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Religion

2009-08-01 12:16:00

Does God think?

Question: In Mark 8:33, our Lord rebuked Peter because he was thinking as a man and not as God thinks. I was reading this chapter this morning and for the first time I wondered, “Does God think? After all, He is all-knowing, all-logical, all-understanding…all-everything. I guess I have always thought, “God does.” Am I wrong?

Answer: Yes, God thinks. But his thinking is not according to our manner of thinking. We know very little about the inner life of God, except for what The Bible teaches us and we are able to realize through our limited reason. Still, it seems evident that you are correct. Thinking is an exercise of the rational faculty, i.e. the Intellect or Reason, like the Will, is a gift proper to spiritual realities, i.e. to God and angelic spirits and human beings. Thinking and conceiving in the mind, anticipating and remembering, intending and determining, reflecting and pondering, considering and believing: are activities of the intellect or reason, i.e. of the soul or spirit of an individual. Intelligent and well-ordered speech is also part of the faculty of reason. Some brute animals can be trained to makes sounds that resemble speech, but they are unable to carry on an intelligent conversation because brute animals are lacking an intellect or reason, the soul. Animals do have an imagination, which is not the same as reason. Animals do not possess a spirit or soul, which would enable them to exercise the above-mentioned faculties. God is a pure spirit, without beginning or end, and He possesses all these faculties in the supreme degree. Numerous texts in the Holy Bible mention God exercising those faculties. Of course, the human author of each particular book of the Bible, was writing according to his own understanding of God’s operations. Yes, in doing so, the human author was using part of his faculty of reason, which he had received as a gift from God, as a share in God’s own life. And the human author wrote according to his own understanding and experience, which he applied to God. In the biblical narrative of God’s act of creation, we read in Genesis 1:27: “God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” And, after human disobedience, we read in Genesis 3:22: “The Lord God said: ‘See the man has become like one of us, knowing what is good and what is bad!’” Further on we read in Genesis 6:5-6: “When the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart grieved.” These and many other biblical texts give evidence that God plans, and also seems to regret some of his earlier decisions; therefore God thinks. However, by definition God knows all things, past, present and future. Everything is open and clear to him. In his thinking there is neither progression nor succession. For God everything is eternally present, all is NOW! But in his act of creation God provided that his creatures live in time, a succession of motion, a continuous series of progression as well as retrogression, and that is what we call history. In Himself God contains all history and knows everything. Still he can recall and compare and appear to develop, according as he wishes man to know him and relate to him. In the Gospel of Luke (2:46-47, 52) we read the Jesus, the Son of God, at age 12, went into the temple at Jerusalem and “was sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. All who heard him were amazed at his intelligence and his answers. Jesus progressed steadily in wisdom and age and grace before God and men.” It was in order to direct humans to God, that God sent his only Son, in the person of Jesus, to assume a human identity with human limitations: so that humans could identify with Him, and thus know God’s Will for them. In a lovely hymn in his epistle to the Philippians (2:6-11), St. Paul summarizes what I have attempted to say: “Though he was in the form of God, (Jesus) did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. He was known to be of human estate, and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross. . . . So that at Jesus’ name every knee must bend . . . and every tongue proclaim the glory of God the Father.”