First compassionate conservatism, now compassionate Catholicism.
A self limiting God is one of the cornerstones of liberal theology.
Henry Nelson Weiman, in the 50’s, began promulgating this notion in an effort to explain away the “problem” of evil. To wit, “How can an omnipotent God allow evil to reign in the world?” His position was that God, in His omniscience, limited His control of mankind in order to ensure human freedom.
This, of course, flew in the face of Calvin who had no truck with freedom, determining that everything is predetermined, or, more to the point, foreordained. By limiting God Weiman could allow God to keep His hands clean while grieving over evil.
Much of the theological claptrap in the latter part of the 20th century devolved from this particular brand of nonsense. God is not divine but is a natural process, like gravity. Hence, we have the Pope carrying on about an explicitly Unitarian and non Christian view of God.
It is interesting to note that Boston University, where Weiman taught, was a Methodist seminary which theology department was headed by a Unitarian, in the 50’s.
And this is what Penn Jillette has brought us...
It doesn’t pay to quote the Pope to Catholics for several reasons. (1) It was a hoax. If not that then (2) He was mistranslated. (3) You don’t know the context. And my favorite one is (4) He wasn’t speaking ex cathedra. So you see it just doesn’t pay. He can say whatever he wants and it doesn’t matter.
The criticism misunderstands Pope Francis’s remark. In fact, he is, like his predecessor Benedict XVI (from the point of view of us Orthodox Christians, the best Pope of Rome in living memory by far, and perhaps the best Pope of Rome since the schism of the Patriarchate of Rome from the Church) moving back toward Orthodox theology.
Francis expresses himself badly on the point (unless he explained more of what he meant than was quoted) but he is speaking in the manner of the Cappadocian Fathers and St. Dionysius the Areopagite’s “On the Divine Names”. It is neither God’s divinity nor His ominpotence, Francis was denying, but conceiving of God as a mere being, or seeing His activity as the activity of a mere being like a magician (or, for that matter an engineer). God is the very ground-of-all-being, prior to even the distinction between existence and non-existence, and no created binary distinction is applicable to Him.
Modern atheism correctly concludes that there is no mere being with the attributes we Christan ascribe to God, but bound in the philosophical shackles of rational categories, cannot see that the God whom we worship is not a being, but the transcendent ground-of-all-being, Who transcends all the categories of thought in which the rationalist deals, transcending the distinction between unity and multiplicity, subsisting from all eternity as the All-Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God, and even the distinction between transcendence and immanence in the Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Pope didn't say that, so this article is nonsense. I guess the author hopes that some people will buy it.
Can the writer of this article shut up too?
Ah, NOT in Religion Forum!!
Ah, NOT in Religion Forum!!
Saying that God cannot do everything or God is not divine seems to disqualify himself from his job doesn’t it?
The Pope said “demiurge”, not “divine being”. It was mistranslated. A demiurge is a Gnostic concept of a lesser god rather than the ultimate Deity.