No spiritual creature could fail to achieve its naturally supernatural end unless God himself were the direct moral cause of evil in that creature, which is impossible. Conversely, God saves creatures by removing extrinsic, physical (that is non-moral) impediments to their natural union with him
There is a modal difference between an addict suffering withdrawals in pursuit of his wounded conscience and a tsunami that destroys his family members and community. The first demands of his conscience un-learning his love for something evil or destructive. The second demands of his conscience his naming and condemning the evil (here purely physical evil, a work of gods or, increasingly, of men) that has afflicted him - and if he does not, he becomes complicit in that evil. In other words, in both cases, the attitude towards suffering is the same: its condemnation.
In both cases, the demand on the man's soul is to condemn his suffering; the fact is occluded in the first example only because the man is his own victim: indeed, his recovery depends upon recognizing his suffering as an evil he has inflicted upon himself. In both cases, a soul is shaped by its attitude towards suffering, true, but it is a banal observation, merely the flip side of recognizing the good (that is, what is not suffering). Indeed, souls are shaped perfectly well (in fact, probably only so) in the absence of suffering - by joy, delight, learning; that is, by learning our natural love for the transcendentals as best we can here. A man in agony 24 hours of the day and told his suffering teaches him of God must learn nothing of such a God; for such is not God.
What is the alternative, really? That loving God requires suffering? No. To love God - to truly love God - is bliss. True Bliss and God are identical. Suffering without purpose is the nature of suffering; otherwise, it would come directly of God.
Once this is grasped, DBH's argument becomes transparently true. God does save his creatures by removing extrinsic, physical (i.e., non-moral) impediments to their natural union with him.
Well, it's a complex matter and I think we're coming at it from different perspectives. I didn't mean to say that suffering is good in itself and the suffering I referred to as part of becoming Orthodox is merely the basic praxis or spiritual exercises assumed by all great philosophic traditions as being of value. I did not mean to suggest God requires tsunami's to be Good or desirable. But we don't usually start in bliss do we? We still have to deal with what we can do with turmoil which we did not chose nor God, but the archons of this age let's say.
Suffering is a deprivation of being I guess you could say. Moreover, all of us are addicts to various habits of the heart which initially lie outside of our control to change, but as we detach from our thoughts and cling to God, we can let go of in order to acquire bliss. But their is spiritual delusion as well. I'm not prepared to say that Christ's suffering didn't mean anything. I'm not saying it's intrinsically good, but the only bliss I've experienced in my life, considering I've dealt with number of major painful illnesses over time including Bi Polar, is when God breaks in after I've been willing to to show me how one moment in his house is worth thousands elsewhere. I guess I figure as I've experienced God's taking the most dramatically difficult moments of my and working good out of it. I was humbled and overcame a great deal of resentment and my relationship with my parents was restored after a long hiatus. I don't think me seeing things is God's work, but he takes, it appears to me, what is broken and makes it whole. To come into being is to assume an indefinite form. We take the form of what we love. It is painful to change our loves but most of us need to, because self-gratification outside of self-giving love for God and all creation, can be considered bliss, but it's best understood to be the gift god grants to the perfect, as they die to their egos and let themselves become the place where sin stops, and pure Grace enters into the world. Not that God isn't here, or we can't delight in him, but we usually have to grow and this requires some moments of self-denial and re-orientation.
Thanks for sharing. I suppose my point was only the one you may make here: insofar as we recognize suffering as alien to our nature, we become more like God - those moments when God breaks through and tells us our suffering is not who we really are. We seem to be in agreement there.
I'm not sure you intended this as dualist as it comes across, but I object to it nonetheless: "As we detach from our thoughts and cling to God," is meaningless. Clinging to God, obviously, is also a form of thought - a truer and more natural thought, in fact, as we move closer to the simplicity of the Godhead.
May I say something on the point “suffering as alien to our nature.” I will agree if you are talking to the nature prior to the commission of Original Sin.
After original sin, in way of speaking/curse of disobedience suffering and death become part of the fallen nature as punishment, not to mention what we have to deal being under the dominion of the prince of this world. And this is situation we are in right now. Even those who were with Jesus were told akthough he has overcome the world yet the disciples were going to suffer tribulations nonetheless . Every one has seen Pope St. John Paul II suffered Parkinson’s in the last years of his pontificate
I will agree that there will be no suffering in heaven, but there will be in hell. Ultimately to suffer or not to suffer is up to the individual person to make. We are given that freedom to make but we have to work for heaven, to hell we do not have to have, just live as the flesh would take a person.
Well, smarter people than I will have said this better than I will here, but "Original Sin" did not change our nature. That's logically impossible. Any theologically coherent definition of "nature" must mean something essential and irrevocable, especially if that nature is made by monist God like the Christian one, whose will in the creation and the eschaton are identical and identically irrevocable.
Alien elements can accrete to a nature, certainly affecting it (as does sin for us humans) but such elements cannot change a nature. Otherwise the devil or I or whoever could alter out God-given natures into a different nature. The devil cannot de-create in any real or essential sense, for the same reason he cannot create as only the Godhead can.
Even Tolkien, no theologian, knew this. Morgoth could not de-create or alter the Elves at the level of nature. Tolkien even admitted in the tHoME that the orcs, if they were Elves, would go to Mandos when they died, because nothing Morgoth could have done to them or made them do to themselves could have made them anything other than Eru's Elves, who are by nature doomed to Mandos. The same principle applies to us.
For your last paragraph... Yeah. I agree. I just don't like the word "necessary" when applied to suffering, even suffering that results in healing. Perhaps "unavoidable" is better. It seems to me such a surrender to the logic of suffering itself entails to some degree a love of suffering for its own sake, which is not of God. But I'm not a theologian or a philosopher, so I don't know where the line is there.
I just want to point out that relationship between the finite and the infinite is explicit in the Bible.
Man (finite) is the image and likeness of God (infinite). It is also clear how the finite can reach the infinite, Jesus Christ had demonstrated it for us. He assumed our nature, and in our nature he fulfilled the requirement of the infinite, evidenced by his resurrection.
Why do we have to work it out in our head what had already done for us to exprriencd by our senses?
What could be the reason why we seems not to admit to ourself and accept of our helplessness of our “finitude” but still give an impression of resistance to the “infinitude” who came to offer help.
self-love and an inflated sense of who we are apart from God. It's hard because for us this seems logical, but for many, the logic of things has been changed. They start at a deficit with impoverished understandings of God and how things work.
Regarding those who “start at a deficit with impoverish understandings of God” we all do, but God does give opportunities for us to exercise our freedom like he did to Adam and Eve, and to explore our limits like the prodigal son, then we come to our senses. Those who are humble enough decide to ask God to save them. That is how I learned it myself.
It is a humility, not a contrived one intended to get out of a hot water, but a humility overwhelmed by the truth of one’s poverty, powerlessness, and nakedness.
because it's easy to think about the nature of volition and desire and intentionality in abstract terms that come to terms with our finitude and reliance on God..
It is because of our reliance on self? When it is evident, it beyond our power and capacity; not to mention who we are up against with? Someone who used to be the “signet of perfection.” What chance do we have such a formidable opponent? It has to take someone who is greater than him. And only God was greater than him of all creation.
Why not accept what God is offering to us, done with tremendous humility of “emptying” himself even to become one of us and that was not all, even to suffer the insults and mocking up to hanging on the cross?
I don’t know.
Your points on suffering are reductive.
There is a modal difference between an addict suffering withdrawals in pursuit of his wounded conscience and a tsunami that destroys his family members and community. The first demands of his conscience un-learning his love for something evil or destructive. The second demands of his conscience his naming and condemning the evil (here purely physical evil, a work of gods or, increasingly, of men) that has afflicted him - and if he does not, he becomes complicit in that evil. In other words, in both cases, the attitude towards suffering is the same: its condemnation.
In both cases, the demand on the man's soul is to condemn his suffering; the fact is occluded in the first example only because the man is his own victim: indeed, his recovery depends upon recognizing his suffering as an evil he has inflicted upon himself. In both cases, a soul is shaped by its attitude towards suffering, true, but it is a banal observation, merely the flip side of recognizing the good (that is, what is not suffering). Indeed, souls are shaped perfectly well (in fact, probably only so) in the absence of suffering - by joy, delight, learning; that is, by learning our natural love for the transcendentals as best we can here. A man in agony 24 hours of the day and told his suffering teaches him of God must learn nothing of such a God; for such is not God.
What is the alternative, really? That loving God requires suffering? No. To love God - to truly love God - is bliss. True Bliss and God are identical. Suffering without purpose is the nature of suffering; otherwise, it would come directly of God.
Once this is grasped, DBH's argument becomes transparently true. God does save his creatures by removing extrinsic, physical (i.e., non-moral) impediments to their natural union with him.
Well, it's a complex matter and I think we're coming at it from different perspectives. I didn't mean to say that suffering is good in itself and the suffering I referred to as part of becoming Orthodox is merely the basic praxis or spiritual exercises assumed by all great philosophic traditions as being of value. I did not mean to suggest God requires tsunami's to be Good or desirable. But we don't usually start in bliss do we? We still have to deal with what we can do with turmoil which we did not chose nor God, but the archons of this age let's say.
Suffering is a deprivation of being I guess you could say. Moreover, all of us are addicts to various habits of the heart which initially lie outside of our control to change, but as we detach from our thoughts and cling to God, we can let go of in order to acquire bliss. But their is spiritual delusion as well. I'm not prepared to say that Christ's suffering didn't mean anything. I'm not saying it's intrinsically good, but the only bliss I've experienced in my life, considering I've dealt with number of major painful illnesses over time including Bi Polar, is when God breaks in after I've been willing to to show me how one moment in his house is worth thousands elsewhere. I guess I figure as I've experienced God's taking the most dramatically difficult moments of my and working good out of it. I was humbled and overcame a great deal of resentment and my relationship with my parents was restored after a long hiatus. I don't think me seeing things is God's work, but he takes, it appears to me, what is broken and makes it whole. To come into being is to assume an indefinite form. We take the form of what we love. It is painful to change our loves but most of us need to, because self-gratification outside of self-giving love for God and all creation, can be considered bliss, but it's best understood to be the gift god grants to the perfect, as they die to their egos and let themselves become the place where sin stops, and pure Grace enters into the world. Not that God isn't here, or we can't delight in him, but we usually have to grow and this requires some moments of self-denial and re-orientation.
Thanks for sharing. I suppose my point was only the one you may make here: insofar as we recognize suffering as alien to our nature, we become more like God - those moments when God breaks through and tells us our suffering is not who we really are. We seem to be in agreement there.
I'm not sure you intended this as dualist as it comes across, but I object to it nonetheless: "As we detach from our thoughts and cling to God," is meaningless. Clinging to God, obviously, is also a form of thought - a truer and more natural thought, in fact, as we move closer to the simplicity of the Godhead.
May I say something on the point “suffering as alien to our nature.” I will agree if you are talking to the nature prior to the commission of Original Sin.
After original sin, in way of speaking/curse of disobedience suffering and death become part of the fallen nature as punishment, not to mention what we have to deal being under the dominion of the prince of this world. And this is situation we are in right now. Even those who were with Jesus were told akthough he has overcome the world yet the disciples were going to suffer tribulations nonetheless . Every one has seen Pope St. John Paul II suffered Parkinson’s in the last years of his pontificate
I will agree that there will be no suffering in heaven, but there will be in hell. Ultimately to suffer or not to suffer is up to the individual person to make. We are given that freedom to make but we have to work for heaven, to hell we do not have to have, just live as the flesh would take a person.
Well, smarter people than I will have said this better than I will here, but "Original Sin" did not change our nature. That's logically impossible. Any theologically coherent definition of "nature" must mean something essential and irrevocable, especially if that nature is made by monist God like the Christian one, whose will in the creation and the eschaton are identical and identically irrevocable.
Alien elements can accrete to a nature, certainly affecting it (as does sin for us humans) but such elements cannot change a nature. Otherwise the devil or I or whoever could alter out God-given natures into a different nature. The devil cannot de-create in any real or essential sense, for the same reason he cannot create as only the Godhead can.
Even Tolkien, no theologian, knew this. Morgoth could not de-create or alter the Elves at the level of nature. Tolkien even admitted in the tHoME that the orcs, if they were Elves, would go to Mandos when they died, because nothing Morgoth could have done to them or made them do to themselves could have made them anything other than Eru's Elves, who are by nature doomed to Mandos. The same principle applies to us.
For your last paragraph... Yeah. I agree. I just don't like the word "necessary" when applied to suffering, even suffering that results in healing. Perhaps "unavoidable" is better. It seems to me such a surrender to the logic of suffering itself entails to some degree a love of suffering for its own sake, which is not of God. But I'm not a theologian or a philosopher, so I don't know where the line is there.
I very much agree with what had been said here.
I just want to point out that relationship between the finite and the infinite is explicit in the Bible.
Man (finite) is the image and likeness of God (infinite). It is also clear how the finite can reach the infinite, Jesus Christ had demonstrated it for us. He assumed our nature, and in our nature he fulfilled the requirement of the infinite, evidenced by his resurrection.
Why do we have to work it out in our head what had already done for us to exprriencd by our senses?
God knows we need a Saviour.
What could be the reason why we seems not to admit to ourself and accept of our helplessness of our “finitude” but still give an impression of resistance to the “infinitude” who came to offer help.
self-love and an inflated sense of who we are apart from God. It's hard because for us this seems logical, but for many, the logic of things has been changed. They start at a deficit with impoverished understandings of God and how things work.
Regarding those who “start at a deficit with impoverish understandings of God” we all do, but God does give opportunities for us to exercise our freedom like he did to Adam and Eve, and to explore our limits like the prodigal son, then we come to our senses. Those who are humble enough decide to ask God to save them. That is how I learned it myself.
It is a humility, not a contrived one intended to get out of a hot water, but a humility overwhelmed by the truth of one’s poverty, powerlessness, and nakedness.
because it's easy to think about the nature of volition and desire and intentionality in abstract terms that come to terms with our finitude and reliance on God..
It is because of our reliance on self? When it is evident, it beyond our power and capacity; not to mention who we are up against with? Someone who used to be the “signet of perfection.” What chance do we have such a formidable opponent? It has to take someone who is greater than him. And only God was greater than him of all creation.
Why not accept what God is offering to us, done with tremendous humility of “emptying” himself even to become one of us and that was not all, even to suffer the insults and mocking up to hanging on the cross?