Reading God's divine nature Part II (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 06, 2019, 01:16 (1935 days ago) @ David Turell

To continue with a Catholic flavor:

"Among the things we have to subtract is the notion that God’s idea of himself is a kind of accident or modification of God, the way that our ideas are accidents or modifications of our intellects. For this would make God composite, and among the conclusions of negative theology is that God is non-composite or simple. Divine simplicity is sometimes claimed to be in tension with the doctrine of the Trinity, but as McCabe shows, in fact it is essential to understanding the Trinity. Divine simplicity entails that whatever is in God is God, and thus God’s idea of himself, and his willing of that idea, are God – exactly what we should expect given the Trinitarian insistence that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three Gods.

Simplicity is also essential to understanding the idea that the Persons of the Trinity are to be understood as relations. For example, the Father is said to generate the Son and the Son to be generated by the Father. But we have to subtract from these notions any supposition that the relations in question are accidents of God, the way that a human father’s relation to his son is a kind of accident. Again, whatever is in God is God. Hence God the Father doesn’t have a relation, he is a relation. This is mysterious, McCabe acknowledges, but then, God is mysterious anyway, even apart from the doctrine of the Trinity.

McCabe has much else of interest to say about the divine nature (as well as the other topics in the anthology referred to above) but I have been emphasizing the remarks that involve application of the idea that God is fundamentally that which accounts for why anything exists at all.

Again, McCabe heavily emphasizes the ways in which this entails a negative theology. In my opinion, he sometimes overdoes this a bit. Theological language cannot be construed in an entirely negative way. The most basic of theological assertions – that God exists – is at bottom an affirmative assertion, however many negative theological qualifications we put on it. And talk of the divine attributes would have no content or motivation at all if we took their content to be entirely negative. Negative theology is an essential corrective to theological misunderstanding, but it is not a complete account of theological language, and sometimes McCabe says things that seem to give the opposite impression. All the same, these days the greater danger is to go to the opposite extreme of crudely anthropomorphizing God, and McCabe does a great service in exposing the folly and theological shallowness of doing so. (My bold again)

Comment: I wish I could have been in the past as clear about God's nature as this essay and its interpretation are about God's nature. He must not and cannot be humanized. He is what we cannot imagine. Yes, He is crudely, a human invention of our wishes, but after deeper thought it is patently obvious, living organisms, complex as they are, must have had a designer. But at last we must see the negative side of trying to define God or imagine His thoughts. I don't, but dhw does as he attempts to be an imaginary theist.