Tag: Kant

“Because I was crushed”

Trolling merrily through Ezekiel, I find this little gem:

Then those of you who escape will remember Me among the nations where they are carried captive, because I was crushed by their adulterous heart which has departed from Me, and by their eyes which play the harlot after their idols; they will loathe themselves for the evils which they committed in all their abominations. (Eze 6:9, NKJ)

I read somewhere that in Orthodox thought, one of the attributes of God is the divine impassibility.  The idea is that, since God is perfect, He is not affected by things outside of Himself; He is not subject to passions.  Now, on the face of things, that’s obviously not true.  God is described hundreds of times in scripture as being affected by what people do.  But there’s still this concept of the aseity of God, that God’s source of subsistence is from Himself. (I tried and tried to find the adjective form of the word, but apparently it doesn’t exist.  God is aseious? aseiful?)  He doesn’t need anything from the world he created, or else, how could he have created it?  “If I was hungry, would I tell you?”

One of the great mysteries is that Jesus, being the very image of God, should not have been able to die.  He took on the form of man, something that should have been impossible, so that he might die for us.  (Of course, being who he was, he couldn’t stay dead…)  But the implication that you get is that every attribute that smacks of mortality really ought to be applied to the human nature of Jesus.  Does God suffer and die?  No, but the man Jesus Christ does.  Does God stub His toe?  No, but Jesus Christ could.  Is God overcome by grief, overjoyed, lost in a fit of rage?  No!  But maybe Jesus?

I get the impression that, in Orthodox thought, God the Father is sometimes pictured as a great and holy Vulcan: completely free of all fleshy emotion that might hint of weakness, a Platonic postulate of practical reason.  Well, that’s Kant, but Orthodoxy sometimes sounds pretty close.  And yet… aseity.  So my tendency was to split the difference:  Passion means “to suffer,” though we downgrade it often to mean experiencing great emotion.  Jesus suffered on the cross, God the Father did not.  So perhaps, while God can be emotional, only Jesus could be subject to “passions,” that is, overwhelming emotions.

Until I get to Ezekiel.  He says in chapter 6, verse 9, “I was crushed by their adulterous heart which has departed from Me, and by their eyes which play the harlot after their idols.” That isn’t the Son speaking.  That’s God the Father, crushed by the adultery of Israel’s idolatry.  Maybe a translation error?  Holman says “crushed;” KJV says “broken;” ESV says “broken;” ASV says, “broken.”  Now, the NIV says “I have been grieved,” and the New Living says, “how hurt I am,” so it sounds like some translators are struggling with the aseity thing.

The Hebrew word is

שָׁבַר, Shabar, (Strongs #7665)
to burst or break; to smash, to shatter, to shipwreck

It’s the word for what happened to Moses’ first copy of the 10 commandments, the word for what ought to be done to all the sacred pillars scattered about on every high place.  Most certainly it doesn’t mean “bruised, irritated, abraised.”  In short, I don’t think “grieved” really cuts it.  “How hurt I am” is in fact the question at hand.  The answer appears to be “broken.”

For Ezekiel, God is not impassible. He suffers much.  He does not need us in any sense of dependency, yet being broken because of us is part of what it means to be God.

I had some questions, but now I am confident:  It’s appropriate to pray, “Lord, break our hearts with the things that break yours.”

3-leg porridge

When I went to college, it was at a school that had some affiliation with the Presbyterian Church, USA, but for all practical purposes, it was a private secular school with a chapel. It wasn’t as though there was a pervasive Christian atmosphere. Pretty much it was standard-issue multi-cultural liberalism.

A part of the core curriculum to graduate was a class in the senior year on Ethics. Of course, I almost failed.

It was really difficult for me to process their way of gauging right and wrong because they weren’t willing to pin themselves to any particular foundation. It should be pretty obvious that Ethics is the sort of thing that starts from a set of key principles and works the implications out from there. But being the sort of school they were, it wouldn’t do to just assert what these principles ought to be. What if I don’t like your principles?

Instead, they gave us some options. Apparently, it’s a modern pluralist idea to try to present ethics on a 3-legged stool, kind of as a “choose-your-own” morality. So they give you Kant, Mill, and Aristotle to teach Duty, Utility, and Virtue. You’re supposed to choose which system of reasoning best fits the situation and your taste. You’re even told that each form of reasoning has its flaws, so that you have to balance each against the others.

It really got me. Confused the daylights out of me. The problem was that in my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe in morally gray areas. Still don’t. There are things that are hard to do, but it’s not usually hard to determine the right thing to do. So how did they get this perfectly balanced porridge? It took me years to get an answer, and I wish I’d written down who it was that popped the bubble of my confusion.

It’s actually pretty pathetic. Every system has its flaws so long as man is the measure of all things. If there is no standard to hold to, there isn’t even any way to come to a wrong answer. And if there isn’t any wrong answer, there can’t be a right one either. But the very point of ethics is to determine right and wrong. If you set up the system so that the goal can’t be achieved, then there’s no wonder that no one ever achieves the goal.

Sin is determined to tie up moral knots because that twistedness deflects you from judgment. It takes a Champion to take the sword of authority to cut through those knots with a simple standard. Continue reading “3-leg porridge”