Friday, October 13, 2006

Does God care about every detail of my life? Does He have a specific will for every aspect of my life?
Posted by at
Labels:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

No.

3:26 PM
Ρωμανός ~ Romanós said...

Anybody out there have a shades of gray response?

4:25 PM
Anonymous said...

Now that the snarky comments have had a chance to settle, I thought I'd expand a bit. And look, Erin said what I was going to say. Numbers every hair, He does. But the second question, to answer yes to that is to live in fear that the quarter pounder with cheese, no pickles, you ordered might have been outside of God's will. Or if you marry this with the sovereignty of God (that nothing happens apart from the will of God), you descend into a death spiral of fatalism.

How would you break down the statement "God is control?" Do you picture control as someone manipulating levers and wheels as if the world were a big machine? Or do you picture a mother parenting her child, a government in control of its people?

I talked briefly about this on my blog here: http://snipurl.com/zin4

9:21 AM
Kenny said...

As cited in the previous post:

Prayer to the Author

If you think of the world as a machine, a mechanistic collection of invisible gears and cogs, then it’s easy to think of God the Creator as a watchmaker—content to let the world spin as he observes.
If you think of the world as a masterpiece of art, a creative composition, then why not believe God is intimately involved in his work.

What interest do you have in us, Lord (free and timeless),
When we are tied to a string of heres and nows?
Yet you wrap your tale around ours,
Weave your signature style in the telling;
I trust you’ve penned for us a happy ending
That will bring you accolades and bravos.

9:34 AM
Ρωμανός ~ Romanós said...

I said my YES too quickly perhaps, but in the end, I think I am going to stick with YES to both questions. The reason I say YES to question 2 is because you wrote "aspect" and not "detail." That provides a bit of a loophole. It might still be YES even had you written "a specific will for every detail of my life."

God has a distinct single Will in which the three Persons unite in fully free cooperation. If we, therefore, according to Orthodox theology, are destined to be joined with that divine Life, our free will has to be thoroughly in sync and in agreement with that single Will. These are speculations on eternal nature, but not on temporal nature.

Our earthly life is so mixed with the fallen nature of this place, that we simply cannot discern the Will all the time in every detail. I can imagine, though, in an unfallen world (such as Perelandra), that the human nature which was created for utter unity of will with the divine Will might have a way of just "knowing" what that Will was in EVERY instance. Can it not be, too, that such things as we consider inanimate (fields of grass, forests, clouds, the planets) or even as BELOW us (animals) or ABOVE us (angels), might be in total "knowledge" of and submission to the Will of the One in Three?

2:48 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)