Jerry asks:
“You say that God is “maximally loving” and that God maximizes his glory. My question for you is, if God wasn’t maximally loving, how could you tell? In other words, what would it take for you to declare that God is not maximally loving, and therefore, not worthy of your worship. If God did in fact consign people to hell; if someone close to you had to go through almost unbearable suffering, if God really did tell the Israelites to annihilate the Canaanites, if God really did bring “moral atrocities” on the Israelites when they were captured, brutalized, and exiled by the Assyrians and Babylonians, if God did indeed orchestrate the suffering, crucifixion, and death of his own Son – would any of these things disqualify God in your own eyes as maximally loving? And would that also result in your refusal to worship such a God? I’ll be interested in your answer (don’t hurry; we both have buku grading to do). But I’ll go ahead and say here, that if your construct of a maximally loving God would cause you to deny the character of God as revealed in the narratives and express theological statements of scripture, or you would resort to exegetical contortions to explain those scriptures away, then I would find that position to be a very dangerous one.”
Adam quoted Jerry’s comment and then offered his own thoughtful response which included the following: “To say “God is good” is to make an evaluative claim.” My initial response is a bit different. I’d put it like this: To say “God is good” is to make an analytic claim. So I take Jerry’s question “if God wasn’t maximally loving, how could you tell?” to be as contradictory as “if the bachelor was married, how could you tell?”. The bachelor couldn’t, by definition, be married. God couldn’t, by definition, be less than maximally loving.
The underlying definition at work here is Anselm’s. God is that being than which none greater can be conceived. I’d be interested to hear if Jerry agrees with this definition. If he doesn’t then I’d like to know what is the being greater than God which he can conceive.
In closing, I’m going to rephrase Jerry’s final warning, tweaked every so slightly so that it could be spoken by an open theist. I trust the rephrasing will help to illustrate that for every warning there is a counter-warning to go with it.
“But I’ll go ahead and say here, that if your construct of a maximally knowing God would cause you to deny the character of God as revealed in the narratives and express theological statements of scripture, or you would resort to exegetical contortions to explain those scriptures away, then I would find that position to be a very dangerous one.”
