|
1. God acts in the world by compassionate persuasive love.
God acts by being felt by God's creatures, the individual entities of creation. And God's envisagement of possibilities elicits a response from the individual entities of creation.
God acts in human life by being felt by us as persuasive love that is transforming. We are tuned to resonate to the lure of God. When God is felt by individual entities, God enters into their constitution. God is lure. God is persuasive love, ever confronting the world, as it is, with possibilities of its future.
The life and mission of Jesus would not have been possible except in a society that, through its history, had reached a certain critical point. Jesus was able to show men and women what human life could be.
God confronts what is actual in the world with what is possible for it. This is the compassion of God for the creation. God acts by being and by having purpose.
God cannot choose from time to time to interfere coercively here and there, at will. This is at the heart of the difference between classical theism and panentheism or neoclassical theism. God does not put up special umbrellas to protect the faithful against this or that disaster, nor does God authorize any particular disaster. Such concepts suppose a providence in which God is in total control, either determining all events, or selectively determining some events.
God's directing creativity always creates through the spontaneity and structural wholeness of all creatures. Providence is not interference, it is creation. Providence is a quality that lures towards fulfillment. The person who believes in providence does not believe that a special divine activity will alter conditions of finitude and estrangement. They believe and assert with the courage of faith that no situation can frustrate the fulfillment of their ultimate destiny, that nothing can separate them from the love of God.
The concept of an all-powerful, almighty, all-controlling God is antithetical to the reality of the world. In such a world, free will would be impossible. The nature of the world is consistent with the concept of God as persuasive love that is never coercive.
Faith in divine providence is faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence. Circumstances need not destroy us. What matters is our attitude to circumstances. No person, nor any situation, need ever have an unbreakable grasp upon us. Faith makes it possible to act creatively in any situation.
Every life has two aspects, the objective and the subjective. It is mainly our inward subjective contribution that in the end determines what life means to us. "I have overcome the world," said Jesus. His victory was inwards.
Prayer is not the endeavor to get God to do what we want. It is the endeavor to put ourselves in such a relationship with the God-Within that the possibilities of God for our lives become concretely real in our experience.
This view of the nature of God's activity is not only a view of the nature of goodness but also of the nature of evil. Evil springs not from providence but from freedom and chance. If there was no good, there would be no contrasting evil. If God gives us the freedom to choose his goodness and his love, then we also have the freedom to reject--and the possibility of perpetrating evil.
2. The only adequate human response to God's persuasive love is infinite passion.
Plato spoke of undimmed and unwearied passion as the only adequate response. Tillich plummed for infinite passion. Hartshorne3 chose to be creative and foster creativity in others.
The creative evolution of the cosmos is a consequence of the combined creative activity of the individual entities of the universe. Some kind of tendency (lure) to the realization of further possibilities must belong to the individual entities of the world. Otherwise evolution and life is unintelligible--a sequence of chance events of preposterous improbability. At the human level this lure is felt as an imperative. And the response to the divine lure is passionate.
We open our lives to being grasped by something greater than ourselves which becomes part of ourselves. This is the full meaning of incarnation, literally meaning 'becoming flesh'--which is becoming concretely real instead of remaining a possibility.
|
|
