Play within reconciliation and death; hello Daily Office, tonight
Tonight I wanted to do the Daily Office. I had just watched Matthew.So many things seem to theologically penetrate me. Life as a deep dance of reconciliation; not just the/a divine moment, but every action. I participate in it or I repel it. I am captured by Christ's redemption or I am distanced. I dispense mercy or I steal soul elements of another. And life as mourning and getting on the other side of that. Theologically our expectations as crucified and this is death. Giving out of poverty (part of me removed; it leaves room for change; it causes a cavity for breath) instead of abundance (the cost as arbitrary; forgotten quickly). Death → forgiveness → reconciliation. I hear the foot steps of Paul Tillich's dialectic yet again.
So I wanted to do the Daily Office and I chose one from the Prayer Book for the 21st Century. It has a lot of process theology. I like that God wept; that he has capacity to change his mind; that his love for creation marks not just a distant artist from his work, but a compulsion that the artist is beyond his art and yet runs through it. But I found the reworking of the Psalms for a more process feel to be a bit too much. Perhaps another day it will seem different. For tonight I think a danger in process theology is that we can loose fear and awe. If God changes and we think we can now peg that characteristic, have we not become foolish and devilish?
posted by Learner at 3/18/2006 11:24:00 PM
3 Comments:
Excellent nooma, I would like to see it.
I don't know much about process theology, but I hope that it isn't God that changes, but our constant understanding or perspective of Him.
For process theology, God does change in many respects except character. The thinking is that in order for God to be moved by emotion (regret, sorrow, wrath, etc.) he must participate in time. So there must be a time before God wept in order to have a time when God wept.
In the orthodox view, God being perfect is a Greek understanding that perfection is unchangeable. God is beyond time and is not subjected whatsover to it. Hence predistination takes on an odd flavor of God determining eternal destiny and having absolute knowledge outside of time, but yet there seems to be freewill as well. God knows what's to happen, orchestrates pieces of it, but can't be held accountability ultimately for evil in it. So God has no emotion per se. The emotions expressed in the Bible are simply man trying to make sense of God who is beyond us. God is love is not proved because Jesus wept, but it is simply a fact. God does not change his mind in the OT when he regrets, it's just that we as humans can't get him, so it's the best we can do. For process theologians, Jesus wept is God's living out his love and in regretting he actually regretted which means he changed.
Process and orthodox theology have serious problems from my perspective, but process does allow for an understanding of God's relationship to the world which is more organic and attached. It also offers some comfort that God cares for us, but may not ultimately be responsible for evil because his power is not limitless. But that gets into much more than a little comment can handle...
Interesting, I would like to dig a little deeper...
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