I ran across a Naz Net thread today focused on “God Talk”. Now that’s always a wild ride among pastors. I was not disappointed. 
The question posed was wether God could
make a mistake? We might have well discussed if God could make a rock so big even God could not lift it?
What always amazes me in such threads is how certain we pastors can be about One who by definition is beyond our comprehension. Several writers, convinced that God was incapable of a mistake appealed to our Greek influenced understanding of God as knowing all (omniscience). Others, allowing for trial and error—theistic evolution anyone?—challenged with the certainty of Scripture, notIng that God was sorry about creating humans given that humankind, behaving badly, subsequently filled the earth with violence and pain—apparently a mistake God felt needed a correction.
The appeal to Scripture is especially difficult for evangelicals to argue against. The Biblical authors clearly reveal Israel’s God as passionate and moved by humans. The Trinity of God often changes their communal mind in response. So, what emerges from this thread is an interesting discussion of anthromorphism—attributing to God, human feelings and characteristics. While that clearly is at work throughout scripture it cannot be used as a dismissive, unless we are prepared to undo even the ‘idea’ that God can be known via human inspired intuition or in community or Jesus, the ultimate example.
Wether an appeal to Grecian perfection or Biblical experiential knowledge I simply wanted to note that the real enemy in our discussion was certainty, best illustrated by one pastor who said, “God can do whatever God wants.“ End of discussion.
And so, here is my appeal to mystery and the wisdom of heart knowledge as I responded to my Naz-Net colleagues—beginning with a thoughtful and original response to the question from a pastor who suggested the question itself assumes a Grecian philosophy of God’s nature. I then wrote:
Greek philosophy posited God abstractly as the absolute perfection of all that is mathematically calculable. There are perhaps good reasons to consider Omnipresence or omniscience, ect. but we have moved beyond what the Biblical writers were concerned with. Attributing to God by way of analogy human ways of feeling and behaving lies at the heart of Israel’s hunger to know God and God seems to encourage and appreciate such understandings by allowing for and creating a multi-shared world wherein we exercise an inter-active degree of creativity and responsibility.
As Christians such “anthropomorphism” is inherent and necessary given we are as removed from Divine Experience as an aunt is to a human; human language and categories of understanding are necessary for relationship and likeness in spirit. Such language (including Greek philosophical categories) inevitably miss and hit their object, understanding God.
Jesus of Nazareth is our best experience of the Divine and allows for relationship and knowing.
Observations:
1) Jesus most certainly learned by mistake, trial and error.
2) The Biblical revelation infers, even requires God being incredibly flexible. We clearly influence God and God appears to have deep emotional resilience, including passion, questioning, reflection. In fact, if we interpret all of Holy Writ through Jesus of Nazareth we either have to declare that God was profoundly mis-understood, when for example God is credited with ordering ethnic cleansing as Israel enters Canaan. The other possibility is that God entered into our human woulda and sins, eating and drinking of human greed, lust and violence in order to redeem our larger narrative.
To limit that as only our experience of God using limited human language seems to leave us with a mathematical calculus of the Divine when scripture infers rich, free, emotional response including change of mind.
3) Oswald Chambers suggests that God’s knowledge of humanity also grows, deepens in Gods Incarnational experience as The Eternal Son/human Son of The Father enters fully into human experience.
Put differently, abstract, even omniscient knowing is not the same as experiential knowing. If God cannot grow, deepen in The Trinity of God’s experience then Creation itself becomes a rather boring tinkering with nuts and bolts instead of an awesome creative painting in which the brush and canvas share in the Creation.
I have no desire to follow a God of nuts and bolts. Fortunately, the Biblical record is far more intriguing. But then, who knows?
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