Is God able to truly feel sorrow over our failures? Does God truly rejoice with our successes? Today in Church our lectionary included the text from 1Samuel 15 that "The Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel". This is a wonderful text which leads into several interesting theological places I have wanted to write about for some time. To get to those places, let's start Biblically.
First thing to note is that 1Samuel (like most of the Hebrew Bible) was written 2500-3000 years ago. Ideas about God have changed and evolved a great deal since then, and philosophical reflection on God's nature in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions have brought a great deal more precision to some of the ancient insights that were originally expressed in the language of "emotions" or "feelings". Throughout the Hebrew Bible, God is said to feel sorrow, to repent, to become angry, to feel compassion, to have pity, to rejoice, and a whole host of other feelings.
These feelings are tied to Divine action. In ancient Hebrew thought, God was thought to both control the world and know all activities in it. Yet, God also was seen as responsive to the free choices made by humans. In Genesis 6, using the same Hebrew word in 1Samuel, our text says God was "sorry" or "repented" that God had made humans because of the great wickedness and violence in the world before Noah's flood. In Genesis 18 God responds to Abraham's pleas by "bargaining" with him about the fate of the wicked and unjust cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 32, God "wrestles" with Jacob, whom he renamed as "Israel", which means "wrestles with God". While these images are very anthropomorphic and include appearances of God in human form (theophanies), they also depict God as extremely responsive to those who are in relationship with God.
Later in Hebrew Scripture, we find passages such as: Deuteronomy 30.19 "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live." In this, God gives humans genuine choice with genuine consequences, and according to Ezekiel, God has emotive responses to what we choose. In Ezekiel 18.21–23, God says through the prophet: "If the wicked turn away from all the sins they have committed and keep all my decrees and do what is just and right, they will surely live; they will not die... Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?"
In places like Jeremiah, we find that for each set of choices God gives to creatures, God has a responsive plan already in place for how to deal with those choices. This responsive plan not only includes Divine intervention, and allowance of natural consequences. It also includes emotional responses of Divine joy for our healthy, compassionate choices, and Divine anger and sorrow over our destructive, evil choices. For instance:
Jeremiah 18.1-10 [1] This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: [2] “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” [3] So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. [4] But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. [5] Then the word of the LORD came to me. [6] He said, “Can I not do with you, house of Israel, as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, house of Israel. [7] If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, [8] and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. [9] And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, [10] and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.
Finally we come to the Christian claim that this responsive God was somehow embodied or incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. According to Paul, God accomplished this incarnation by "emptying" the Divine Self and taking on human flesh in the form of a servant (cf. Philippians 2). One may infer that this means something like laying aside infinite divine powers-- such as omniscience and omnipotence-- so that the Divine Self can experience finite life as a true human being. This human Jesus was responsive and caring: Weeping, feeling compassion, wondering, wandering, hungering, thirsting, experiencing weakness. Yet, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus also exercised Divine Power to heal, to cast out evil, to provide food, and ultimately to defeat death.
Taking these Biblical insights, the Western theological tradition has tried to construct various models of Divine Providence-- God's relation to the created world-- which handle the data.
The first view is technically called "Monergism" from the Greek words for "single power". In this, God is the sole determining power for all events in every reality. In Divine omniscience and omnipotence, God has pre-ordained everything that will come to pass from before time. Therefore, God does not change, nor does God have any feelings aroused by creation (i.e. God has no passions and hence is impassible). Any Biblical teachings which speak of God's reactivity or feelings for Creation are declared to be anthropomorphic and primitive word pictures to describe an eternal, immutable, impassible God. In reality, God ordained life and death, blessing and disaster, for God's own purposes, without any "feelings" of responsiveness to the "actors" involved. This view is popularized in Calvinist versions of Christianity and most forms of Sunni Islam.
The benefits of Monergism are that God does not change, and therefore is completely reliable. In addition, everything God desires comes to pass, so we can look to the future with assurance that God's purposes will "win in the end". The problem, of course, is that God does not "care" for creation in any way that humans would understand "care", and God is not responsive to creation, as the Bible and other holy texts repeatedly affirm about God. And not only that, but the value of History is precisely nothing: All of history is nothing but a kind of "play act" of decisions that were decided eternally and immutably. And finally, the moral problems here are numerous and intractable. God appears to be a monster who actively and willingly causes evil and death (because God is the sole power at work in History), while humans have no responsibility for evil, nor any praise for good (because humans don't choose anything, God makes them to do it all).
The second view could be called "Indeterminism", and it is popular in more modern theologies such as Process Theology. While Monergism focuses on God's Transcendence outside of space and time, Process Theology focuses on God's immanence within and throughout all space and time. God, in fact, is bound by space and time like we all are. God is the "soul" in "body" of universe like we are "souls" embodied in flesh and blood. While we are aware of our present and past, and evolve into the future in our body, so also God is aware of everything in the universe's present and past, but is evolving along with the universe into the future. God may know some future possibilities, but God does not know what will happen with any kind of certainty or reliability. Thus God has only limited ability to influence present events, and no sure way to assure the outcome of the future. God feels pain when we cause destruction, and joy when we promote life, but God is severely limited in doing anything other than experiencing existence alongside and within us.
Indeterminism has the benefit of making God truly responsive to Creation, and truly emotionally involved with our lives. Also in Process Theology, humans are responsible for moral choices and shaping history, such that God cannot fully be God without us cooperating with God. But this comes at quite a cost. No matter how loving and compassionate God may feel toward us, God really has very little power to make things work out for our good. In many versions of Process Theology, God is completely passive and is limited only to experience and remembrance. God cannot actively intervene at all in the world of events, because that is not the kind of being God is. And thus, death and destruction may actually get the Last Word in the Universe, even to the point of destroying God.
So, we seem trapped between a Monergism that makes God transcendent and powerful, but heartless and unresponsive (on one hand) and an Indeterminism that makes God immanent and caring, but impotent and limited (on the other hand). And neither of these views can really make sense out of the claims of the Incarnation of Jesus. From the Monergism position, there is a real question of how a completely transcendent God could have anything to do with creation, much less enter it as a limited physical creature (Sunni Islam makes precisely this objection to the Incarnation). And why would God need to become incarnate? Everything God could want to accomplish is done without God "getting his hands dirty" so to speak. From the position of Process Theology, it would be impossible for God to enter into any particular person, nor do anything which interrupts the normal functioning of physical laws, since both would be a direct contradiction of God's nature as the "cosmic soul".
So finally we come to a third option, which is broadly called "Synergism". It comes from Greek terms meaning "working with" or "energized together". It means that creation works with, and within, the work of the Creator: God "loans" us power and freedom to make real choices with real consequences, within God's overarching control of the universe. Versions of this view are some of the oldest in the Christian tradition, stretching back to some of the first Orthodox philosophers and theologians, such as Justin Martyr, Origen, Athanasius, and Gregory of Nyssa.
In this view, God is Triune, as our Transcendent Source (The Father), the Immanent Energy that upholds all being (The Spirit), and the Divine Pattern who gives our world reason and purpose and meaning (The Son). It is this Divine Pattern that is the Mind of God (the Divine Son) who holds all possible worlds within his creative Word. Every potential we could ever choose or become is known fully within the Divine Mind, but God creates us to actualize these possibilities as we actually choose and experience actual consequences.
No matter what we choose, God already has a response for it in the Divine Mind. God may allow natural consequences, or choose to intervene in big or small ways, in order to nudge and push us toward bringing about the fulfillment of History in God's Love. And in every choice, God responsively cares for us, rejoicing in decisions that bring life, and feeling anger and sorrow for decisions that bring death. In this view, God is constantly responding to choices with eternal wisdom, acting in ways that influence us and move us away from death and toward life throughout time. As Martin Luther King Jr was fond of quoting: "The Moral Arc of History is long, but it tends toward Justice" (with Justice here understood as the full flourishing of God's plans of life for us).
Every now and then, God intervenes in decisive ways to reveal God's Love and desire for our flourishing. God does this through Hebrew prophets, along with acts of deliverance to heal us and set us free, or acts of discipline to turn us from evil. Eventually, in the fullness of time, God takes synergism to it's natural and logical fulfillment by fully joining God and humanity together in the person of Jesus, who embodies God's Love to the world. This Jesus shows us the kind of person we are supposed to imitate, to embody, and to evolve into. Jesus not only saves us from sin by taking the consequence of sin into himself on the Cross, but he overcomes death by the resurrection, to open for us the Path to this new life.
The process of history is now for us to evolve into, and fully manifest, this resurrection life of Christlike Love. And God will continue to influence History in large and small ways, gradually pointing our species toward this Love, until at long last God's Love reigns supreme at the end of History when God heals and raises us all to new life. In this view, God fully knows every possible future, and is proactive in working toward the optimal future, while also being passionately involved in History, and responsive to our choices, so that History does have a meaning and a trajectory that points ultimately to the reconciliation of all things in Christ. No choice we make will ever surprise God (for God has already thought of everything we could do), and yet God does not pre-ordain or control our choices (we have genuine freedom).
And unlike both Monergism and Indeterminism, Synergism can make sense of the Incarnation and see the Incarnation as the very Meaning and Pattern of History made human flesh. He is the first Word that God spoke to create all things, the Word that became embodied in Jesus, and he is the last Word God speaks to unite all things in his Love.
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