Nouslife: Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (9)

08 March 2014

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (9)

Analogy: human to divine and back again

Recently I re-read a series of my posts from last year on forgiveness and atonement. I noticed that one of the issues I'd posed in the first post in the series I had not properly returned to:

Can this apply to God in relation to humans?
God-talk is inescapably analogical. The question is how far and how truthy is the the analogy? Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (1):

So I'm going to try to sidle up to that issue here.

As I see it, this issue is how far is it meaningful to see God as loving, lovingly-angry, being hurt and even 'experiencing' such materially-based responses. These questions devolve to understanding the nature of God and the relationship between God/eternity and the world /temporality. Of course, those are huge topics and in themselves the subject of books and articles. So I'm not aiming to resolve or contribute anything particularly new, merely to position the issues in relation to the kind of perspectives and insights that seem to be helped or to help in this case.

Really it comes down to whether and how we can think or speak about God's love given that our primary understandings of it are formed in relation to human experience which is finite and has at least some basis in hormones, neurochemistry and culture. Similarly anger -with the added difficulty that it tends to be perceived negatively and as somehow unworthy of God. So can an infinite, essentially unmaterial being ('without parts and passions') experience emotions in any sense we can relate to as humans? Can a being for whom Time is not necessarily 'sequentially present' in the way we are accustomed to knowing it, be understood to have any similarity of experience to our sequential processing of love, anger and forgiveness?

I think that the previous posts in this series have given a broadly adequate account of the emotional dynamics of forgiveness in human terms. I think, too, that they have offered a bridge, via the motif of the eikon of forgiveness, to God's forgiveness. But can that bridge carry the traffic and is it well-anchored on the far shore? Or is God actually too different from us for that anchor to hold over there?

I think that we need to start with 'God is love' (1 Jn.4:16) which derives, in turn, from reflection on the incarnation (the combination being caught in John V Taylor's book The Christlike God alluding to the paraphrase 'God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all'). in the fact that this quality of Deity is expressed thus, we get a sense that something in our human experience is shared in some essential way with Deity: love. So the point of rooting my analysis in love is underlined. Though we may be aware that God's love exceeds our love, it is not a difference of kind but rather of degree and translation (from eternity to temporality, from infinite to finite).

This opens up the possibility, in principle, that offense against love could result in love-born anger in Deity and that such anger could be forsworn and reined back. This is further evidenced by the use of terms to do with anger and offense as well as forgiveness applied to God as subject. The same logic would apply as mentioned in a previous post: if God is not outraged by the detriments to those God loves, then surely we would doubt that God cares for us creatures: in effect we would not believe that God actually loves us. And if there is no reaction against harm to the beloved, then what would be forgiven? These are the necessary correlates of God's love.

Trickier to handle is the relationship between our temporality and God's being not bound by it in the way we are. Implicated in this is the issue about our emotional life being founded in bio-chemical processes and finite perceptions which can in no way be ascribed to God. Though perhaps that is not entirely true because the incarnation shows God taking on the experience of time- and space-boundedness and the materiality of bodily-based information processing via affective and cognitive systems. For the analogy cinched by 'God is love' to hold, it should be noted that the incarnation commits us to holding together the possibility that our material-bodily emotional systems are capable of paralleling and even expressing appropriate analogues of God's life -obviously in a form that is appropriate to a space-time bounded existence. In a sense, the incarnation is our guarantee that the analogy can hold, that the bridge from the human side can be well-secured on the divine side.

So this presumably means that the love-anger-forgiveness 'cycle' we can see in human affairs does model adequately, at least sometimes, something of God. But what we probably need to note is the fact that these things are, in fact, the same thing in different temporal modes. Anger is love confronted with the harming of the beloved. Forgiveness is love in the face of the anger-response of love against the beloved who has become a perpetrator of harm against one who is beloved. The 'eternal dimension' of each of those things is Love. The temporal dimension works out in different ways according to the temporal conditions love is refracted through.