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BULLETIN SIXTY FIVE

MAN NOT GOD CHANGES AND LONGS FOR
THE UNATTAINABLE, OR THE DISRUPTIVE FOR HIMSELF

Someone feeling languid, maybe like Tillich, might wonder what it would be like if God Himself wanted to die ? even the demonstrable God of the Bible (as in SMR).

Such a person might even have an opinion on the topic.

Leaving that aside, let us look at this proposition.

Firstly, for that to be the case, since time is an invention, a creation of God, it would imply that He wanted to inhabit that changeable world subjected as it is to many forces, powers, provisions, to begin and to end. It would be like a boy who wanted to become a carriage in a toy train given to him. There is no provision for a creator to become part of the creation in total, for then there is nothing left to sustain it. When Christ became incarnate, the Father and the Spirit did not. Here however the boy would become what he is not systematically, without either the power or the logic to achieve it. It is a work of imagination lacking reality and power, system and intricacy, sufficiency in short. It is fancy dictating to fact, and not managing it. Not uncommon but inadequate logically.

Yet God Himself IS sufficient, it might be answered. Sufficient to make what is not so, to become so, in manifest contradiction of the facts, however, not just the powers of what He made ? He made the facts. The fact is that the necessity of there being an eternal Being back of creation is readily demonstrable as noted, One never having to 'arise' (out of nothing ? necessarily not, that is antilogy!), and thus a Being adequate not only in nature but in supernature. No forces beyond Him are there. He is the source. No inadequacy in terms of what He is not and might conceivably want to be, is possible. If it were the case, then His will and nature would be subject to antipathetic forces, and hence limited. This is not God but a creation. That would be part of the entirety of His nature, insufficiehcy. Moreover, if He wanted to be or have or be under the control of what He had made in total, it would show that in Himself He was not adequate, self-suffiicient, but needed addition, moderation or transformation in order to live, otherwise dying (for He would have to be able to die as well as wanting it).

There would be in His very nature, what He lacked, what was thus the exposition of what was not independent of possible outcomes of His power, and hence there would be a gap between His imagination and desire, and reality, which He constituted, and in terms of which He created. To create in terms of His sufficiency (self-sufficiency) what made Him lose that, would mean that it was self-sufficient only under certain circumstances. That of necessity would put God under circumstances, which is impossible, for then He is but a creature amid an autonomous world, and so not God.

Further, since God is the truth (there IS not truth without a super-relationship mode), being always there and always doing what He pleases, it would then be true that He lacked something, and hence by definition, this implies that in talking of a wish to die, we are speaking of a surrogate, something else.

In general, all these misnomers are based on some other model. A  Being self-sufficient and eternal, beyond time and chance and law-girt bodies is logically necessary FOR creation; and one other than this is necessary for the model of those who want God to have in mind to die. The collision occurs in conception and its grounds, and misconception and its bounds.

Dying involves time. It ceases to be even relevant to the entity that was. In this wandering model, that entity therefore becomes subordinate to it ; but He is not even IN it, to be subject to it; and to apply that model's offices to One in another domain from that which inclusively and exclusively He made and contains, like a glove or hat, makes of that domain a ground and bound of His being, which is not the case. To so dismiss what is beyond all time IS, is mere caricature.

If I made a million, I cannot thus become a million. When God makes a creation, He cannot turn Himself utterly into it since this is not the case: He is definitively and distinctively NOT a creation; He never was created. Nothing CAN create Him because He is logically necessarily already there. Creation as containing Him by transformation is not a possibility, since it is a lie concerning what He is.

If it does not contain Him, then it cannot quench Him; it is beyond its powers, as the truth and the scenario. To get things so you have to have a different model; but a different model does not work in meeting the needs of the creation, that it should be there, being created and logically sourced. If you abandon logic, you abandon both the power (in consistency with the resulting model you are adopting) to argue logically, and hence the power to express your point of view logically. Hence it cannot be done.

Reason requires what the Bible indicates: an entirely self-sufficient God, beyond and adequate for creation, not subject to its ways but instead making what is subjectible to Himself in all respects in and through it. If  He makes freedom for a part of His creation, it does not equate with His making Himself into what He is not, subject to other domains, forces, limitations. As such He would be a limited Being. To argue otherwise is to forsake necessity and talk in terms which are neither in accord with what God is, or the facts, or the truth. It is a flummery of fiction.

It would finally, mean, that God was being envisaged as Someone who may tire of being Himself, grow weary of it, come to deem it insufficient, inadequate, not matching His will, who may BE a time-related entity as such, and that is NOT eternal, and its implementation is a contradiction, its volition pre-supposing in One who knows all, a tilt against truth, which God is. It would mean God in fact was One  possessing either a will or a Being that is decidedly NOT eternal, but capable of disjunction from both fact and truth, magical, inherently unstable and dependent on circumstances; and subject to deterioration or debility processes or internal insufficiency for being; but this once again, is not God.

MAN IS deteriorating, IS subject in genomic entropy, to relatively fast moving deterioration so he may wish to die.

The God of the Bible, however, of logically necessity, does not exist as creation, but as Creator, to whom no deteriorative (outworking) process, flicker of personality or breach of sufficiency by will is applicable, a mere confusion with creation, as if Einstein WERE E=mc². Indeed, those who wish to think in this anthropomorphic manner are involving themselves in an irrelevancy, another model, a mixed up confusion of concepts. What is of creation is one thing, one mode; what creates absolutely is another. The latter is wholly dependent on the former; the former not at all on the as yet non-existent latter. What He is thus is defined.

As to those who invent other models, their locale is with some demi-urge that is being thought about and then confused with God. That leaves the necessity for God Himself right out of the equation, and hence the creation out  of it also; but the creation is.

And so is God. He does not wear out in will or being, in composite self-sufficiency, all in one, One in all, in mutuality or in anything which constitutes His Being, either psychically or mentally or volitionally, but being self-sufficient remains unmoved; nor is He subject to those underlying processes or inherent potentials for ruin which would make Him otherwise. From the first such an imagined  Being would itself be inherently involved in creation, before He did it; and that is again, impossible, self-contradictory. If it did not exist, He could not be part of its ways, participant in its products. Since He made it exist, it is in itself extraneous to He being, though not to His wishes. In the beginning God was; and creation was produced; not vice versa.

What accounts for things has to be there, not a hybrid, which merely invokes clashing terminology and principles.

If God were to change, then there would be in Himself what produces such desire, namely a lack of self-sufficiency, a void, a desire, a lack, a disproportion, a condition, a limit. The disproportion indicates a deficiency, an insufficiency, a vulnerability, a despatch from all inclusive independence by nature. All sorts of demi-urges can live and die as imagination dictates, and facts do not; but they are simply irrelevant to the issue. It is simply to change the subject. That however does not change God!