Saturday, July 22, 2023

Blake Ostler on the Argument from Worshipworthiness

  

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