As we saw last time, “god”-talk is very flexible.
In this post, I’ll look at some non-Christian and non-Jewish examples. Let’s imagine that you brush up on your Latin, jump into your time-machine, and travel back to 65 CE. You wander into the imperial palace in Rome, and encounter the above grafitti portrait.
“Who is that?” you ask a nearby soldier.
“Why, that’s Nero.”
“Who’s he?” you continue. (You slept through Ancient History 101.)
“Who’s he?” says the soldier, “why, he’s the divine emperor, a living god”. “What?” you retort – “you think that scruffy-beard dude created the heavens and the earth, and is the greatest impossible being? No wonder your empire eventually falls – you guys are dumber than a sack of doorknobs!”
Let’s pause the conversation there. You, who slept through history but not theology, are making an egregious error. The soldier indeed thinks Nero is a god, a divine being – a provident (over the empire) (human) being which must (legally and prudentially) be honored (ceremonially and verbally). To think he means, in calling the emperor “a god”, that the soldier thinks him the unique creator of the cosmos, and/or Anselm’s being-than-which-no-greater-can-be-conceived is simply confused.
But, you don’t realize this. Thinking that you’d rather hang out with more intelligent folk (with people, that is, more like you), you hop back into the time machine, and travel back to Athens in the year 300 BCE. You find yourself on a sunny, grassy hilltop, surrounding by happy and inebriated celebrants. Mustering your best Attic Greek accent, you ask one of them “What’s going on?”
“This is the festival of Dionysus, of course.”
“Who’s that?” (You slept through Greek mythology and history as well.)
“Who’s that, why he’s the god of wine.”
“What’s this about a ‘god of wine’. This Dionysus fellow – whoever he is, maybe he stomped a few grapes, but he can’t be the one true God.”
Again, you’re missing the point. The reveler thinks Dionysus is (probably) a provident (over the domain of gettin’ hammered) spiritual being which ought (legally, prudentially, and perhaps morally) to be honored by attendance at the yearly festival and other rituals, such as the occasional drink-offering. Of course, you, being a Christian, don’t think there’s any such being, but you’re misunderstanding her by reading your presuppositions about what a “divine” being must be into her statement about Dionysus.
But you still don’t get it. So you hop back into the time machine, and head for some more kosher territory.
Next time: “gods” of the Bible.
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Hi Scott – that’s an interesting passage. It does seem impossible to cause, create, or even just mysteriously be the source of oneself. The obvious traditionalist objection is that he’s making the Son less divine than the Father, because in his view the former is less powerful. How does he parry that objection?
Here’s a question that arises in Henry of Ghent’s Summa Quest. Ord. 58.1: is Christ omnipotent? Basically, he says that the Father is unqualifiedly omnipotent, but the Son is qualifiedly omnipotent. What’s the difference? Well, the Father generated the Son; so, the one thing the Son can’t do is generate himself. Nevertheless, we can distinguish between a power to produce a ‘what’ (primary substance/secondary substance) or a ‘who’. So, all divine persons can produce substances; but only certain divine persons ‘produce’ other divine persons.
In which case, is ‘omnipotence’ in some sense a sign of divinity? And, omnipotence in what sense precisely?
Morris’s book – don’t have it with me now – I think assumes that the Bible, or at any rate, Christianity, teaches that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. I’m narrowly focusing on some things – the grammar of God talk, and actual biblical god-talk – relevant to this claim, and to arguments for it. So I guess… ninja. 😛
Is there any Thomas Morris in the background here? Or are you approaching this from a completely different, ninja angle?
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