Future and Past

 "Who or What is God?" a question on the final exam of my theology professor at seminary. This morning I have two things in mind. First - - (before we discuss what scholars call Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, if we get to that) - - with your participation, I want to do something adult with you that’s in the nature of theological discourse. I invite you to contemplate something, actually several things in the process. Your religious background, what you grew up believing, being taught, by your parents, in Sunday School as a child, in your religious indoctrination of doctrine, Confession or creed, may affect your thoughts and your answers to yourself. And there are no right or wrong answers, it’s to challenge assumptions, to stir curiosity and contemplation.   

The basic discussion-question is this: does God know the future? Is God all-knowing? Does God have a plan for your life? Is God omniscient? Again, does God know the future? Does God know your future? Does God know what you will do with your life, all that you will do in your life, your decisions, your choices, the roads you will take, your sins, how you will live and die? Does God know, let us say, on the night in which you are conceived, before your moment of conception, which one of millions of spermatazoa from your father will puncture and enter which waiting egg in your mother and, impregnated, form the fetus with specific innate characteristics that will be you? Does God know whether you will be male or female? Gay or straight? Look like your father, or your mother’s great aunt Bessie? Have a peaceful mind or a quick temper? Be smart, average, or dense? Have a sense of humor? Blue eyes or brown? Be right- or left-handed? Have black, brown, red or blond hair, curly or straight? Does God know which girls you will fall in love with, which you will marry, how many children you will have, and their destinies? Does God know if you will be totally healthy or will (as I did!) inherit a particular heart issue from your father and maternal grandmother? Does, did God know all that at my conception? 

When I was born, did God know that on reaching adulthood I would be a Naval officer twenty years, then go to a Lutheran seminary and become an Episcopal priest and disappoint my Pennsylvania bishop by taking a parish in Florida instead of the Pennsylvania parish my bishop was counting on me to take? Was that bishop's disappointment in me foreordained? Did God know that future fact about me back when it was in my future? Or was it not "in my future"? Let me be trite, trivial: God knows I had a pork chop for breakfast this morning, but did God know, as I was waking up, what I would have even before I decided and knew myself? I mean, I almost never have a pork chop for breakfast, but did God know beforehand?

What does God know? More important for this contemplation: how do we know what God knows?

What do we know about the God we worship? What do we believe about God? What are the bases for our beliefs that we are so certain that we "know"? Where do we get our notions about God: is it out of our minds? From revelation, including God’s own self-revelations in the Bible? At Exodus 3, God tells Moses who or what God is, his name: God says אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה eh-yeh a-sher eh-yeh. We are not sure how to translate that or even how to pronounce the Hebrew in which it is spoken in the Bible: something about BE or BEING, God is BEING. I AM that I AM, I will be what I will be. This is my name forever, throughout all generations, and then: יְהוָה Y’hVah, I AM. In the Greek Septuagint and the NT, “ego eimI”, I AM.

What do we know about God? In Genesis, the two creation stories, very different from each other, have at least this in common: that we humans are of high importance to God. So, we can know “God loves us, for the Bible tells us so”?

From the history of the Israelites, the children of Abraham, we can say that God is loyal to his chosen people. God will have mercy upon whom God will have mercy. To non-chosen people who are enemies of the children of Israel, God can be merciless, brutal, murderous. If you do not agree, then you have not read the Old Testament, or even Joshua, so I’m not inviting disagreement or discussion on that, I’m simply trying to help us get a handle on God’s revealed characteristics, as we wonder “does God know the future?”. 

One theologian, Hals by name, wrote that God has but one characteristic, which is “grace,” unconditional lovingkindness. That would exclude omnipotence and omniscience, wouldn't it. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but that’s his position.

Think about it: what are God’s characteristics? We like to say omnipotent, all powerful, but if so there's the theodicy problem: why do people suffer pain and grief? If omnipotent, could God stop that, or maybe God does not want to have that mercy; or does God simply grieve with us in our pain and grief? Or shall we rationalize somehow in order to excuse God, we love to do that to get God off the hook, out of tight spots. Is omnipotence a characteristic that we "build into God"? We like to say God is all-loving. We like to say God is omniscient, all knowing, but is there anything in Scripture where God declares or reveals such a trait? - - or is divine omniscience something we like to believe about our God and so we give God that trait and say that not to believe God is omniscient is blasphemy, a sin? Is God all-knowing, or have we built God the way we think our God should be? 

And if God is omniscient, knows our future, what does that do to the “free will” that we think we have, each of us making our own decisions and ordering our own lives?

So then: does God know the future? And if God does not, are you disappointed in God, and maybe will go back to constructing a god that meets your expectations?

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This was our adult Sunday School contemplation yesterday, April 15th, an engaging discussion in, because of terrible weather, a smaller group than the usual full table. One of the most helpful comments I heard was that scientifically, in our expanding universe, the future does not exist, the present just keeps expanding into it; and so there is nothing about the future for God to know or not know, because the future is not; and we can never "travel into the future" because as yet it's nonexistent except in our imaginations. That thought was helpful. The past, on the other hand, mathematically it may be theoretically possible to return to the past; perhaps in scientific theory somewhat just as when we look at the light from a star a million light years distant we are looking a million years into the past; a formula for traveling there and enjoying that past might pose presently insurmountable problems, but perhaps theoretically I could return to ages and ages thence and travel the other road? Also helpful was the suggestion, in response to the problem of theodicy, (why is there pain and sorrow if God is good and powerful?), that we are created in a material world, and aside from whatever eternal, infinite, spiritual sides we may or may not have, in this world we are material beings in a material universe, and we ourselves, our bodies, are subject to all the aspects of being material things: wearing out, disease, accident, death; I liked this existential response that leaves God out of the blame equation entirely. 

DThos+

pics: NASA, Hubble telescope