The Argument from Worshipworthiness
God is properly the object of our attitudes of worship ad
praise. If God is emotionally impassible then such worship and praise to not
affect him in any way. God has the same reaction to our worship as a law of
nature or a telephone pole. Thus, God would be deficient in reactive love and personality.
He would lack the ability to enter into truly personal relationships with
persons. Yet we must think of God as an appropriate object of our worship. God
is minimally the sort of being that is capable of fully inspiring our worship
and unconditioned love because he can fully appreciate our praise, devotion and
adoration. A being who cannot be emotionally moved by us even if he chooses to
be so moved, cannot give meaning and significance to the pain and suffering
that we experience in our lives. God must be the appropriate object of our
worship. Thus, it seems that God must be emotionally passible.
. . .
The highest love is not undergoing torture for the sake of engaging
in pain. But no passibilist asserts that God engages in pain merely to undergo
suffering to show his love. Rather, the value of suffering is precisely in the
love and intimacy expressed in compassion. It is the love that willingly enters
into ur pains and sufferings to share our lives that is the highest form of
love. For example, the person who sacrifices comfort and personal interests for
the benefit of another is admirable by virtue of the altruistic nature of her act.
We do not pity the father who suffers when he sees his son suffer due to burns
over a part of his body. Rather we should pity the father who is incapable of compassionate
suffering. The father who feels happy whether his son is in the intense pain or
not is appropriately regarded as an aloof monster hardly capable of a human
response to pain and suffering.
. . . .
The Son’s suffering is also at the heart of redemption and
the atonement. God seeks eternally to bring us into a relationship at-one-ment with
him so that we too participate as one in the unity of the plurality of divine persons.
In so doing, humans are endowed and literally “enthused” wit the divine glory
and attributes. Humans are made over in God’s image by accepting God’s transforming
spirit into their own beings—by participating immediately in God’s own experience.
Thus, God offers the fullness of his experience and glory at the datum of human
experience to be incorporated and incarnated into the human life. God’s very
mode of being, as a unity in plurality, as an immanent spirit that immediately
acts upon and is acted upon by us, is to be at-one-ment with us. By taking us
into his emotional life and allowing us to take him ours, God literally incorporates
us into his life. By suffering, God incorporates into his experience our
existential experience and thus opens the possibility that persons participate in
God’s mode of existence: to be at-one-ment with all realities immediately. To
the extent we are included in Od’s life and he in ours, we are fully redeemed
form our alienation from God.
Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes
of God (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001), 402, 403, 405
