It is clear that freedom does not matter much to many people (perhaps because spiritual freedom entails ultimate responsibility for our own fate). So the fact that mainstream/ orthodox/ traditional Christian theology has no place for freedom in its conceptualization of God; is not something that deeply bothers those who aspire to total obedience, or the annihilation of "the self".
This exclusion of space for freedom is somewhat distinct from an explanation for freedom - although the two can go together.
There is no space for freedom when God is assumed to be "omni" and to have created everything from nothing; because every-thing then is ultimately made, known and controlled by God.
To explain what freedom is requires a rather different understanding. We need to get an intuitive grasp of what we are talking about when we reference freedom, free will or agency; and develop a picture of how it could happen (even if it seldom does actually happen).
The difficulty is that most people have an unconscious assumption that understands every possible action (including every thought) to be caused by some prior stimulus. Such assumptions leave no space for freedom.
So freedom must be uncaused. But many modern people vaguely-but-firmly believe in a thing they call "randomness"; so then they assume that stuff happens completely unpredictability...
But randomness is not freedom, indeed it is not an explanation At All but the opposite of explanation - "randomness" (if it existed, rather than being just a mathematical tool) would be a denial of even the possibility of explanation.
Freedom must therefore be the attribute of a particular person and his nature and motivations. In other words, freedom must be an uncaused cause, a first-cause - which is a partial definition of God.
Hence; freedom is a first-cause, which is a divine attribute.
It seems that the conclusion is that Men are gods, of the same kind as God; insofar as they are free.
Insofar as Jesus Christ really matters to Christians, it is noteworthy that so many Christians have been so concerned to assert the absolute power and fundamental nature of God's unity, omni-qualities and total-creation, that they have left no space for Jesus the mortal Man.
And no possibility of explaining why Jesus was necessary - after all, if God is defined as having everything possible already covered, there is nothing substantive for Jesus to do.
If God does everything, either directly or via creation; then Jesus is merely optional.
The exclusion of freedom by theological assumptions is therefore another side of the same coin that excludes the possibility of a coherent explanation of why Jesus is necessary for the accomplishment of what Jesus offered.
If we agree that Jesus (a mortal man, living in a particular place and time) offered the possibility of for Men to choose resurrected eternal life in Heaven; then there must be some reason why Jesus was needed for this task - and if God is predefined in terms of omni-qualities, it seems clear that the Man Jesus was not necessary for anything.
Yet those who accept Jesus's claim to divinity and to be the necessary path to eternal resurrected life should - it seems to me - be making metaphysical assumptions and constructing their theology around that fact.
In sum: If Jesus is a Man and is necessary - then God cannot be Omni.
My view is that the reality and necessity of Jesus must be the primary focus and structuring factor in creating a Christian theology of God; not the other way around.
NOTE - It may be asked why, if there is indeed no space for Jesus, so many previous generations of Christians were satisfied by theological explanations. The first answer is that many weren't and these stayed Jews or embraced Islam. But the main answer is that Men's consciousness has changed through history - and world-pictures that strike us as abstract and dead used to be spontaneously infused with purpose and meaning - by the innate Original Participation which Men have only recently left-behind.
5 comments:
wrt to the note at the end, i think there is another dimension to it, although still related to the question of original participation: i think this this abstract theology business was simply ignored by most people. it was an exclusive domain of a very small fringe, not even all priests or all monks, although these probably repeated the broad strokes of it. but it didn't much matter. if it did, medieval society would not have been as we know it was. i think this is more plausible than the abstract explanations being infused with spontaneous purpose and meaning for most people (although no doubt they were for the high theologians). but for most people, even if they weren't rubes, but craftsman or poets or troubadours, i imagine, they would hear this stuff sometimes and go: sure, sure, i believe in all that, but now let me pray and make an offering for a good harvest or a safe trip to Jesus and Mary and all the host of saints. and then go about their day.
@Laeth - I completely agree; and I only intended my remark to apply to those who knew and believed the theology.
The veneration of Mary the Mother of Jesus, even from early centuries, shows how far away from core theological explanations, could be the devotional focus of Christianity.
Veneration of Mary long preceded any serious or systematic theological rationale for it - and/yet devotions to Mary often assumed (and this continues) de facto devotional priority and greater intensity than worship of the Father or the Son.
But this kind of inner contradiction is a weakness in the face of prolonged ideological onslaught in the context of modern consciousness.
Christian incoherence and obfuscation which was treated casually and hardly mattered in earlier eras, is Now something that people find impossible to ignore, which blocks conversion, and which saps the strength of faith (very obviously!); as well as being focused-upon and exploited for destructive purposes by the endemic evil that rules this world.
@Bruce,
absolutely, i did not mean to diminish the problem of the now, but rather to highlight it. those same people who shrugged all those abstractions off as irrelevant and remained christian and romantic in their daily lives, now cannot do so for a variety of reasons that the high theology does not address in the least. and, worse, it seems to me though it is hard to prove, that there has been a hardening also on the side of the theologians. by which i mean, i think they knew it was the case that their abstractions didn't really matter for most people and they didn't seem too bothered by it in the middle ages. but then the more questions started to be asked, the more they doubled down, not only on the theology itself but on its importance to the whole thing (and, in a similar manner, the importance of the institution and its edicts, rather than an organic religion). so more and more the faith became even more dependent on the proper formulations and the proper authorities, except now the common people have no reason at all to turn to them than to, say, the state, the NGOs, the technocrats, etc.
@Laeth - Yes indeed. And, no matter whether they double-down on their core issues of church order and dogma, or converge with secular leftism - the churches continue to decline both as institutions and in terms of strength of faith.
Indeed, I cannot see any way in which the formal institutions of churches can remain truly Christian in their core - since they are all both led and inhabited by a majority of people for whom Christianity is far from the priority.
When all social institutions (including all churches) are apparently net-corrupted throughout, then Christianity can only exist in the shrinking gaps (as it were) *between* the system requirements.
For Christians to inhabit churches is indeed a possibility (i.e. there are real Christians in many of the churches, of many denominations), but their situation gets harder every year - and there is a continual observable falling-away (both out of the churches, and out of Christianity/ religion altogether).
"Freedom must therefore be the attribute of a particular person and his nature and motivations. In other words, freedom must be an uncaused cause, a first-cause - which is a partial definition of God. Hence; freedom is a first-cause, which is a divine attribute. It seems that the conclusion is that Men are gods, of the same kind as God; insofar as they are free."
That's a good description of the uncreated freedom I keep harping on about.
The reality of freedom as an uncaused cause hit me shortly after I realized why the Grand Inquisitor accused Jesus of expecting too much from man (from Dostoevsky's B. Karamazov), particularly the bit about Jesus increasing man's freedom. At first, I simply assumed it referred to resurrection after death. It does, but there is more to it than that. Jesus also increases freedom when he makes us aware of our divine attributes. It took me a while to figure out that second layer of increased freedom, but it helps explain why the people are relieved to hand their freedom over to the G.I. in favor of Miracle, Mystery, and Authority.
Put another way, there's no space for Jesus in mainstream Christian theology because there is space only for one uncaused cause and no space for any consideration of men as gods.
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