Reflections on the Impossibility of a truly lonely Christian God (Dale)

Not possible. But why? (image credit)

Here are some rough-draft thoughts on another line of thinking associated with social trinitarian theories.

God is perfect. Arguably, an absolutely perfect being could not fail to be “well off” – in classical terminology, a perfect being must be happy, must be in a “blessed” condition. Part of perfection is independence. One kind of independence is the kind which comes up when discussing ontological or cosmological arguments for God’s existence – the idea of aseity, or existing but not because of anything else. But here’s another kind of independence or self-sufficiency: not requiring any thing (i.e. any fact not entailed by your existence) to be well off, to have a good life. Perhaps we could call it the divine property of security, or independent or self-sufficient happiness.

Is God as well off as he could possibly be? Arguably not, for people thwart his will all the time. He’d be happier if his will were always done. But if he’s self-sufficient in the above sense, he’d be well off even if no human had ever responded to his grace. Open theists (unlike other theists) believe that God literally takes risks as he rules over his creation, but if God is self-sufficient, then he never risks his own well-being, even if open theism is true.

If God must be well off, then he couldn’t ever be lonely, in a happiness-depriving (life-ruining) sense. He could want fellowship with Hitler and not get it, and suffer because of Hitler’s rebellion, but this suffering would be compatible with his being thoroughly well off. One might say the divine serenity is large enough to absorb all such pains.

I think all Christians agree that God is far from being anything like an emotional cripple, or some invasive and needy single parent, who in a sickly way needs the friendship of his children. He of course deeply wants it, and has taken great steps to secure it. His having a good life, though, doesn’t depend on our cooperation, whether individually or collectively. But why is this so?

It’ll be some fact about, or implied by, God’s essential nature. One candidate would be, that God essentially “contains” multiple “persons” or something like persons. God can’t be lonely because he can’t be alone – he’s always, in any possible circumstance, got these multiple friends “in” him. In any possible world, God exists, and is never alone, but always with these other (somehow internal) relationship-worthy things.

Sometimes, in conjunction with this idea, it’s urged that a “merely unipersonal” God, or a “unitarian” God like that of the Jews and Muslims (not to mention Christian unitarians), would be imperfect, because he’d possibly be alone, without these internal “others”. These poor confused theists, then, have an incoherent notion of God. They say their God’s perfect, but their lack of trinitarianism logically implies that their God isn’t perfect. Only a social trinitarian God, it is urged, is perfect, because only it can be self-sufficient, as explained above.

Well, not so fast. Why couldn’t a “unipersonal” God exist alone, and yet be well off, not lacking any happiness-depriving thing? Yes, he’d be capable of loving another, but in the scenario we’re imagining he wouldn’t actually have such a relationship. He’d love himself, and that’s a good thing, but that’s different. He would be lacking a distinctive kind of love: other-love – the good of being in a (non-reflexive) personal relationship. And he’d want that sort of love. But why couldn’t God be so serene and blessed that he could simply “absorb” this lack? (Don’t think of it as a loss – we’re supposing God never created in the first place.) He’s still got all his intrinsic perfections, after all.

Perhaps the idea is this. Man, as Aristotle said, is a social animal. It is unnatural for a human to live outside a human community. A man or woman could survive alone, but would not thrive and flourish. A lack of relationships, before too long, badly warps any human. Such a person might avoid becoming a drooling feral human, but he’d still be importantly unfulfilled. In short, human happiness requires friendship, and being embedded within, functioning as a part of a human society.

That’s all well and good. But what does this have to do with God? Maybe the idea is this:

1. God made humans in his image and likeness. (Genesis 1)
2. Therefore, God is similar to a human, and vice-versa. (2)
3. Humans can’t be well off without personal (non-reflexive) relationships.
4. Therefore, probably, God can’t be well off without personal (non-reflexive) relationships. (1-3)

This strikes me as a very weak argument by analogy. I agree with 1-3. But God (i.e. the Father) doesn’t have a body. He doesn’t need touch, or the sights and sounds of others. He’s always everywhere. He’s never afraid, and never lacking in knowledge. He knows nothing could ever destroy him. He never needs to whistle in the dark to reassure himself. He’s never overcome with dread, never paranoid. He’s never suicidal (and not just because deicide is a logical impossibility – but because he’s never that hopeless). He never feels like he’s in a world spinning out of his control because, well, he never is. He doesn’t need his mommy. In short, we have no relevant experience, and no other sort of evidence, for thinking that a god is a social animal – i.e. that a divine being can’t flourish without being in a loving relationship with another. As best I can tell, it’s a mere assertion, one which is very convenient, if you’re already convinced that social trinitarianism is true. Being perfect doesn’t require having as good a life as one could possibly have, but only being the best sort of being, the most valuable sort of being, there could be. Because of this, I don’t see any perfect-being argument for social trinitarianism.

Do you?