“To say God is almighty is not to say God has the power to bend anything and everything to his will”. And “for him all things are indeed possible”. I would love this to hear more about this apparent contradiction. I think of my Father with whom i had a beautiful relationship. I don’t believe he could have bent my choices to his will, and he would not have wanted to. But his love held the possibility of the healing/reconciliation of any and all decisions i made. Is the the kind of thing you are talking about?
I should address this at length in a separate post, but here's the argument in a nutshell: all things are possible for God precisely because his power is not a coercive, cause-effect power but the infinite creativity of loving-kindness.
I also have a question: everlasting doesn’t mean long life? It means fullness? I mean I think I get it- he IS life in himself, right? And that exists out of time, but it also exists in time, right? I just want to make sure I’m understanding. Lay person here ;)
Yes! We just don't want to reduce God's eternality to a timeline—as if the divine life is just stretched out over an impossibly long time. God is lively! Joyous. Delighted. Full of surprises. Not old!
“The words said to us on Ash Wednesday as our truth, our comfort and our indictment are written in Scripture at the beginning of the history of mankind; they are a statement and a judgment of what man is from the beginning. These words concern a beginning, but they are said by God. They sound like a statement about our future, about the abyss of death into which we shall fall. But our future is not what is said to us in these words, so that we should know whence we come and what we must endure, our future is he who says these words; their deepest sense is that HE is addressing us. He speaks to us because he wants to be involved with us. He has not yet finished speaking, he will have done so only at the end, when he will have fully communicated himself. In hard words he reveals to us the abyss of our origin, in order to promise us himself as the abyss of our future. He is ours, this is our expectation and our hope against all hope.”
“To say God is almighty is not to say God has the power to bend anything and everything to his will”. And “for him all things are indeed possible”. I would love this to hear more about this apparent contradiction. I think of my Father with whom i had a beautiful relationship. I don’t believe he could have bent my choices to his will, and he would not have wanted to. But his love held the possibility of the healing/reconciliation of any and all decisions i made. Is the the kind of thing you are talking about?
I should address this at length in a separate post, but here's the argument in a nutshell: all things are possible for God precisely because his power is not a coercive, cause-effect power but the infinite creativity of loving-kindness.
This is a starting point: https://www.cewgreen.com/post/the-logic-of-cross-resurrection-vs-the-logic-of-cause-effect
I also have a question: everlasting doesn’t mean long life? It means fullness? I mean I think I get it- he IS life in himself, right? And that exists out of time, but it also exists in time, right? I just want to make sure I’m understanding. Lay person here ;)
Yes! We just don't want to reduce God's eternality to a timeline—as if the divine life is just stretched out over an impossibly long time. God is lively! Joyous. Delighted. Full of surprises. Not old!
Love this, Chris. Such a beautiful invitation into His enfolding love and mercy, always present and inexhaustible.
🙏🙏🙏
Karl Rahner:
“The words said to us on Ash Wednesday as our truth, our comfort and our indictment are written in Scripture at the beginning of the history of mankind; they are a statement and a judgment of what man is from the beginning. These words concern a beginning, but they are said by God. They sound like a statement about our future, about the abyss of death into which we shall fall. But our future is not what is said to us in these words, so that we should know whence we come and what we must endure, our future is he who says these words; their deepest sense is that HE is addressing us. He speaks to us because he wants to be involved with us. He has not yet finished speaking, he will have done so only at the end, when he will have fully communicated himself. In hard words he reveals to us the abyss of our origin, in order to promise us himself as the abyss of our future. He is ours, this is our expectation and our hope against all hope.”