Personality

I haven't done a very good job as of late in posting things regularly. I have a lot that I want to write about, but time seems to be short at the moment. Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza at the University of Notre Dame, which was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I plan to write a reflection on that soon, but I want to wait a little bit to reflect on it, so for the time being I will post some thoughts based on another recent talk I head from the person who happened to be moderating the debate, Mike Rea.

Professor Rea spoke on the topic of divine hiddeness (or divine silence to use his preferred term), and while that is not the topic that I want to discuss, he made a very interesting point that I think is significant. In questioning whether or not silence may be part of God's personality, Rea made the comment that there is an endemic tendency in the philosophy of religion to treat God as devoid of all personality and simply reduce God to a machine that rewards and punishes, maximizes good, etc. However, when we do so we treat God as if He has no personality Himself and can be easily made to reflect what we perceive to be the obvious good or benefit to us. Taking this point as a launching pad, I want to reflect a bit more on what it means to speak of God's personality.

This is deeply problematic on a theological level because for Christian theology God is supposed to be the epitome of person-hood. The trinity, three persons in one, is the ultimate reality, and this reality is personal. To treat God as if He has no personality is a tacit denial of this crucial point of Christian doctrine. Perhaps too much discussion of personality is bound to make some people uncomfortable. After all, stressing that God may in fact possess a vibrant and dynamic personality leaves wide open the possibility that God may be very eccentric or idiosyncratic. It is important to stress that these characteristics are not incompatible with being all-loving or all-good. What it does mean is that God's reasons for acting or not acting may look very different than ours.

This is perfectly compatible with the testimony found in Scripture. Besides an obvious verse like Isaiah 55:8 ("For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways"), we also find telling examples from the life of Jesus. Jesus in many ways is a paradigm of the unexpected, constantly defying the expectations of his culture, his family, and his disciples. For anyone who affirms the divinity of Jesus, this should be a powerful challenge to our own expectations of who God is and how God goes about acting.

While the context of the passage clearly indicates that they were being sarcastic, if we take seriously for the sake of argument the call of the teachers of the law to Jesus as he hung on the cross ("He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! ³²Let this Christ, this King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe." Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him." link), then it seems that Jesus passed up an opportunity to make evident who he was and gain more followers. Presumably there may have been other people there too who might have been willing to follow Jesus but were struggling with how such a person fit into their religious paradigm. Didn't Jesus care about these people? Didn't he know that if he came down from the cross others might believe? (Again, this is just for the sake of argument. I am not claiming that this is the meaning Mark is trying to convey).

To anyone honestly wrestling with who Jesus was at that moment, it would be extremely natural to think that the best thing for Jesus to do would be to come down and prove he was the Messiah, the anointed one. If he really cared about these people and he really was the Messiah, why wouldn't he do such a thing? It is easy to see why not in the light of the resurrection that followed, but for anyone on the first Good Friday such a thing could not have been anticipated. And that is just the point- God does things that we do not expect, things that violate what to us seem like self-evident truths about what a good person should do in a given situation, but in the end what God has done surpasses our imagination and is incomparably greater than what to us seemed like the obvious thing to do.

This imagination and counter-intuitiveness may very well be a part of God's personality that reflects just who God is. Will this satisfy everyone who wonders how a world filled with evil could ever be justified? Probably not, but perhaps, following Ivan Karamazov, they may walk the quadrillion miles and declare it incomparably better than could ever have been imagined when they at last come to see what God has done:-) All this is only to say that Scripture is filled with incidents of God acting in unexpected ways that at the time undoubtedly seemed to go against what seemed to be the obvious good decision to make. If we take seriously God's personality and look to the testimony provided in the Bible then we have reason to believe that what we see now may look radically different in the light of what God will yet do. This requires a step of faith, but it isn't a blind leap. We can only have confidence in God Himself and who He is, which is exactly what we should expect if He truly is personal.