You were right in anticipating that some readers would find it just as difficult to accept your view that there were some things that God could not do (because they would not be coherent with other things He did, such as giving free will to human beings) as they had found it difficult to accept your view that there were some things God did not know (because they did not exist, such as the future). Can you explain further?
I began by pointing out that the word we use in English when we speak of God as being omnipotent or all-powerful is a translation of the Greek word pantocrator.
This word appears 10 times in the New Testament. It is used once by St Paul to refer to the coming of the Kingdom of God with the Messiah. It is found nine times in the Apocalypse always referring to the end of time and implying that the universal sovereignty of God will not be manifest until the end of history.
The reference is not to some abstract attribute of God in Himself but to a quality of His relationship to the world and history that is not yet fully visible at present.
Insoluble problems begin to arise if it is forgotten that God in Himself cannot be known by human beings. Even the revelations of Himself received through prophets, culminating in Jesus Christ Himself, concern God only in His relationship to the world and its history .
The Fathers of the Church never talk about the power of God in the way in which we talk about the power of some human being to do what he likes.
God’s power is always seen in relation to His love. The term pantocrator means rather ‘universal carer’ than ‘able to do anything’ (possible). Love propels God to make human beings free even if the exercise of this freedom will lead them to reject God’s love. Because of self-coherence, God does not have the power to act in any way that will annul such a significant expression of His love as the free-will He has given to human beings.
It is not only the evil that results from human free choice that has to be allowed to happen, but also the bad things that happen to certain beings in the natural course of evolution as it pursues its trajectory towards the fulfilment that is called in the New Testament “the Coming of the Kingdom”.
The power of God’s love will only be manifest then when the totality of the story of Creation will be seen to have integrated even the ugly episodes into a beautiful whole. Divine power shines out most brightly in Providence ensuring straight writing with our crooked lines .
How does what you are saying relate to what we read in the Book of Job?
The primary message of this marvellously told short story is to expose the absurdity of what might well be called the cybernetic theory of justice meaning the belief that evil gets automatically punished and good rewarded in this world.
Job’s friends take the disasters that befall him to be punishment for the evil he must have been committing. Job affirms his righteousness, and protests to God that God is either being unjust to him or misreading the moral value of Job’s actions.
Different interpretations have been given of God’s reported answer. My reading of the text is that God’s reply amounts to roughly the following “You are picturing me quite wrongly as a Book Keeper whose business consists in doling out prizes or punishments to people according to how they behave. What I really am is a farceur. The style of human artistry that most resembles my own mode of operation is that of comic writers. My special power is that of producing happy endings out of the tragic muddles that are so often made by human beings both singly and collectively.”
I can easily understand why some people find it hard to swallow the idea of God as a supreme joker, although that is how He has been recognised as presenting Himself in the Book of Job by insightful exegetes.
Like me, many accept Aristotle’s analysis that laughter is provoked by perception of a mistake, the consequences of which, however, are less than catastrophic. Thus, jokes (by which I mean any kind of laughter provocation) may be practical (inducing someone into a relatively harmless mistake) or narrative (recounting the story of some such mistake). In any case, joking involves mistakes made or imagined, so how can they be associated with divine minting?
The whole Bible can be considered to be, in this sense, a huge joke: in its first pages, it highlights a very stupid mistake committed by Adam, with consequences that initially look catastrophic, but eventually lead to a super happy ending, the inclusion of humankind in the glorious second Adam.
The colourful telling of this meandering narrative-type joke is studded with illustrations of its central character, God, playing the part of Arch-practical-joker.
For instance, at the very start the reader is invited to picture Him creating the animal kingdom. Many beasts have features that look like blunders, for instance, the long neck of the giraffe, which then eventually turn out to be strokes of brilliance: what cuter way could be found to enable the munching of tall tree-tops?
Are you not downplaying the atrocity of human (and animal) suffering?
No. The overriding joy of the Resurrection did not blur out recognition of the pain and anguish of the Passion. What I am deriding is the rationalist’s stance: who, when the optimist says, ‘the glass is half full’ and the pessimist replies, ‘No the glass is half empty’, the rationalist remarks in a superior tone, ‘this glass is twice as big as it needs to be’.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.