In the comments section of the Versus Populum posting about Rowan Williams's view of God, I ran across the following sentence:
The living God as the divine perichoresis of the Trinity already contains and 'knows' what it means to be human in the unity of the fully divine/human person of Jesus Christ.I admit that, after reading that, I had to look up the word perichoresis. It turns out there is a Wikipedia article on it, for anyone who is interested. It is a part of Trinitarian theology, as it turns out; but then, I am not a Trinitarian. In any case, what I found interesting was the suggestion that somehow the Incarnation was necessary in order for God to know what it means to be human.
I've run across this argument before. And I have to say that it makes no sense to me. Are we to believe that God didn't know what it was like to be human before Jesus was born? Are we to suppose that there are actually limits to God's knowledge and understanding?
I would suggest that God already knew and already knows what it is like to be human, that there is no limit to God's knowledge and understanding, and that furthermore this means that God knows what it is like to be me and you and the fish in the sea and the birds in the air and the bacteria in your lower intestine.
To say that God knows all of this in the fullest way possible means that God knows our experiences not just objectively as an outsider, but God actually knows what we are experiencing internally as well. God's empathy is perfect, in other words, in ways that our own capacity for empathy is not. God understands our own subjective experiences. This dovetails with the notion of panentheism--because if God shares in all of our subjective experiences, then God understands us not just as an external observer, but also from the inside; and this implies that God is within us and we are within God.
To suggest otherwise is to place limits on God's omniscience. I cited in an earlier posting a quote from Uta Ranke-Heinemann that stated that "A powerful God finds more supporters than a compassionate God." Perhaps we can add to this a corollary: a powerful God finds more supporters than an omniscient God as well. By that I mean that God's alleged omnipotence--which supposedly allowed him/her to act as a kind of divine sperm donor to a young woman 2000 years ago and thus create a miraculous birth so that God could incarnate himself on earth--is said have been a means of overcoming a certain limit to God's omniscience.
In my view, describing God as omniscient and omnibenevolent makes for a richer and more meaningful theology than what can be accomplished by describing him/her as omnipotent.
4 comments:
**Are we to believe that God didn't know what it was like to be human before Jesus was born? Are we to suppose that there are actually limits to God's knowledge and understanding?**
I'm right there with you. If one defines God as all-knowing, then by the very definition of the word, God knew what it was like to be human way before Jesus ever came along. If this wasn't the case, then God cannot be defined in such a way. The word omniscient prohibits it.
Well, aren't there different kinds of "knowing," though? It's true that God in His omniscience knows everything. But, the incarnation is saying that God also "knows," and shares in our nature in an experiential kind of way.
To say that God knows all of this in the fullest way possible means that God knows our experiences not just objectively as an outsider, but God actually knows what we are experiencing internally as well.
I was trying to address that point when I wrote, "To say that God knows all of this in the fullest way possible means that God knows our experiences not just objectively as an outsider, but God actually knows what we are experiencing internally as well."
To say that God cannot know what we are experiencing internally is limiting the kinds of knowledge that God has. Furthermore, the best that the Incarnation could do in this matter would be to let God know what it is like to experience what we experience in our lives; but it still doesn't give God any actual direct knowledge of what we are experiencing in the moments that we experience them. This is another way of saying that the best that God can do is draw an analogy of what he went through during 30 years of his life. And did Jesus really experience every single thing that every human has ever gone through?
No matter how you look it, the basic problem remains--it ends up limiting God's knowledge by asserting that he/she doesn't know what we are subjectively experiencing. This is not consistent with the idea that God is omniscient.
Grace,
There is still the problem of the word "omniscience," though. By using that word to describe God, that means that God already shares the nature in an experiential sort of way. God already knows all the different sorts of "knowing" because of the "all" associated with the omni. If you say that there are certain things God cannot know until He becomes human, then the word "omniscient" cannot be attached to God.
And Mystical also brings up a good point, if we go down this track -- it lets God have an experience similiar to us, but it doesn't let God have the same experiences as us. People experience suffering in different ways.
Not only that, but you'd only have one aspect of God knowing this -- the Son. The Holy Spirit didn't have this knowledge. Nor did the Father.
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