Ok, I am a nerd. So is Jeff Moore, and so is Dave McCarthy. We are nerds. Why are we nerds you ask? Well, because the three of us decided to spend our Friday night attending a philosophy lecture than partying or whatever else it is that college students are supposed to do on Friday night. (I'm a nerd, so I wouldn't know.) I tell what he talked about for the first part of the post, so if you don't have time to read a long post, just skip to the end (Past the dashed line.)
The speaker for the night was a distinguished professor of philosophy that I think it would be smarter not to include his name considering how I attack his ideas. I don't know what else to say about him other than what he said. He asked us to look at the word God and seperate the name from the event. By that he meant for us to take what is really meant by the three letters G-o-d and analyze it without letting your perception be skewed by the name itself. He said that the event is what is actually going on in the word. Then he proposed that the event contained in the name G-o-d has been distorted in theology because it is caught in power and sovereignty. In other words, in viewing God as soveriegn and powerful we are viewing God wrongly because he isn't sovereign or powerful.
He then stated that people ask two questions wrongly when they think about God. the first is, Can't God do anything?, and the second, What about evil why doesn't God stop it.
While he was explaning the second question I actually had a flash of fury rise up in my heart. It was the only time during this lecture that my pity at their ignorance was replaced with fury. He started talking about the book of Job in relation to why God doesn't stop evil. He said something like, "Job was right all along. He was right. God had no right to do this to him. And look at the end of the book. What does God say? 'Where were you when I created the world?' What is that? Then Job blinked and admitted he was wrong. It kind of like you as a parnet when one of you kids starts annoying you by asking you a lot of questions that you say, 'If you ask that again, you'll pay for it.' There is no reason behind this other than a threat, and Job gave in under pressure." This prompted laughter from the audience at Scripture. I wasn't laughing. Jeff wasn't laughing. Dave wasn't laughing. I could not bear to hear God's word laughed at. But anyways, he moved on.
He moved on to two other statements that kind of irked me as well. First, he took the common quote, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" which is used of human rulers, changed it, and applied it to God and said, "Infinite power corrupts infinitely." Yeah, that didn't go over to well either. The second thing came right after that when he was talking about how God had power over everything, God over man, but then you had tiers. There was man over woman, man over animals, amn over plants, "there was a whole system of subjugation." I was with him right up until he said subjugation. I guess what I saw is that even in high academic circles, for one person to have authority over another means that the one who doesn't have the authority is being subjugated.
He then defined sovereignty as, "The ability to make an exception. The law holds unless I say it doesn't hold. It is the power to act unilaterally."
"Suppose we treat Jesus as the icon of God, that there is an image of God in Jesus. Jesus is unique among other religions not because he was a miracle worker or that he was incarnated in the virgin birth, but rather that he was executed. He was radical about the poor, he was radical about healing, but most of all he was radical about forgiveness." These are my notes of his description of Jesus. He then went on to say that he sees Jesus in the plea for sinners while he was on the cross, but not in the transaction, the substitutionary atonement. He sees that as a perversion. He thinks that Jesus is the icon of God, but doesn't ascribe to him the ability to get down off of the cross. He proposes that Jesus was unable to do that.
He stated, "Suppose that event that typifies the nature of God is weakness, and the cross is its emblem. Suppose Jesus' death was a great 'NO!' to injustice and unrighteous execution." He called this the "power of powerlessness."
At this point he apologized to the crowd because he had promised to be heretical but hadn't gotten heretical yet. Jeff and I both laughed at this. If that wasn't heretical, what is? Then we found out what he thought was heretical, and yes it was heretical. It is below.
If God is powerless then what is God? He started to answer this question. First he stated that God was not a being, nor was the source of all being, nor was he beyond being like "the Good" which was held by the philosophy professor I conversed with a few months ago. He proposed that the structure of God is an event of an unconditional answer. That God was an unconditional promise. The promise of a future life, a promise that this isn't all there is. You wouldn't so much say that God is, but that God promises. He said that God was also an unconditional memory. This memory of Jesus' death and the "NO!" to unjust suffering. He also said that God was an unconditional call. That we call God's existence into being. That we bring his power to bear.
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So I heard all of this, and noticed Jeff Moore's little note he wrote me in my notebook saying Romans 1:22, which simply says, "Professing to be wise they became fools." That was what had happened here. None of this, what I posted above makes any sense. I understand his points, but his points themselves don't make sense. He has no basis,no foundation for anything he says. It made me think of the end of the sermon on the mount where you have the builder who builds his house on the rock versus the one who builds on the sand. But I thought that the analogy of sand was a bit to generous to describe the situation. Perhaps trying to build a foundation in a cloud or in the middle of the ocean would be a better description. The sand at least holds up until the storms come. This thing never had anything beneath it. It is a theology built on air.
He is proposing that God is weak and that He is not sovereign, that he is not powerful. But what he is actually saying is that God does not exist, that He has been created by humans, but then he goes on to describe what this God is or isn't. Now, if God is defined as that which people accept God to be, how can God be something different from what people believe Him to be? Furthermore, how can this professor state that God is actually all about weakness, when all believers see him as strong, and then say that He only exists in the mind? How can he say that God is only a conception, but the conception of God is faulty? If the conception of God is God, how can it be wrong about who God is? Do you see why this is absurd? Not only is it untrue, but it is self-defeating.
I'm glad I went and heard him though. I got to hear a vary well presented postmodern view of God, and found it both to be completely wrong, and to be self-defeating. That's good enough for a night. But yes, I am a nerd.
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