Reflections on Divine Obligation

While walking back from class this afternoon, I found myself reconsidering the teaching that we human beings don't deserve anything from God (or, at least, not a salvific, restorative relationship with God).
The doctrine I'm familiar with, as I have accepted it in the past, states that because human beings are fallen, and because we fell because we broke the good relationship between us and God by our sin, God doesn't owe us salvation. God extends salvation to us not based on our own merit, but rather as a free gift, grounded in God's love for us.
Here's what I was thinking earlier this afternoon. According to William James, moral obligation comes from a person making a demand, either on herself or on some other person. Now I'm willing to grant for the present discussion that God's demands, on Godself and on human persons, constitute the highest level of obligation. From James' perspective (which, to be clear, I'm just adopting for the sake of convenience; I'm not committed exactly to his view), because God is ideally, perfectly good, God's ultimate moral demand is that as many demands as possible be harmoniously satisfied. In a sense, this is to say that God wants the best of all possible worlds to be actualized--where every person has as much of what they want as they can, all wants considered. (James steps over the qualitative/quantitative distinction in valuing competing wants/demands in a way I think is awkward and constitutes a serious flaw in his view--but I'll not go into this now).
OK. Now, what does it mean to say that God is or is not obliged to grant salvation to us?
I am not sure a clear distinction can be maintained between what God owes to us and what God wants to give us, because God's demands on Godself, and on us, constitute grounds of moral obligation. We deserve what we deserve, on a theocentric model of obligation, because it's what God wants us to have. God wants us to have a restored relationship with God (which is in my theology equivalent to "salvation"). Therefore, we deserve a restored relationship with God.
Any demand that we make on God, insofar as we are appealing to God's very nature and God's very own desires--such as God's desire to provide for and relate to us in a salvific way--is a righteous demand. So it isn't really that presumptious or arrogant to say that we deserve salvation. As far as God is concerned, since it is something God wants for us, it is something that we deserve.

OK. Now, here's what I'm thinking about this now. We can approach this whole situation from a different model of breaking and reconciling relationships. Since we are the ones who broke the original relationship with God, it is in a sense our responsibility to make things right. God doesn't have any responsibility to initiate reconciliation--nor to accept any of our overtures of reconciliation. (However, God is still responsible to take what action is necessary to accomplish what God wants. If God wants reconciliation, God is responsible to take action to make reconciliation happen; this is closer to the argument I was making earlier).

How about this? Let's go back to the our-own-merit vs. God's-free-gift categories. Even on a system of obligations according to which God owes us salvation because God wants to give us salvation, this recognizes that God's free choice and God's desires and God's love are the determining factors. I'm not sure there is a concept of human merit that makes sense apart from what God determines we deserve, but maybe it is still pretty orthodox to say that we don't deserve anything apart from what God's free love for us makes us deserve. Now it sounds like I'm explaining the Reformed concept of Justification?!

...These rambling thought have been brought to you by....

------

"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

Read the full post.

Migration; back-to-school; reading & reflections

This marks my first post on blogger. I was perfectly happy with my xanga site, but I find that I changed the password and cannot remember it after not having logged into it for nearly a month. And it was registered to my TU email, so....

I hope everyone finds me here that is looking for me. :)

Teaching Logic is going well. I have two classes this semester, sixty-two students in all as of Monday morning. My goal is to be two weeks ahead in prep by the end of this week. Meanwhile, other things are slightly on a back burner, but I am getting some other work done.

I want to read more John Howard Yoder, and maybe some Stanley Hauwerwas. Have I said that before? I have started two J.H. Yoder books recently: one posthumous anthology of essays, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, and a shorter more easily digestible one called Nevertheless, which presents mutliple, distinct, potentially overlapping versions of Christian pacifism.

I spent most of last week reading William James essays from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. One of his central ideas is what he calls the "Triadic Reflex Pattern", or "Reflex-Action Theory of Mind", according to which our cognitive encounter with the world goes through three stages: (1) impression, (2) definition [or conception], (3) reaction. You can think of stage (2) as involving theoretical activity and stage (3) as the pragmatic output of the way we conceive the world. In more than one essay (although he devotes the most space to this idea in his "Reflex Action and Theism", the earliest essay in the anthology) James puts forth the idea that our personal, subjective interests drive our theorizing: we conceive the world the way we do because we need a good enough theory to act upon. Theoretical activity is never an end in itself, says James. Reading these essays have helped me to appreciate pragmatism more. (The notion has filtered into the new title of my new blog: "All Thought Is Practical".) Still, I wonder what the virtue epistemologists I read last Fall would say about this, with their talk of "alethic ends" which are somehow supposed to be qualitatively distinct from our other practical ends.

As I was beginning to write about this yesterday in my notebook (the pencil-and-paper kind--my laptop is on the fritz), I was thinking about how we have to bring our subjectivity to bear on the world in order to know or experience anything at all (a la Kant). And I found myself becoming slightly more open to the meta-ethical views that I've been decrying as "subjectivist" for the past year. However, as my friend said to me last night when I brought this up with her, grounding ethics in human nature seems prima facie problematic just because we are so evil so much of the time (not that she or I are thoroughgoing Augustinians about depravity). And, as I've been trying to argue for the last many months, how can we sensibly regard one person's ethics as superior to another's in any non-egoistic sense, without some sort of "objective" standard? Whether we get that standard from God or not (what is the committed non-theist to do? -- glad I'm not one), we need to postulate it if we aren't going to fall into relativism. Even James sort-of makes this point, and he sounds a lot like the new expressivists, too (e.g. Simon Blackburn). The anti-theocentric criticism comes back with a bite, though: what gives God the right to impose the standard? I suspect he has that right, but why should human beings recognize it? Is there any answer other than "might makes right" or something even more arbitrary? I kind of hope so, and I expect it has something to do with God's special role in creation.

------

"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)

Read the full post.