Francis Berger's Blog, page 11

Can God Lose in this World?

An important post by Dr. Charlton on the problem of Omni-god and free agency prompted an insightful comment exchange between Bruce and blogger Derek Ramsey: 

Derek:

In the Bible Satan seems to act as if were possible for God to be defeated. This isn't to say it was probable, but his rebellion in heaven makes no sense if it were categorically impossible for him to have success. Satan's behavior implies that Omni-God isn't a metaphysical reality.

The idea that God could have lost, however improbable that outcome might have been, is what allows me to conceive of freedom as a meaningful concept.

Bruce:

My understanding is that there was - and is - a sense in which God (the Father) can lose in this world; which is why Jesus Christ was/is so vital, in his "second creation" of Heaven.

What I mean is first that death cannot be eradicated from this mortal world of our experience. God can keep creating mortal life, but it will keep dying.

And there is a continual battle of God against evil. God can continue creating mortals, but the devil's party continues to accumulate "personnel", and can increase subversion.

This is not a matter of freedom as such, but a matter of the fact that beings just-are-free because not wholly of-God, because co-eternal in their existence and separate . What God can do for beings, can be undone by their choice.

The possibility for God to win eternally is also the consequence of freedom - it happens only because beings choose to follow Jesus Christ (to resurrected life in Heaven - which is free from evil, by the consent of resurrecting beings.

Unlike most Christians, I am also inclined to believe that God can lose in this world, which is why I keep harping on about the reality of authentic, uncreated freedom. 

I will expand on this vital theme in future posts.     

Rejoice! I Am the King of Greenland!

Manipulated into Optimism

A few years ago, nearly everyone was manipulated into fear. Now, at least a portion of the West is being manipulated into optimism, which informs me that very few people learned anything from the campaign of manipulated fear.

Some of the most egregious examples of recent and ongoing optimism manipulation: The lack of protests over certain “rightist” political victories.The increasing hope that the sort of people who will look after us are being put in place.Less-bad or slightly “better” politicians replacing “bad” politicians in Western countries.The consensus that democracy and voting are working again.The notion that wars will end or decrease in number soon.
The media is getting better and more balanced.The sudden and inexplicable “right” to expound potentially “racist” views.The promulgation of outrage and concern stories in the mainstream media that were taboo to even think about let alone publicly express a few years ago.Free speech is winning.Companies, especially social media and tech companies, sudden abandonment of certain odious policies, including climate stuff, D.I.E., trans, etc. Politicians and leaders who stomped on freedom four years ago are now heralded as freedom fighters.Alt-right/Christian types on venues like the Joe Rogan Experience.Rebranding of certain business/finance/CEO types as masculine and macho.Bitcoin will break the System and set everyone free.Increased interest in things like Christian nationalism.Increasing sentiment that the Catholic Church will improve and reassert itself as soon as the current pope dies, which can’t be far off now.Even the dullest of leftist dullards are increasingly becoming aware of how utterly retarded a leftist/woke society as evidenced by events like the fires in California.The unsupported but rampant belief that the masses won’t be taken in by future fear campaigns.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Remember, it’s still the System, and as far as I can tell, the System is not in any sort of “creating” mood.

Abysses and Ground? No. Freedom is Being and Being is Freedom

I admire Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev because they understood the inherent contradictions in traditional Christian theology concerning freedom and evil. If nothing can be prior to our outside of God, then, as stated in Acts 17:28, in God, we live and move and have our being. The same applies to everything in existence, and it only follows that it should apply to freedom and evil.

The problem is that it can’t, at least not if God is perfect, eternal, ultimate, timeless, and omni-everything, all of which traditional Christianity insists upon. Thus, freedom is defined as an innate attribute of actual creatures, as an extension of God’s freedom in which all actual creatures participate, or an uncreated eternal idea in the mind of God imbued in all creatures that can then utilize the eternal idea to align themselves with God’s law via free will choices.

Whatever the explanation, the ultimate source of freedom is God, which contradicts what freedom is. If all freedom is contingent upon God— and traditional Christianity insists that it must be because God is ultimately the source of everything—then it is not free in any authentic sense, conceptually, existentially, or otherwise. Factoring in God’s omni attributes like omnipotence and omniscience only deepens the contradictions implicit in traditional/classical theological explanations and qualifications.

And what about evil? If nothing can be prior to or outside of God, then it only follows that evil is also a part of God. Privatio boni/absence of good delineations that declare everything in Creation to be good and write off evil as nothing, non-being, or non-existence do nothing to address the very real presence of evil in Creation, to say nothing of the many contradictions such elucidations reveal when juxtaposed against God’s ultimacy and omni attributes.

Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev recognized traditional/classical theological explications on freedom and evil as contradictory and incoherent, regardless of how such explications were qualified or asserted.

Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev had the honesty and discernment needed to recognize that if nothing can be prior to or outside of God, then freedom and evil must also be from God. Full stop. There was no way around it. Understanding the gravity of the problem, Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev all offered coherent explanations of how freedom can still be authentic and how God cannot be responsible for evil even though nothing can be prior to or outside God.

Böhme placed the potential for evil with God in the form of the Ungrund—the groundless ground, neither good nor evil--within and from which God the Father creates. The Son purifies the potential within the Ungrund into pure act, thus elevating the Trinity above all potential for evil. The same applied to the rest of Creation until the Fall, after which the Light of the Son retracted from Creation, and the potential for evil seeped through. Consequently, it is only through the Son that this potential for evil can be negated.

Influenced by Böhme, Schelling reconceptualized the Ungrund as the Ground. Like Böhme’s Ungrund, Schelling’s Ground is also within God, but, paradoxically, contains a part that is His living essence and a part that is not God. Schelling describes God and His Ground as co-eternal.

“God has in himself an inner ground of his that in this respect precedes him in existence, but, precisely, in this way, God is again the Prius [what is before] of the ground and in so far as the ground, even as such, could not exist if God did not exist actually.”

God’s Ground is an essential concept in Schelling’s Freedom Essay as it pertains to the biblical Fall. Creatures are separated from God and exist in the mere Ground as independent beings. This independence is crucial for Schelling who posited that creatures do not dwell in God’s immanence, the perfection of pure, unblemished divinity. Instead, creatures are engaged in the process of becoming in the mere Ground of God.

Like Böhme’s Ungrund, Schelling’s Ground in God contains the potential for darkness because in some sense it is both connected and separated from God. The dark ground yearns for revelation and anticipates the moment of being reunited with the eternal father. This separation from God is vital to upholding the necessity behind all beings/creatures’ freedom and individuality.

Schelling argued that the only real way for freedom to emerge in the cosmos is through the primordial decision each creature makes—the choice for good or for evil—made possible via the Ground in which every creature exists. According to Schelling, this independence and power within the Ground allows creatures to form their own ontological centers. As is the case with Böhme, the end goal of all creatures is realignment with God; hence, the necessity of the light, that is Christ, in overcoming the darkness of selfishness and alienation.

Berdyaev took Böhme’s Ungrund a step further in the name of freedom and absolving God of evil by placing it entirely outside God. The Ungrund—the abyss of pure freedom—precedes being, even God, but it is not prior to God as time does not exist until God emerges from the Ungrund and begins creating. Since God creates from the Ungrund, a part of that pure freedom is inherent within all creatures, and over this freedom, God has little or no control; hence, the presence of evil in the cosmos.

As I reflect upon these explanations for freedom, I can’t help but think that a simpler and more coherent possibility exists. Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev all began from the assumption that nothing can be prior to or outside of God and then developed imaginative and coherent explanations of how and why freedom can be authentic within such an assumption. These explanations then branch into more convincing elucidations on how God is not responsible for the presence of evil in the cosmos. However, for me, these explanations are still far too abstract and fall short.

The crux of the problem, for me, at least, is the assumption that nothing is prior to God. Nothing is prior does not negate the possibility that beings co-exist with God eternally. Neither before nor after—but at the same time, stretching back into eternity. If we allow for such a possibility, we can then define freedom as something implicit, fundamental, and essential to beings.

Thus, freedom is in being, and being is freedom. Neither can be separated from the other. They did not begin, nor will they end. At most, they change depending on their mode of being.

In this sense, I do not think the beings in Creation are prior to God, but I certainly think that they were outside of God and that even now, within Creation, a mode of being, a part of them remains outside of God.
​
Berdyaev’s dictum that God has control over all being but not freedom is, at best, a partial truth. It is probably closer to the truth to say that God has control over beings in Creation—the mode into which he forms beings—but not their freedom. ​

Ruin of a Gothic Church in the Forest

A drawing Carus completed the same year he died.  Carl Gustav Carus (1789 - 1869) - Ruine einer gotischen Kirche im Wald - 1869

Suspect Arguments Are Usually Driven By Suspect Motives

​I recently reflected on an ultimately pointless discussion I was involved in not too long ago, and it occurred to me that the vast majority of arguments some people tout as coherent and ironclad are actually flawed and deceptive. 

The biggest doozies among these have to be the arguments marinated in things like Zeno’s paradoxes. Chief among these is the old, you can’t traverse the infinite and arrive at the present time spiel, which is commonly employed by people enamored by thinkers like William Lane Craig and his Kalam Cosmological Argument. 

The impossibility of traversing the infinite is also known as the Successive Addition Argument, and it is commonly wielded by those who wish to “prove” that the universe had a finite beginning.

The argument proposes that the universe’s past cannot extend infinitely into the past because this would create an impossibility, specifically, that all the events in the past have been adding up since eternity, hence completing, at this present moment or any moment infinitely far back from the present, the traversal of an infinite series. 

Okay, whatever, but the argument very subtly includes a beginning point, and that is where the little trick in the argument is hidden. You see, there is nothing inherently contradictory or metaphysically impossible about traversing an infinite that never began. More precisely, the infinite can be traversed because it lacks a definite starting point called “infinity.” 

The same holds for a beginning that is infinitely far in the past. Contrary to claims otherwise, the infinite can be traversed by starting somewhere. The possibility of infinitely far beginnings reveals infinity can be traversed. Incidentally, it could be traversed many times. Perhaps even infinitely. 
​
Anyway, none of that is of particular interest to me one way or another. What interests me is the obstinance with which successive addition arguments are utilized, even after the flaw in the argument is exposed. That's where the motivation behind the flawed argument usually surfaces. 

Abyss Explanations For Freedom and Evil Come Closer (But Not Close Enough)

Nothing can be prior to or outside of God.

The above is a fundamental assumption in Christianity and in virtually all Christian doctrines, dogma, philosophy, theology, and teaching; however, the assumption faces heavy headwinds when another core assumption of Christianity comes into play—namely, freedom. Or at least they do for me.

Traditional/conventional Christian theology and philosophy offer many apparently logical and coherent arguments that explain how freedom can still be authentic and real even though nothing is prior to or outside of God, yet the explanations they provide and the abstract qualifications they utilize tend to diminish or subtly deny the reality of authentic freedom. Or at least they do for me.

The dilemma is a simple one. If nothing can be prior to or outside of God, then freedom cannot be prior to or outside of God. If freedom cannot be prior to or outside of God, then freedom is something God created for humans. If freedom is not something God created, then it is an eternal aspect or idea of God that He shares or allows human beings and other creatures to access or partake in. Either way, God is the ultimate source of freedom, in the same way, he is the ultimate source of everything.

In general, most Christians see no dilemma in any of that, not even when evil enters the equation, which is strange because if nothing can be prior to or outside of God, then it only follows that evil cannot be prior to or outside of God.

Yet this is unacceptable because God is omni-everything, including omnibenevolent. So, if God is not and cannot be the source of evil, what is it, and where does it come from? How does it manifest in the world?

Most Christians will quickly point to free will and confidently claim that evil is a “product” of free will—that it arises or manifests when free will choosing goes against God’s will and divine purposes. They will also insist that such a choice for evil is necessary because if God had denied such decisions, we would be little more than push-button automatons, not actual, free creatures.

Okay, granted, but such explanations do little to shed light on where the evil from free will choosing comes from, especially when you factor in the assumption that God is perfect, all-powerful over Creation and that nothing can be prior to or outside of Him.

The basic solution to this problem—one many theologians have relied on over the centuries—is in the literal understanding of the assumption that nothing can be prior to or outside of God. So being is God. Whatever is not of God is not being. Thus, evil is nothing. Non-existent.

Theologians like Augustine and Boethius define evil as the absence of good or privatio boni. Within such conceptualizations, evil is not a substance, thing, or entity but a lack or absence of good. In other words, evil itself has no real existence. It is non-existent. More precisely, evil can have no real existence because everything in existence, insofar as it exists, *must* be good. To suggest otherwise would not only contradict God’s omnibenevolence, but it would also reflect poorly on the Creator, to the point of making him look “bad.”

Within the privation boni framework, being is equated with goodness, and non-being is equated with evil. All that “is” is good; all that “is not” is evil, which immediately raises the question of why God allows privation evil at all. It also raises questions of how and why God would create beings with the freedom (and power, apparently) to choose to manifest non-existence or non-being in Creation.

Well, since God is omni-everything, the manifestation of such non-existence or non-being must serve some divine purpose, so the world is inherently good, despite all the non-being flaring up all around us—cue Leibniz and his best of all possible worlds conceptualization.

As satisfying as these explanations are to the traditional/orthodox-minded, I have never found them convincing. Thankfully, I am not alone. Some Christian thinkers also struggled to accept such proposed theodicies and definitions of freedom.

Chief among these were Böhme and Berdyaev, each of whom aimed for more penetrating insights into freedom and evil. Starting from the initial assumption that nothing can be prior to or outside of God, the above-mentioned thinkers nevertheless pushed the envelope as far as they could take it in terms of qualifying or re-interpreting just what “not prior to or outside of God” meant or might encompass.

The following are extremely brief encapsulations of those qualifications and reinterpretations that do little justice to the content and depth of each writer’s arguments. Still, for the sake of this post, I’ll touch on a few main points.  

Böhme’s vision of the ‘Ungrund’ is essentially a reinterpretation of the Trinity. Böhme begins with God the Father as the Ungrund, a fiery abyss containing all the indefinite matter of the universe and the Divine Will. As such, God the Father, considered on his own, is neither good nor evil but contains both, unconsciously and impenetrably.

The Ungrund (Father) knows itself through its relationship with the Son, who Böhme defined as light and wisdom. The Father then expands and expresses itself through the Holy Ghost. The Ungrund of the Böhmian Trinity possesses two innate wills, one good and one evil, love and wrath, which drive Him to create nature, including humanity. The Ungrund itself is purified of evil through the light of the Son and thus expands and expresses Himself in perfect goodness through the Holy Ghost.

To sum up (poorly), Böhme placed the potential for evil within the Trinity but conceived the Trinity as immune to potential due to the love, wisdom, and redemptive qualities of the Son. This vision not only conforms to the assumption that nothing can be prior to or outside of God but also strives to explain how and why evil exists in Creation via the War in Heaven and the Fall yet can be overcome via Christ.

Captivated by the vision of the Ungrund, Berdyaev took Böhme’s vision a step further and placed the abyss, in the form of pure freedom, potentiality, and non-existence that is neither good nor evil, entirely outside of God.

In doing so, Berdyaev places freedom before being and breaks the not prior to or outside of God paradigm; however, he does so primarily to preserve God’s ultimacy rather than demean it. The Trinity emerges from the Ungrund in dramatic self-actualization and proceeds to create everything else from the Ungrund:

Out of the Divine Nothing, the Gottheit or the Ungrund, the Holy Trinity, God the Creator is born. The creation of the world by God the Creator is a secondary act. From this point of view, it may be said that freedom is not created by God: it is rooted in the Nothing, in the Ungrund from all eternity.

In my very humble opinion, Böhme and Berdyaev both offer far more convincing and coherent explanations for the origins of freedom and evil, yet neither abandons the traditional conceptions of evil and, subsequently, freedom as non-existence or non-being. And neither truly abandons the assumption of nothing being prior to or outside of God.

In Berdyaev’s case, the Ungrund possesses no ontological reality, thus it does not limit God as infinite or absolute. Also, God’s birth from the Ungrund happens outside of time; hence, there is no “real” before. And even if there is, that thing that is “prior to” God is not really prior to at all but happens instead in eternity and freedom, beyond any concept of time.

Although I find the “abyss” explanations for freedom and evil fascinating and, to a great extent, far more convincing than traditional explanations, I can’t help but feel that they remain hemmed in by the constraint of ensuring that nothing is prior to or outside of God.

From my perspective, freedom becomes far more comprehensible if one assumes that it is and has always been an inherent part of eternal Beings, of which the Primary Creator, who has mastered freedom through love, is supreme.

​Such a framework renders any idea of non-being or non-existence absurd and offers far more meaningful explanations for the significance of freedom. More on that in a future post.

​Freedom Stalls When You Can’t Let Go

As I currently see it, the philosophies of thinkers like Böhme, Berdyaev, and Schelling—thinkers who correctly advanced the primacy of freedom in Christianity and thus “liberated” it somewhat from confining and constraining doctrines and dogmas—all culminate in what I can only describe as truncation, not in the abridgment sense, but rather in the sense of being cut short, especially at the end. 

Böhme, Berdyaev, and Schelling go far and deep in their explorations of freedom. However, in the end, I am inevitably left with the frustrating feeling that none of them went far or deep enough.

Within this perspective, their respective philosophies strike me as probes that successfully inquired and explored beyond some of the limits set by antecedent assumptions yet were ultimately incapable of extending beyond other seemingly enforced boundaries. 

Chief among these is the adherence to the strict monotheistic conceptualization of God, which then necessitated the inclusion of some, if not all, of the omni attributes of the mono-god who creates from nothing, albeit tweaked with philosophical qualifications throughout.

Regardless of how far and deep any of these philosophers of freedom went, their explorations were curtailed or hemmed in by some aspect of the assumptions they seemed, whether consciously or not, to be metaphysically arguing against.

None could bring himself to the point of simply letting go in the metaphysical sense. And if they did, they kept it to themselves.

A Stab at Romantic Christian Eschatology

In my last post, I shared an excerpt from an article that outlined “Romantic Eschatology.” The participation in the framework described was rooted entirely in Romanticism, with only partial allusions to Christianity. However, the partial allusions revealed much.

Romanticism proper—assuming such a thing existed—largely embraced the evolution of consciousness but eventually distanced itself from Christianity. Christianity proper denies the evolution of consciousness and regards Romanticism as an error and a threat. In the end, neither offers a viable solution to the problem of alienation.

Alienation is the emergence of the individual, conscious self. But this emergence requires the split between the natural or unconscious realm of objects, and the conscious realm of the individual subject.

This is a false split that can only be healed by the imagination. Alienation can be thought of as a series of false images or projections of the self and its relation to the world.
For F. W. J. von Schelling and Berdyaev, this involves two forms of evil/despair that arise from within this condition: 1) to be swallowed up in chaos; 2) to create such a stultifying order as to do away with freedom. Each has a myriad of representations, and each is a false image of the self.

Neither Romanticism nor Christianity have been able to heal the false split via imagination. Granted, Romanticism was fueled by the imagination, but with little or no grounding in Christianity, eventually became swallowed up in chaos. Conversely, by rejecting the evolution of consciousness, Christianity doubled down on its stultifying order and stifled freedom and, consequently, imagination.

The solution, as far as I can see, lies in the amalgamation of Romanticism and Christianity. I do not think this can happen at the institutional church level, at least not yet.

For the time being, it will be limited to individuals. Moreover, the nature and quality of any such amalgamation will be set by the individual and his honest and sincere relationship and communication with the Holy Ghost.

The goal, if it can be described as such, is overcoming alienation. More precisely, recognizing and, to the best of one’s ability, overcoming the false images or projections of the self and its relation to the world.

These relations include, nay, are founded upon, the individual’s relationship with the Divine. This relationship must be rooted in freedom, freedom that strives for the actualization of concrete love.

In his essay Of Human Freedom, F. W. J. von Schelling offers some insight into what such a striving aims for:

This is the secret of love, that it unites such being as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other.

and
​
This is the secret of eternal Love – that which would fain be absolute in itself nonetheless does not regard it as a deprivation to be so in itself but is so only in and with another.

Romantic Eschatology

An illuminating description of a journey that very much mirrors Barfield's ideas on participation.

In his famous book on the romantics, Natural Supernaturalism, Abrams argues that many of the romantic works follow the theme, exemplified in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, of the “Circuitous Journey.” This journey basically consists in three parts.

1) Unconscious unity:

The unconscious unity is the potentially fecund but actually meaning-less abyss. This is the absolute, but it is a unity that is nothing in the sense of no-thing. It is a chaos of pure potency, a meaning less chaos of indeterminism.

2) Alienation from others and nature:

Alienation is emergence of the individual, conscious self. But this emergence requires the split between the natural or unconscious realm of objects, and the conscious realm of the individual subject.

This is a false split that can only be healed by the imagination. Alienation can be thought of as a series of false images or projections of the self and its relation to the world.

For F. W. J. von Schelling and Berdyaev, this involves two forms of evil/despair that arise from within this condition: 1) to be swallowed up in chaos; 2) to create such a stultifying order as to do away with freedom. Each has a myriad of representations, and each is a false image of the self.

3) Conscious unity; or, the “Mediation” of the Imagination between nature and the human:

This is represented in the return home, but it is not a return to the innocence of phase one consciousness but is at a higher and more intense level.

In romantic and dialogical visions, this termination of the quest was usually thought of as social, represented in the ideal of love.

Both the self and other are preserved in a higher unity.

Schelling’s Of Human Freedom states, “This is the secret of love, that it unites such being as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other.”

and

​“This is the secret of eternal Love – that which would fain be absolute in itself nonetheless does not regard it as a deprivation to be so in itself but is so only in and with another.”