The Living God
There is complexity in the nature of God. As eternally self-existent, he is absolute in his self-isolation, devoid of all relations. He is independent of all others, those who exist contingently and not necessarily.
God’s relative nature is his knowledge of and concern with the world, including his care for the people of the world.
God’s perfected actuality is that of everlasting unity of the redeemed, in which the redeemed are one everlastingly, without any loss of individuality or completeness of unity.
The fourth phase is God’s saving work in the world. It is the phase of “superjectivity.” In the language of the English-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947):
In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again in the world. In this sense God is the great companion–the fellow-sufferer who understands.[1]
A short reference to Plato is helpful. Plato defined God’s eternal self-existence by the term the unconditioned beginning. The Greek term is _vυπόθετov (anhypotheton). The term is found nowhere else in attic literature, and is used only in Republic and only three times. It is a very significant term. It is wholly negative and abstract, fitting therefore for the abstractness of the primordial nature of God.
God’s relative nature is his relationship with his people. Its acme is Jesus’ death on the Cross. We have in Scripture the cry of Jesus’ agony at the Cross:
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, _’-_, _’-_, lä’-mä’ sä-b_ch’-th_-n_-_? that is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me (Matt. 27-46)?
2 Cor. 5:21 reads:
For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
The translators inserted the italic “to be” because they could not believe that Jesus was made sin. So they said, Jesus was made concerning sin. In the same verse it is said that Jesus was made the righteousness of God. There is no italicized “to be” here. We must conclude, therefore, that in some sense Jesus was actually made a sinner, as he was also actually made the righteousness of God.
But the question remains as to the respect that Jesus was made sin. Olin Curtis (1850-1918) deals with this question:
Jesus Christ was not personally a sinner, and was not personally punished; that is certain. But, on the other hand, his suffering was not ordinary individual suffering——it was official, representative suffering. He suffered as the Race-Man, for the whole race. He carried the race in his consciousness. Thus, Christ’s death is a racial event from the double fact that he bears the racial penalty against the old race and that he is the racial center of the new race. And whether we consider the dying Saviour a sinner or not, depends entirely upon our point of view. From the Arminian standpoint of personal sin, he surely was not a sinner. Nor was he a sinner from the standpoint of depravity. But from the racial standpoint he was a sinner, because he stood for the race, and allowed himself to be shut into its category, and actually bore the race penalty, actually died, and was broken off from the race like any son of Adam. It matters not so much about the words you use, though, if you only catch and firmly hold the idea that our Lord’s death was a racial event through and through.[2]
It is evident from the words of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion that there was a rupture in the divine life. The harmony of the divine life was broken. The very life of deity had undergone radical alteration. Now, this radical alteration could occur only on the condition that the life of God is not static, but process. Only in process can God be the living God.
Some attention to Anselm of Canterbury may be helpful. It is quite evident that Anselm never moved beyond the view, essentially Aristotelian, that God is a static, unchanging being. And this view caused an unresolvable perplexity of thought. He writes:
But how art thou compassionate, and at the same time, passionless? For, if thou art passionless, thou dost not feel sympathy; and if thou dost not feel sympathy, thy heart is not wretched from sympathy for the wretched; but this is to be compassionate. But if thou are not compassionate, whence cometh so great consolation to the wretched? How, then, art thou compassionate and not compassionate, O Lord, unless because thou art compassionate in terms of our experience, and not compassionate in terms of thy being.
Truly, thou art so in terms of our experience, but thou art not so in terms of thine own. For, when thou beholdest us in our wretchedness, we experience the effect of compassion, but thou does not experience the feeling. Therefore, thou art both compassionate, because thou dost save the wretched, and spare those who sin against thee; and not compassionate, because thou art affected by no sympathy for wretchedness.[3]
Now, the affirmation that God is both compassionate and not compassionate is a logical contradiction. The statement cannot stand and must be rejected. And the statement is morally and religiously offensive, which is an additional reason that it cannot stand.
We see, then, that the view that God is both compassionate and not compassionate, is the result of viewing God as but static and unchanging. That is, if God is indeed the living God, his reality is that of process.
In sum, God’s relativity reaches its ultimate limit in the Son’s experience of suffering and death. The chapter of relativity is then closed, and God moves forward, beyond mere relativity, to another phase of his life.
God’s perfected actuality is that phase of God’s life that creates and sustains the unity and harmony of redeemed individuals, preserving both the identity and the completeness of their harmony. In Whitehead’s words:
Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality.[4]
Perfected actuality, where people sustain their individuality and yet unite in relations of harmony without violation of their individuality, is, finally and ultimately, the proper goal of society. And it is that condition that is lacking today, and that frustrates the proper end of society.
In his book, Habits of the Heart, a phrase from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Robert Bellah puts the problem tersely:
The tension between self-reliant enterprise and the sense of public solidarity espoused by civic republicanism has been the most important unresolved problem in American history.[5]
We do not need to cite the innumerable instances of this difficulty in our own present-day society. They constantly recur. What is important here is to note that the problem is a spiritual one. We fail to reach, in many instances fail even to approximate, the phase of perfected actuality. Without the voice of spirituality, this problem cannot be satisfactorily resolved. We must desist from looking elsewhere for a solution, and find the appropriate spiritual context.
The phase of God’s superjectivity is the phase of God’s life that reintroduces the values into the world saved in his own life. The values are given a quality of divinity, and this quality saves the world and its people.
In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love of heaven, and floods back again in the world. In this sense God is the great companion——the fellow-sufferer who understands.[6]
Now, it would appear that the consequent nature of God is the quintessential factor in the process by which values are achieved by persons in the actual world. But Whitehead in effect denies this, when he says that God is able to preserve and unify only some of the values achieved by other actual entities, i.e., individuals. He writes:
The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system . . . woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good that they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image——and it is but an image——the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.
The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness that loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.[7]
But why should God be unable to save some finite, positive values? And why should he be able to save some finite, negative values? It would seem that the salvation of positive values more readily admits of inclusion in God’s perfect life than negative values.
Any way, the essential point here is that some positive values are lost.
God saves only the values that he is able to save.
I think that this inability means that the consequent nature of God cannot be the decisive factor that saves finite values. And I think that the salvation of finite values is effected by the rubric of relativity. Relativity, not superjectivity, is the quintessential factor. God’s relation to his people is the matrix of salvation.
God’s relation to his people is found ultimately and finally in that relation in which the Son of God suffered and died upon the Cross. Nowhere is that relation so quintessential than at Calvary.
It was at Calvary that Jesus cried “_’-_, _’-_, lä’-mä’ sä-b_ch’-th_-n_-_?” that is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me” (Matt. 27-46)? This cry signified that the harmony of the divine life was broken, replaced by critical tension in the deity. The Son was allowed by the Father to enter the gates of death alone. Curtis writes:
With our Saviour, however, this personal isolation would not have been actual had he been able to find fellowship with his Father, but his Father had forsaken him. I dare not be ingenious and accommodating here——I must take these words to mean that God the Father was literally absent from the consciousness of his only Son. And, further, I think that the Christian consciousness will never allow the critical mangling of the text. The utterance just as it stands, answers to the intuitive demand of the profoundest Christian experience. A sinner saved by grace shrinks back from the awful words, but in his heart he is certain that his redemption cost all that. The Eternal Father abandoned his own son and allowed him to pass through death all alone.[8]
We have the account of the days following the death of Jesus:
And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,
And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many (Matt. 27:52-53).
There is a further dimension of the resurrection than that described in the above account. That dimension is that the resurrection also resolved the rupture in the life of God. And this rupture, we now see, consisted in the fact that the Father forsook his Son.
The resurrection extended beyond finite individuals; it extended to the deity. It reached beyond this world to the heavenly world. It reached eternity itself. Now the Father and the Son were brought into final and everlasting harmony.
To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne (Rev. 3:21).
Copyright © 2012 by J. Prescott Johnson
[1]Alford North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1929).
[2]Olin Alfred Curtis, The Christian Faith, Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, n.d., p. 321. (First published New York: Eaton & Mains, 1905).
[3]St. Anselm, Proslogium, (La Salle, Illinois, 1951), pp. 13-14. First published in 1903.
[4]Whitehead, Ibid., p. 532.
[5]Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 236.
[6]Whitehead, Ibid., p. 532.
[7]Ibid., p. 525.
[8]Curtis, Ibid., p. 322.