The Self-Sufficiency of God
"Although man knows number and its secret he no longer knows that even number, which determines days, years and seasons, is not self-contained, that it too rests only upon the Word and command of God. . . . We have forgotten this connection. . . . What we comprehend is the godless language we speak ourselves, the language of an eternal law of the world resting in itself, silent about the Creator and boasting about the creature.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, cited by Pangle, op cit. p.35).
In the confrontation between Jerusalem and Athens, between the Christian Mind and the Unbelieving Mind, there are certain persistent matrices of difference and conflict. The Unbelieving Mind has a myriad permutations and combinations--including endless variations of religion and belief in false gods. However, all unbelieving thought necessarily has certain key common assumptions or elements--representing the "ground rules" of unbelief. These key unbelieving assumptions are beyond proof or demonstration. They are unproven, non-established assertions--and as such represent the fundamental irrationality of all unbelief.
These key assumptions of unbelief represent the points of irreconcilable conflict between the Unbelieving Mind and the Christian faith. The first irrational assumption common to all forms of unbelief is that the God revealed in the Scriptures cannot possibly exist. From the outset, He is excluded from the terms and content of the discussion. (We are not saying here that the Unbelieving Mind will not have extensive debates and discussions about god[s]--in fact the reverse is the case--but we are saying that the Unbelieving Mind will assert at the very outset that while god[s] might exist, the God revealed in the Scriptures is an impossibility.)
A second point of irreconcilable conflict turns around creation. The Scriptures attest that the Living God created all things of nothing. The Unbelieving Mind from the outset proceeds on the assumption that this cannot possibly be true. In the Athenian worldview if there is a creator or an impersonal creative force (to the Unbelieving Mind it is ultimately irrelevant which; both are comfortable and congruent with the worldview of unbelief) he/she/it began with something. There has to be an eternality of conceptual frames (ideas) or matter; or a combination of the two. The gods of unbelief work and interact with this non-created material. Creation ex-nihilo versus creation ex-substantio represents a point of irreconcilable conflict between Jerusalem and Athens.
All unbelieving thought posits the eternity of matter in some way, shape, or form. Only Christians—converted through the grace of God—have come to believe and understand the following truths:
1. There was a "time", before the creation of time, when only God was.
2. Before that “time” there was nothing apart from Him.
3. There existed no matter, no space, no time, no creaturely thought/reason/rationality.
4. The Living God was (and is) completely self-sufficient. Theologians call this the “aseity of God” meaning “origination from self.”
5. All of the creation—which is limited and finite—utterly and completely depends upon Him. He has called it into existence out of nothing.
The Tri-Unity of God
We now come to another irreconcilable point of difference between Jerusalem and Athens. God has revealed Himself to be Triune: one God in three Persons. The Scriptures do not make a "big deal" of this--in the way that they do about the atonement of Christ, or the resurrection from the dead. But that is not to say that the triune nature of God is unimportant--rather, the very reverse, for the Scriptures treat the tri-unity of God as self-evident, in the same way that the very existence and nature of God Himself is treated as self-evident. (In contrast, the truths of the atonement of Christ and the resurrection of the dead are not self-evident--they are works of God's free grace and in almost every way completely unexpected. Certainly they represent blessings and favour from God to which we have absolutely no title or right from Him. That is why the Scriptures make so much of them--because they are contrary to expectation. Therefore we hardly dare to believe that they are true. The Lord condescends to our weakness by insisting repeatedly and explicitly that they are the truth.)
The unity and plurality of God is revealed from the very beginning, in the first verse in the very first chapter of Genesis. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . ." The Hebrew word for God (Elohim) is in a plural form, but the subject of the sentence is singular ("created" has a third person singular subject). So throughout the chapter, the Bible uses the third person singular whenever God speaks or acts. But in verse 26,on the sixth day of creation, we read: "Then God said (third person singular): 'Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness' " (first person plural.)
Moreover, in Genesis 1:2 one of the Persons of the Godhead is spoken of specifically: " . . . and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters." As revelation progresses through God's work of redemption throughout the rest of Scripture we learn that there are "three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory." (Shorter Catechism).
The tri-unity of God is not a “higher” doctrine, a doctrine that people “climb” to on their way to a better understanding of God. The doctrine of the Trinity is absolutely fundamental. If God were not triune, He could not exist or be true. If God does exist, He must be triune, or have unity and plurality equally ultimate within Himself, His Being. Without tri-unity we could not believe or assert the absolute self-sufficiency and independence of God. Note that Scriptures reveal God to be equally ultimate in unity and plurality--in other words, the Oneness of God is not more fundamental to His being than his Many-ness.
All the blessed attributes of God have existed within the unity and plurality of the Godhead before all time, and will for all eternity. God did not need the creation in order to be God or to exercise His divine attributes. Thus, divine attributes such as love, faithfulness, covenant loyalty or lovingkindness, generosity, covenanted commitments--all the attributes which require a plurality of persons to exist in the first place--are eternally ultimate in God: the Persons of the Godhead have always been this way (love, faithfulness, etc) toward Each Other. This contrasts with Athenian conceptions of god, where if god is posited as almighty (as in Islam) he is also posited as monistic or unitarian (singular, non plural). The existence of a monistic god's attributes depend upon (are correlative to) the world. A monistic god requires other beings in order to speak, work, serve, and so forth. Without a creation, the monistic god cannot exist as god. The monistic god is thus dependant upon the creature for its existence.
Consequently, the Unbelieving Mind will always deny or exclude from the outset the tri-unity of God because the tri-unity of God and the aseity of God are necessarily related. The Unbelieving Mind will only countenance a god(s) that are limited, correlative to and dependant to some extent upon the creation and, therefore, man. Thus, the Unbelieving Mind asserts from the beginning that the tri-unity of God cannot possibly be true.
No "Chain of Being" Between God and the World
The absolute independence, or aseity of God, and the consequent total, universal, and absolutely comprehensive dependance of all other (created) reality upon Him is unique to Jerusalem--that is, to the Believing Christian Mind. All the religions, beliefs, and philosophies of Athens (the entire world of unbelief) cannot accept the aseity of their gods (which is, after all, rather hard to do when all Athenian gods are figments of human imagination). In a similar vein, all Athenian gods are necessarily dependant in some way on the universe--so that the universe, in some way, shape, or form is co-eternal with the gods, and the gods are limited to, shaped by, or correlative with the universe.
Similarly, the equal ultimacy of the One and the Many in God is unique to Jerusalem. All Athenian gods (whether personal or impersonal) either reflect the ultimacy of the one (unity) at the expense of the many (diversity), or of the many at the expense of the one. The ultimacy of either the one or the many leads inevitably to meaninglessness. Where the one is ultimate, the particulars--the details--have no meaning. Since man is a mere "detail" in the vastness of the universe, in the end he has no meaning. His life is ultimately without reason. Life is a joke. "Eat, drink, and be merry--for tomorrow we die." Consequently, many Athenian religions deny the possibility of any meaning to anything. Or, they assert a totalitarian something (most frequently--in our day--the all competent nanny State) that seeks to obliterate all it does not control. Here, too, the life of the individual has no purpose, significance or meaning. We are just a mere cipher, and IRD number.
Similarly, the ultimacy of the many leads to an equally irrational meaninglessness. In a world where the myriad details of existence are ultimate and have no unifying relationship to each other there is no meaning to anything. If you see your neighbour on the street and either wave as you pass or run him over and kill him or ignore him completely makes no difference. There is no meaningful or true relationship between the two details--my neighbour and me. Even to speak of "neighbour" has no meaning in a world where the many is ultimate. To speak of "me" has no meaning at all either. So, in our day, the Athenian evolutionists struggle (and fail utterly) to attribute meaning to mankind whom, they fatuously and stupidly assert, has arisen from an ocean of pure chance.
Behind all unbelieving religions, philosophies and rationalisms of the Unbelieving Mind lies an absolute irrationalism. This means that every unbelieving mind is fundamentally irrational. That is why the Bible declares, "The fool has said in his heart that God does not exist." (Psalm 14:1)
But there is another watershed between belief and unbelief, Jerusalem and Athens, that is found in Genesis 1--3. Because God created ex-nihilo and is absolutely independent of the creation, there is no "chain of being" that exists between God and man (or the world). By "chain of being" we mean a conception or belief that God and man share the same "stuff"--or that part of man is like God, or that God in some ways is like man and that man and God in some way share the same being or substance.
In contrast, the Unbelieving Mind always posits a chain of being between man and god, whether personal or impersonal, however he/she/it is conceived to be. It is yet another fundamental assertion insisted upon by all unbelievers. There are a myriad manifestations of this "chain of being" concept: it is inevitably intrinsic to the Unbelieving heart--which we would expect, since the Unbeliever steadfastly refuses to believe that all things were created by God of nothing, and that the entire creation is therefore totally dependant upon Him.
But the Unbelieving Mind in its principles of unbelief excludes from the outset the very possibility of God's absolute aseity, and therefore insists that only a limited and dependant god can be countenanced. If the creation is not dependant upon God, then god(s) must be dependant upon the creation. It can only be one or the other. And the Unbelieving Mind is insistent on which "other" it has to be.
The most common conception of the "chain of being" is the idea that there is a spark of the divine within mankind. The Greeks were the first to frame this idea in a formal way. But the Christian church rapidly took it over, and it has resulted in the Church stumbling along ever since--which is to say that the principles of unbelief, or sin, still gnaw at the Church corporately, just as they do in every individual Christian's heart.
The idea is that there are lower and higher levels of being. At the bottom of the chain of being, the lowest level of being, is the primordial slime or amoeba. Then, further up the chain come non-sentient creatures or parts of the creation. Then, next, come sentient creatures (animals). Then comes man who is the highest sentient creature. He is a mixture of material, physical stuff and rationality. He has both a mind and a body. He also has a spirit. Then, further up the chain, is god. He is pure being in its purest form. He has no body, but is pure mind and spirit.
Man is part base (made of the lower orders of creation) and part divine (with a mind and spirit). God and man share the same stuff. Death is a great release for man, because he shuffles off the mortal, physical coil (his lower forms of existence) and becomes pure mind or spirit--in other words, he becomes divine-like.
Because the "chain-of-being" concept is so foundational to all unbelieving thought, we will return to it again and again to identify, illustrate and refute its errors and damage. At this stage it will suffice simply to identify it as one of the inevitable constructs of the unbelieving mind.
Genesis teaches us that God and the creation (including, therefore, man) do not share the same stuff at all. God exists in absolute, infinite self-sufficiency, completely independent of, and transcendent to, the creation. The infinite and the finite cannot share the same stuff or being. Once again the Shorter Catechism is helpful insofar as it drives home the absolute separation between God, the Creator and man, the creature. "God is a Spirit: infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth."
The Unbelieving Mind is utterly closed to the truth. It excludes from the beginning the very possibility that the God revealed in the Scriptures might be true. The Unbelieving Mind not only has no desire to proceed in a rational investigation on these matters, it cannot even conceive of the biblical constructs in the first place. That is why the Bible declares the unbeliever to be blind. The Unbelieving Mind therefore has only one possible response when confronted with these truths: a rejection of the person who has a Believing Mind.
In a certain isolated valley from time immemorial lived a community of congenitally blind people. Their entire recorded history and life experience was of an existence without sight. While they had learned much of the world in their valley, all their framing of the world and their experience of it was in terms of no-sight. One day a traveler came upon them. He began to speak about how wonderful their valley looked and the breathtaking scenery of the bush-clad hills. At first the inhabitants were puzzled. Then they became frustrated at his talk. It was was both heretical--attacking their fundamental beliefs about the world--and disrespectful of them and their culture. Soon they became angry and bitter toward the visitor. They seized him and threw him out of the valley. Many wanted to kill him.
In this parable, it is not the truth or the "facts" that were at issue. It was the blind inhabitants that were at issue. They, and the entirety of their collective world view, were fundamentally under attack by the seditious words of the seeing visitor. So, the Unbelieving Mind will not and cannot countenance the truths revealed in Holy Scripture, unless the Lord Himself, in mercy and grace, removes the hardened scales from the blind eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment