While writing in defense of Classical Theism/Thomism (God is actus purus; absolute divine simplicity, etc), Roman Catholic philosopher Eleanore Stump recognizes that the plain reading of the biblical texts poses many exegetical problems with this philosophy:
To see the apparent
inconsistency, take first the presentation of God in the Hebrew Bible; and
consider, for example, the Bible’s story of Jonah in the biblical book that
bears his name.
As that story opens God
comes to talk to Jonah, who knows God and recognizes God’s voice right away.
God tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and warn the people that their city will be
destroyed in 40 days.
Jonah not only understands
what God is saying to him, but he understands that it is God who is saying it.
Only Jonah does not want to do what God is asking of him, and so he reacts to
God’s speech by taking ship to a far country. Once Jonah is on board ship, God
responds to Jonah’s attempt to run away by making a violent storm that imperils
everyone on the ship. When the sailors cast lots to see whose fault it is that
there is a storm, God somehow brings it about that the lots come out to
indicate Jonah. And when, at Jonah’s urging, the sailors throw Jonah overboard
in consequence, God responds to their action by calming the sea for them.
Cast overboard, Jonah
beings to drown; and, as he goes down in the water, he prays to God to help. In
response, God prepares a recuse for Jonah in the form of a large sea beast who
saves Jonah by swallowing him whole. Inside the beast, Jonah finally prays to
God a prayer accepting the task that God originally set him. Because of this
prayer of Jonah’s, God speaks to the beast, who hears and obeys God’s voice and
spits Jonah out on shore. Then Jonah does in fact go to the people of Ninevah
to give them God’s message that their city will be destroyed in 40 days.
The result of Jonah’s
prophesying God’s plan for the city’s imminent destruction is that the whole
Ninevite people repent in dust and ashes. Because they do, God responds to
their repentance by abrogating the destruction of the city which he had told Jonah
to announce.
And this is not yet
the end of the story. When Jonah is filled with anger at God’s failure to
follow through on the message of destruction that God told Jonah to announce to
Ninevah, God teaches Jonah a lesson about mercy. He makes a fast-growing plant
appear by Jonah and then quickly die. When Jonah laments the death of the plant,
then in interactive conversation with Jonah God uses the example of the plant
to try to get Jonah to understand God’s actions towards Ninevah.
In this story, the
God of the Hebrew Bible is so present to human being that they know God and relate
to God in highly personal ways. For his part, God converses with people,
responds to their needs and prayers, apparently changes his mind about what he
has told them, issues prophecies about them that he seems to decide not to fulfill,
and in general engages with individual human persons in close and personal
ways.
One might say that
the God portrayed in this story and in the Hebrew Bible generally is very
human. When Genesis says that human beings are made in the image of God, the
stories of God in the Hebrew Bible bear out the claim. As the story of Jonah
illustrates, the humanity of human persons has its correlative image in the
responsive and personally present God of the Hebrew Bible. There is a rich
anthropomorphism here that the stories underscore and approve. . . . Think of
the problem this way. The biblical God is able and willing to enter into
second-personal relationships. In the biblical stories, human beings can say ‘you’
to God; and the biblical God is able to say ‘you’ in return, not only to human
beings but also to the sea beasts (as in Jonah) and to trees (Mark 11:14) and
even to the sea (Job 38:11).
When in the book of
Job God is determining the extent of the sea, it is notable that he does so by talking
to it. God does not just wield his great power to decree what the nature
and attributes of a sea must be. Presumably, God could do so with an act of
will alone, without making any utterances. Or, if he wanted to determine what
the sea did by means of an utterance, God could make an impersonal statement,
addressed to no one in particular, of this story: ‘I decree that the sea will
extend from here to there, but it will not extend any further’. Instead, what
we get in the description of God’s determination of the extent of the sea is an
account of a second-personal interaction between God and the sea. God addresses
the sea, directly, in second-person forms of speech. In fact, God talks to the
sea as if the sea were a rambunctious and exuberant child of his, but
nonetheless a child who can hear him, understand him, and respond to him.
Analogously, in the
New Testament, when Christ goes to a fig tree hungry and finds no figs on it,
he intends that the non-productive fig tree wither. Christ could produce this
withering by a simple internal and tacit act of will, as in another story he turns
water into wine. But instead Christ effects the end he intends by speaking
directly to the tree in second-personal terms of address. Jesus produces the withering
of the tree by saying to the tree, “Let no one eat fruit of you
(emphasis added) after this forever!” (Mark 11:14).
And now the problem
is evident. How could being say ‘you’ to anything? And who could use
second-personal address in any location towards God if God is being
alone? And, in general, in the biblical stories, there is a readily discernible
image of God in human beings, and conversely a readily discernible divine
original in God for the image of God in human beings. By contrast, there seems
to be so little in common between God and human beings on the characterization
of the God of classical theism as I have described it here that it is hard to
imagine why anyone would suppose that human beings are made in the image of
such a God. (Eleonore Stump, The God of the Bible and the God of the
Philosophers [The Aquinas Lecture, 2016; Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 2016], 13-15, 35-37)
