Traditional concepts of God impede progress: we need a progressive concept of God

[The Great Open Dance]

Why does God create and sustain the universe?

Abba, our Mother and Father, rolls the stone away from the tomb of being, freeing us to emerge from nothingness. Here, within the divinely sustained creation, we participate in the interplay of cold and warmth, darkness and light, silence and sound, and all the mutually amplifying contrasts that grant life its passion.

Abba continually overcomes nonbeing to grant us, not just being, but becoming—diversity and difference transforming one another through time. Everything that is, is of God, including us: “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me” (Psalm 3:5 NRSV). But this claim raises the question: Why does Abba, our divine Parent, create and sustain the universe at all, especially with its suffering? Why doesn’t Abba just retreat into blissful divinity?

Unlike us, God chooses God’s nature, and God the Trinity has chosen dynamic, interpersonal love as the divine core. This love is superabundant. It will overflow our concepts, overflow our language, and even overflow itself. Traditionally, Christianity has deemed God to be infinite. We will deem God to be an ever-increasing infinity.

Infinity can increase infinitely.

We may deny infinity the capacity to increase. Infinity is, after all, infinite. But first, the divine majesty cannot be limited by our human logic. Second, work by mathematicians on infinity suggests that it can increase. In the 1920s, David Hilbert pointed out that if you had an infinite hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was full, then it could still accommodate one more guest, if each guest simply moved one room number up (1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, etc.), thereby leaving the first room open for the new guest. So, infinity can increase by one, so long as there is movement.

But Hilbert also points out that infinity can increase by infinity. That is, if a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all full, were to be visited by an infinitely long bus of new guests, then the hotel could accommodate all of them by having each current guest move from their room number n to room number 2n (1 to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, etc.), thereby leaving an infinite number of rooms free for the infinite number of new guests, so long as there is movement. Hilbert then went on to prove that any infinite hotel could accommodate an infinite number of buses with an infinite number of new guests, but that math is over my head.

Infinity is capacious and always increasing in capacity. But again we ask: If infinity is infinite, then why is it not infinitely pleased with itself? Why isn’t God self-satisfied? Christian theologians, following Plato, have insisted that since only imperfect things can develop or increase, and God is perfect, God cannot develop or increase. Divine development would imply divine imperfection. For this reason, creation can add nothing to the being of God, who is already perfect and not in need of development. Therefore, God’s creation of this universe is an act of sheer grace, doing nothing for God but everything for us.

Intentionally or accidentally, this concept of God condemns change. If God is immutable—static and unchanging—then to be static and unchanging becomes our highest ideal. If God is immutable, then by implication that which is must take priority over that which could be. All change becomes decline. Divinized immutability reinforces social rigidity, preserving entitlement and preventing reform.

Such stasis was never the intention of the Hebrew prophets or Christ Jesus. Above, we have shown that infinity can increase. Now, we argue that if infinity can increase, then the divine perfection demands that infinity increase infinitely, forever. Because God’s choice is to continually overflow God’s self, God is by nature creative. In fact, God is infinitely creative, ever increasing, and ceaselessly self-surpassing, without depletion or dilution.

This concept of divine development does not suggest that God is deficient in love, wisdom, or joy, always grasping for more. Instead, this concept insists that God is superabundant, overflowing with all three, in everlasting self-donation. It also implies that we, being made in the image of God, can become more. Godward change is humanity’s purpose.

The Trinity offers time-as-blessing.

God’s creativity is deeply tied to God’s trinitarian, interpersonal nature. In the Christian view, God had already decided to be interpersonal relationship, three persons as one God, “prior” to creation. This “prior” does not refer to priority in time, but to priority of being. God creates and sustains our time from God’s own time, which the Greeks call kairos, or time-as-blessing.

God is the many-as-one for whom the blessedness of time always abides. We call this blessedness eternity. According to the Christian tradition, God has chosen not to be a perfectly self-satisfied unity, a blissful One without a second. Instead, God has chosen to be love, and to overflow as love. But love gains reality only when it is concrete. God could not be content with an abstract love for abstract persons in an abstract place, so the ideal sought expression in the actual, and the universal sought expression in the particular.

This desire for particularity, for definite form in a specific location, necessitates limitation. For love to flow, those who are beloved must be somewhere rather than everywhere and someone rather than everyone. Differentiation allows agape to move: from here to there, from now to then, from me to you, from us to them.

Because limitation coupled with time puts love in motion, it is better to be limited than unlimited. Limitations are the means of God’s grace, because they permit completion through one another; they permit love. Our inabilities are completed by their abilities, while their inabilities are completed by our abilities. Through interanimation we find completion. Paul asks, “If the body were all eye, what would happen to our hearing? If it were all ear, what would happen to our sense of smell?” (1 Corinthians 12:17).

Divinity is beauty shared.

Abba also creates to share the divine beauty. An Islamic hadith states: “I was a hidden treasure, wishing to be enjoyed, so I created the world that I might become enjoyed.” Now, the act of creation is a gift from Abba to us. Again, Abba is evermore: evermore beauty creating evermore beauty to be enjoyed by evermore perceivers.

Crucially, Abba participates in this enjoyment, because Abba creates, sustains, and resides within the enjoyers (us), feeling what we feel. Abba is both the beauty that is enjoyed and the enjoyment of that beauty. This process is continual: we are the isthmus between Creator and creation, fully participating in creation while ever growing in awareness of the Creator.

Because our potential is never actualized, we can forever progress in our awareness, forever drawing closer to God, forever bringing pleasure to God, “for whom and through whom all things exist” (Hebrews 2:10). We are the conduit through which God’s infinite mystery is everlastingly revealed to itself.

Completion by another is better than self-contained perfection. The universe is not designed for independent self-sufficiency. It is designed for deep relationality, because even for God continual increase is better than unchanging completion. By divine design, mutual influence and related freedom produce ongoing novelty, rendering time everlastingly new. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 68-71)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Ali, Mukhtar. “Islam and the Unity of Being.” In Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson. Maryland: Lexington, 2023.

Edwards, Rem B. “Axiological Reflections on Infinite Human and Divine Worth.” Journal of Formal Axiology 11, no. 1 (2019) 11–38.

Gamow, George. One, Two, Three—Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science. London: Dover Publications, 1988.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures, 1926. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

[rampartd]

1. christ is a progressive vision of divinity

i pretty much stick to matthew 5-7 for the golden rule and the beatitudes.

acts 2 describes the disciples as socialist

44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.

[The Great Open Dance]

3. Agreed!

I just see those passages buried by so many Christian denominations.

Godspeed,

Jon Paul

[keithbvadu2]

2. Don't we already have that in the old Jesus?

[The Great Open Dance]

4. Yes

I'm in agreement with Jesus, I just want Christian theology to be centered on Christ, not Greek categories.

[lastlib]

5. During my college days, I read Spinoza....

...who saw God as a process, not a being. I found the idea fasciating, and have toyed with it ever since. It was a relief from my fundamentalist family, who have hounded me as some sort of heathen devil.

[The Great Open Dance]

7. Impersonal

Yes, Einstein was attracted to Spinoza's God, who is like the mathematical order in the universe, but impersonal, not personal. I actually conceptualize God as a mathematical person, trying to thread the needle.

[slightlv]

6. Dance, I'm dealing with the death of my Mom and her funeral

as well as couple of other crises here at the house. Been going on for at least two other of your articles. But I wanted you to know how much I'm enjoying your articles, and how important in seeing things from a different angle it's been for me. Seems like where we agree, we're just right there. Where we differ... we differ. But I wanted you to know I've bookmarked the two others, as well as this one. I just need a clearer head to read them. Thank you for posting...

[The Great Open Dance]

8. May Godspeed you

through your grief and personal crises. They're inevitable but can really wear us down. I hope you have a loving, supportive community. I appreciate your note and the time you put into reading my essays, and I welcome all conversation and feedback.