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Monday, June 22, 2009

Does God love the reprobate?-6

“It would be strange enough for God to even merely desire (without even intention on acting to fulfill that desire) the salvation from sin of entities whom He Himself chooses to ensure can never even have the possibility of being saved from sin. But that might be possible if God is not essentially love; thus God’s choice to utterly not love the non-elect (except perhaps in an incidental and accidental fashion as a side-effect), and thus to refuse to even try to save them from sin, would not be incoherent with some merely emotive desire (assuming God could even have a merely emotive desire, which I deny--and which Calvinists typically deny, too) to save them from sin--perhaps thanks to unessential love.”

“The disagreement (metaphysically speaking) is either about God being essentially true love (which shouldn’t be a disagreement among trinitarian theists), or about God refusing to truly love the non-elect. But if God is essentially love, then He must act in love to objects (at least to personal objects) even when acting in wrath to objects, or else cease to essentially exist; and since we, dependent on God for our existence, are still here to even discuss the question, we can be sure that He does and shall act in love to all sinners.”

http://www.evangelicaluniversalist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=420&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=20#p3633

So if God is “essentially love,” (or “essentially true love,” which I guess is even better), then God must love all sinners. The underlying argument, apparently, is that God does whatever God is.

But if you grant the premise, then the logical force of the argument is quite expansive. Since God is essentially love, then God must love forks and spoons and pitchforks and forklifts and underwear and Tupperware and wonder bras and coat-hangers and toothpicks and dipsticks and lipsticks and Tupperware and pornography and bestiality and Satanism and Listerine, &c.

“If this is being proposed, however (and I’ve seen Calves and Arms alike attempt this route, in their own distinct ways--denying that God is essentially love, I mean), then we’ve immediately moved back to a more fundamental theological topic: whether God is a substantial unity of Persons acting to fulfill love to one another as the ground of even God’s own independent self-existence. In that case (which is trinitarian theism), and only in that case, God is essentially love.”

Needless to say, this doesn’t follow. If God is love, and God is a Trinitarian God, then God’s love is “fulfilled” (if you wish to put it that way) via his intra-Trinitarian love. There is no need of any extra-Trinitarian love to fulfill his essential love. The essential Trinity fulfills his essential love.

“Because in both cases God is acting in love to the object. Being essentially love, He loves the object and in so loving the object creates and allows it to be a real person.”

The logic of that argument would commit God to creating every possible person or every possible entity.

However, possible persons include eternally damned possible persons. For that’s a logical possibility. Therefore, Jason’s appeal actually undercuts universalism.

“He is not righteous by some automatic or static necessity, but eternally righteous in active choice as the Trintarian Deity upon Whom all reality depends for existence...Being essentially love, being righteousness in His own interpersonal union of self-existence…”

This is where Jason begins to fudge. To say that God is essentially righteous doesn’t carry the same implications as the claim that God is essentially love. Indeed, it introduces a note of essential hostility to whoever is unrighteous.

“Which, incidentally, is why I have seen a few Calvinists go the distance and try to claim that the non-elect are not really persons, only simulacra.”

Since that’s not a logical implication of Calvinism, that’s not “going the distance.”

Calvinism has no problem treating the reprobate as real persons. Because they’re real persons, they’re morally accountable agents. Blameworthy if they do wrong.

“God will respect the person’s own choices insofar as righteousness can respect an unrighteous person: in love. But being love, God will keep persisting--including in chastisement and discipline, toward accomplishing re-tribution, re-mediation, re-probation in and with the sinner.”

This is the deterministic strain of universalism.

““Jason’s God” would be acting at cross-purposes to treat them as non-persons (whether annihilating them from existence or simply ‘forcing’ them to ‘be good’--temporal and thus temporary exceptions otherwise notwithstanding.)”

This is the indeterministic strain of universalism. Jason is a fence-straddler.

“Nope. ‘Jason’s God’ (i.e. the trinitarian God, God self-begetting and God self-begotten and God proceeding in distinct persons of substantial unity) would be ‘working at cross-purposes’ if He chose to keep persons in existence as impenitent rebels without acting toward saving them from rebellion.”

Another illogical comment. God would only be working at cross-purposes by damning some people to everlasting hell if God had also had a contrary purpose to save them. Since I, along with Paul Helm, William Young, and a number of others, deny that God suffers from conflicting desires or frustrated desires, Jason’s riposte has no bearing on my own position.

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