The Goodness of God
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INTERATIVE GOODNESS
The goodness of God as described in the bible is very different from the ideal of Platonic thought. God’s goodness is interactive and makes demands of humanity.
GOD AS A PERSONALITY
God is seen more than just an ideal to follow, which remains unaffected and does not care who aspires to it. God is seen as a personality, reacting to people and caring about the way they behave.
GOODNESS AS A QUALITY
Goodness as a quality or Plato’s Form of the Good is inactive and very unlike the God of the bible. Goodness as a scale against which things are measured is not interested in the results of what it is measuring, because qualities do not have the capacity to take an interest.
INTERACTION OF GOD
God sets a standard for the people to follow, and watches too see the way they respond. In Exodus 20 the Hebrew people who have been lead out of slavery by Moses into the wilderness are given laws directly from God which they are to follow as part of their covenant relationship with him. Some laws relate to their relationship with God and others to their treatment of one another; for example the10 commandments (the Decalogue):
‘You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God… You shall not steal’
FAITH
Goodness is revealed to faith, not reason (as in Platonic thought). Some of the characters in the bible who are singled out for special commendation are those who through faith continue to obey God’s commands even if they don’t understand them.
In Genesis Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac because of his faith
Job continued to praise and be obedient to God even though he felt he was being unjustly punished
RIGHTEOUS INDIGNITION
God becomes angered at injustice because he cares about his creation, and calls upon his prophets to let his people know they are failing him. He is hurt when people refuse to recognise and respond to his goodness.
Jeremiah – ‘I have stretched out my hand against you and destroyed you – I am weary of relenting’
COMPASSIONATE RESPONSES TO PRAYER
God can also be moved to pity. For example at the beginning of 1 Samuel, Hannah was distraught because she had no children and asked God for a child in prayer. She conceived a baby boy soon after.
HOSEA
God is affected by the ways in which people respond to him. The prophet Hosea uses the imagery of an adult and a small child to show how God can be likened to the love and pride of a parent when a baby is taking its first steps; God’s goodness is also compared with the reins used to steady a toddler.
GOD’S LOVE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
It is God’s love that demands people to become the best they have the potential to be by obeying his commands as they are revealed. Therefore God’s goodness is concerned with individual people, not like the universal form of good.
PERFECT INTERACTIVE GOODNESS
God’s goodness although interactive is described as perfect. Some philosophers would say that God’s interaction makes him capable of change. Since perfection by very nature is unchanging, God cannot be perfectly good and at the same time a relationship with his creation.
JESUS
In the New Testament the goodness of God is shown in the person of Jesus. God came into the world as a man in order to demonstrate his love for humanity:
‘For God so loved the world he sent his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ – John 3:16
This raises the question; how could God be in human form when he is incorporeal? If God is outside space and time (transcendental and omnipresent), how can he enter the world at a fixed point in history? When God was in the world was he also in heaven at the same time?
GOD AS A MORAL LAW GIVER
In Judaeo-Christianity God is seen to be a judge who will bring about eschatological justice – he will elect those people worthy of salvation and an eternal life in heaven on the basis of their faith and good works in the current life. As creator and shaper of the universe, everything is answerable to God. He can therefore be seen as the primary enforcer of the moral code of the Judaeo-Christian ethical system; he is a moral law giver and is responsible for denouncing what is moral and what is not.
GOOD ACTIONS
But if God is the moral law giver, the question can be asked: is something good because God commands it – in which case the content of morality is dependent on God’s whim, or does God command something because it is good – in which case God is subordinate to a higher law. This is known as the Euthyphro Dilemma.
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