#125
Post
by Jac3510 » Fri Jan 27, 2017 7:23 pm
I broadly agree with what you're saying, but with one caveat. You are absolutely right that everything we say about God is analogous. But some things are more analogous than others, which I think you agree with and recognize when you speak of a sort of secod order procession. So it's true, for instance, that God doesn't have wisdom or existence or intelligence or will or personhood or whatever in the same sense we do. Obviously not. He just is those things, and all of that just is Him (in Him, anyway). That's how we talk about attributes.
But we have to be a little more careful with something like emotions. Because while there is certainly something analogous to our emotions in God (so we can speak of God loving or hating), it's not quite analogous in the same way that there is something analogous to thought or will. The latter of these are perfections. Now emotions, strictly, aren't perfections. But they are definitely rooted in perfections. So love is related to the good and that to which we are ordered. I love good food, and that by nature, because my body is ordered towards eating. I love my wife, because my body is ordered toward having a mate. I love God, because my very essence is ordered towards Him. That's just what "love" is -- the ordering towards something. And so, in humans, that has a certain biological expression, and that biological expression is the emotion we call love. Moveover, by the logic and biology, that ordering and emotion give way to another emotion: desire. Here is where we want what we love. And from that, when we attain what we desire and love, we experience this other emotion called joy. By contrast, when something is contrary to how we are ordered, we hate it. So I hate poison and murder and evil and bad music. So that biological response gives way to an emotion called aversion. And when I obtain what I am averse to, I experience an emotion called sadness. The same kind of analysis can be applied to hope and courage, and on the opposite side of those, despair and fear, as well as to anger.
Now it's clear to me that we can think of all of those things in God -- His anger, sadness, hope, joy, love, etc. But really these aren't "fundamental" ideas. They are all related to God's will and/or His intellect. His will insofar as He wills things to happen or not happen and His intellect insofar as how He judges what has happened. So I, for one, would say that God's emotions are an analogy of an analogy. You could say that God's emotions are second order analogies, I suppose. But I think we just need to be very careful here, because I don't think it would be proper to think of God's essence under the auspices of one of those emotional analogies in the same way it is to think of His essence under the auspices of a proper perfection. Yes, the Scriptures say that God is Love, but that language, while very true, is very poetic. John wasn't making an ontological statement about God's nature. It's easy, then for us to say that He is Love. But is God Sadness? Is God Despair? Is God Fear? Because if attribute them to God, that's what you have to say. I'm not comfortable with that.
Again, that's not to disagree with you, K. It's more to unpack how I'd nuance your "second order" idea a bit more.
Proinsias wrote:I don't think you are hearing me. Preference for ice cream is a moral issue
And
that, brothers and sisters, is the kind of foolishness you get people who insist on denying biblical theism. A good illustration of any as the length people will go to avoid acknowledging basic truths.