostly because he lacks the ability to have a conversation about religion and not let it get personal.

Or so it's gone in the past.

However, the other night over dinner we managed to have a conversation without anyone getting their feelings hurt.

It started out as a discussion about Mother Theresa being named a Saint. Oddly, my Dad was raised Catholic but his parents had a problem with the church and left to become Mennonites-lite. So he doesn't know a whole lot about the Catholic church or what they believe since he missed out on CCD classes and actually participating in the life of the church.

So we went over how Catholic Saints are recognized and why people pray 'to' the Saints. Somehow though we segued into a theological discussion about the nature of God.

To preface, my parents are both currently non-denominational Christians. And in my opinion their understanding of Christian theology is less comprehensive than it should be. But that's fine, not everyone enjoys theology and arguing about things that can never be proven or disproven.

I know, I don't get it either. What better fun is there?

Still, they read the Bible and they *believe*, even if trying to pin them down on certain positions is like herding cats. You get nowhere but frustrated super fast.

Back to the conversation. In the discussion about how Saints are people who are recognized by the church as being in Heaven, not *created* by the Catholic church, we wound up talking about the omni's of God. Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent.

My Dad has no problem with the all powerful, being *everywhere* parts of this. His wrinkle comes at the all knowingness.

His stance is that he thinks God can set something into motion but not know how it's going to turn out. That otherwise God might get 'bored' with knowing everything. Which is…not a sustainable theological perspective in the Christian faith, as far as I know. I did tell him to ask his pastor because presumably the man has had more theological training than, say, me who has had none. I doubt he'll ask though.

My argument against his theological opinion basically runs as follows:

1. Christians accept the Bible as the inspired word of God. God, via angels for the most part, spoke on occasion to people directly but other than that He gave people the information that He wanted to get out and let them write it in their own fashion.

2. Even though it is inspired and therefore there are different writing styles, etc., the Christian belief is based on the fact that God would not allow the important parts to get messed up. So anything that God causes to be said about Himself must be what God meant to have said about Him.

3. God says, in several places, that He knows everything. There are references through the Old Testament and the New. So God knows everything, according to the Bible.

4. God also says that lying is a sin. That's pretty much up near the front, starts in the whole Ten Commandments thing.

5. Therefore, if God says that He is all-knowing, but is not actually all-knowing, then you have two options. Either the Bible can't be trusted to be accurate on what is said of God - and therefore the whole thing must be called into question - because there was no divine editorial board, or God lied about being all-knowing. And if God lied about being all-knowing, then God has sinned. And God cannot sin and be a *good* God.

This is all, of course, assuming Christianity, which assumes Judaism as the base.

Pagans don't, as far as I know, expect 100% honesty from the gods, depending on which god they happen to be dealing with. But I could be wrong. Paganism, aside from a brief foray into the beliefs of my ancestors, is not really a thing for me. There's a lot about it I don't know.

Not really sure how Muslims would feel about the whole thing. I still have trouble with the whole belief that God caused the people to believe that they were killing Jesus but really it was someone else. It still feels a lot like lying to me. Which doesn't sit with the concept of a good God.

Anyway.

I don't know, maybe there's some deeper theological theory that I'm unaware of that makes it possible for God to set something up where He doesn't know the outcome, but it doesn't feel right. It doesn't mesh with my understanding of theology and divinity as a whole.

Another question he had that came out of this was why would God bother to create humanity if He knew that we would screw it up in about the first five seconds.

I told him that most(many?) people believe that God created out of Love. Almost like a function of being Himself. He didn't create out of boredom or loneliness or a desire to see what would happen, but because the purest expression of the Love that He has was to create …. everything and humanity as well. Even knowing that people were going to muck it up.

What do you all think?

8 comments:

  1. I love when you post! I'll think on this, and try to write you back later.

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    1. I look forward to hearing any thoughts you have. :) Happy New Year by the way!

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  2. A couple of things come to mind. First, obviously, the word "Christian" is pretty broad and there are plenty of Christians with a more liberal view of Scripture. I know many pastors who would not agree God gave people what he wanted them to know and let him write it, but rather that Scripture is testimony. That is, personal and prone to people's mistakes.

    But I assume you're talking about a particular type of Christianity, at the very least something closer to Orthodoxy. There's still room for interpretation and I don't think your Dad's understanding is necessarily incompatible. It seems to me that a perfectly acceptable interpretation is that God knows all that is and has been. Things that don't exist can't be known, and the future hasn't come into existence yet. God can know the possibilities, but not what form it will take.

    But does that match the Bible? Okay, it's not like I have it memorized. So I searched for a list of verses to prove omniscience, and not one of these seems to me to suggest God knows everything about the future. http://www.allaboutgod.com/god-is-omniscient-faq.htm

    It's pretty much all about God knowing our hearts and how the world works. There are a couple of exceptions. The first says God makes known what is to come. Okay, but he obviously doesn't make known ALL of it. What it is saying here is that God is revealing things he has specifically planned to do. A few down there's one about God knowing the writer before he was born, when he was "woven together in the depths of the earth." Huh. I am not familiar with that part of Christian theology, and I don't think anyone would say the verse is a lie because we're not formed in the depths of the earth. It's poetry, and so are the lines surrounding it.

    Of course, none of this means that you CAN'T believe God knows everything that ever will happen. I'm just not seeing a definite inflexible teaching that this is the case.

    (Also, I would definitely say you're trained in theology. :D Not professionally, sure, but you've done your research. With what you've taught yourself I'd say you seem to know more than several of my classmates.)

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    1. Hi Stephanie!

      So, yes, 'Christian' is a fairly squiggly term actually. I know that, but I tend to forget about it when I'm talking about theology.

      I guess I'm a theological snob? lol

      I do tend to think of Christian theology as only orthodox (not Orthodox) theology. Because accounting for every group that classes itself as 'Christian' is an impossible task.

      "I know many pastors who would not agree God gave people what he wanted them to know and let him write it, but rather that Scripture is testimony. That is, personal and prone to people's mistakes."

      *eyes them*

      See, this is how I know I'm a snob. Because this sounds very wrong to me. I mean, more power to them, but this goes against some deep core of what I believe Christianity to be. Which is on me, I recognize, but there we are.

      "There's still room for interpretation and I don't think your Dad's understanding is necessarily incompatible. It seems to me that a perfectly acceptable interpretation is that God knows all that is and has been. Things that don't exist can't be known, and the future hasn't come into existence yet. God can know the possibilities, but not what form it will take."

      I know that there's room for interpretation, but I feel like the inviolability of the Bible is a pretty standard core. We can argue about how to interpret what it says forever (and likely will) but if a person is a Christian I think there has to be some standard of the faith put into the text. If it is just that God made some suggestions and then people wrote what they wanted, there's not really a firm foundation there, is there? It leaves the Bible very open to error and miscommunication.

      Which, given that people's souls are at stake here, seems a very ham-handed way to run the universe. Then again I doubt anyone is looking to give me absolute power over anything.

      Which is wise.

      What about prophecy in the Bible? If we're assuming that prophecy came from God (where else would it come from?) then that also would seem to say that God knows what is going to happen in the future and in more than just a general way.

      "but he obviously doesn't make known ALL of it. What it is saying here is that God is revealing things he has specifically planned to do."

      An argument could be made, however, that God does not choose to reveal everything to His creation. The fact that He doesn't tell humanity everything doesn't prove that He Himself doesn't know everything.

      "A few down there's one about God knowing the writer before he was born, when he was "woven together in the depths of the earth." Huh. I am not familiar with that part of Christian theology, and I don't think anyone would say the verse is a lie because we're not formed in the depths of the earth. It's poetry, and so are the lines surrounding it."

      Fair. But poetry or not, it should not contain an un-truth, correct? So if these verses are understood to be a poetic representation of God knowing us before we're born, then there's no lie there.

      "Of course, none of this means that you CAN'T believe God knows everything that ever will happen. I'm just not seeing a definite inflexible teaching that this is the case."

      It's a fairly standard belief of main stream Christianity though, isn't it? I'll have to look into it some more.

      *blush*

      Well, thank you for the compliment. But that makes me worried for your classmates, to be honest. :)

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    2. Now I want to know more about the history. I never really looked into omniscience. If my classmates or professors held that belief, it never came up. (Liberal heathens, all of us. :D) It was definitely the standard teaching in my Baptist upbringing, but then they attributed lots of things to the Bible that aren't there, aren't so straight-forward, and/or diverge quite a bit from the rest of more traditional Christianity.

      What I was saying was that even if we take all these Scriptural examples as true, I don't see any of them saying God knows the future. Yes, it's possible to assume God knows the future but just hasn't revealed everything. But it doesn't say that, so at this point we have to recognize we're guessing. It just comes down to how we define "everything" and if things that haven't happened can be said to exist in that category. Of course, the argument can be made that God exists outside of time and has already seen things that haven't happened to us yet. But again, it's guesswork. I don't know enough about what ancient teachers said on this and the Wikipedia article is not at all helpful. Ah well, something new to research!

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    3. You know it's funny, I've never really looked into omniscience either, but from the assumption that *of course* it's there and of course everyone knows and believes that. Because. :)

      It was certainly an unquestionable belief in the MS Lutherans, and in Catholicism. And we know how I feel about *wavy-hand* Protestantism. I'm a snob, and/or prejudiced! *ugh* I am ashamed of myself, but I can't quite stop thinking about anything that deviates from orthodox, high church theology as *wrong*.

      "Baptist upbringing, but then they attributed lots of things to the Bible that aren't there, aren't so straight-forward, and/or diverge quite a bit from the rest of more traditional Christianity."

      See, I find this funny because the Baptists tend to be some of the most anti-Catholic groups out there in my experience. Mostly because they claim that the Catholic church adds things to the Bible.

      "even if we take all these Scriptural examples as true, I don't see any of them saying God knows the future."

      I agree that the majority of them don't seem to say it outright, but I still think the text leans more towards an interpretation of omniscience than away from it. But yes, it is all based on interpretation and conjecture after a certain point.

      "It just comes down to how we define "everything" and if things that haven't happened can be said to exist in that category."

      *Everything*, Stephanie. *makes wide gestures* Everything. :D All the things! LOL

      I think from a human perspective, since we're stuck experiencing time in a linear fashion that can only move in one direction, that things that do not yet exist can't be counted as a part of 'everything'. However, if we do make and accept the argument that God either exists outside of time (a fairly popular argument as I recall) or that God, while experiencing time can 'see' the future in some fashion, then 'everything' for Him would include what has not yet happened.

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  3. These comments were super-interesting. I'm so glad Stephanie came over to talk. : I really don't have anything to add except, for sure, I was taught that God knows all things, and He knows what will happen in the future.

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    1. See, I was taught that too, and I assume that it's a traditional teaching. But now I wonder where it comes from, in actuality. Since we've decided that the Bible is not, perhaps, explicit about it.

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