CAN MAN STAND AS AN OBSTACLE IN GOD’S WAY?

 

CAN MAN STAND AS AN OBSTACLE IN GOD’S WAY?

Stella Bassey Esirah

The rational notion we have about God is that God is an infinite being. By infinity here, we mean that God cannot be put in a relative bracket or that He is absolutely transcendental. But the Christian notion adds a degree of knowledge about God which is immanence and that makes God a subject that could be known to man rationally, by revelation and faith experience.  So the two contexts of references to God must be taken into consideration before attempting to solve the problem as to whether man can be an obstacle to Him.

 Lets approach the problem from a reasonable perspective. God being transcendental means that He is beyond man’s rationality. To conceive the idea of God’s transcendence would imply limiting God in the mind, yet such a limitation is simply impossible because the attribute of the transcendental God is infinity and perfection which man can never quantify or measure, and no category of the mind is apt for quantifying the degree of perfection and infinity in God. This can only be qualified as an absolute, which means that there is no way the human person can have definitive knowledge of God.

The human mind is finite as long as it is natural, but the transcendence and infinitude of God is supernatural, and can therefore never be grasped by the mind. With this in mind, we maintain that, it would be out of place to accept the assertion that man can be an obstacle to a possibly conceived way of God.  Even if the idea of a way of God is conceivable, and where God’s way is only imaginative, the obstacle could remain imaginative as well; since, objectively, there is nothing like a known God’s way, as there is no objective reality of God.

For God is supernatural and cannot be said to be real as far as nature is concern but He is; and this is a fact. There can be no nature, if there is no God or the natural reality of things without the supernatural reality of God. God precedes nature, and the mere fact that there is nature being a boundary of limitation and finality, there also is a boundless non-limitation and non-finality from which the former emanated.

            In contrast, we find the dilemma becoming more problematic when we approach it from the Christian perspective. This perspective adds that God is immanent; but does not deny that God is transcendental. The transcendence of God is in the aspect of God being above all and above nature. Here God being the creator must be greater than everything created. Despite how vast nature is, it remains incomparable to God in diameter. The idea then that God created this vast universe and everything in it, implies that God is above them all and cannot be limited by any of them. In this context of transcendence, the first answer is that God is not possibly limited even by man, because God surpasses the whole of the universe. However, when we consider the other side of the Christian perspective on God as immanent and transcendence, we could then, think of knowing God through the special forms in which he reveals himself in nature and to our minds. His immanence does not make him material; it only makes him accessible to our minds, such that we can speak in allegorical terms, ascribing to God certain qualities like perfection and infinity which is associated with the concept God, without contradicting the terms of God’s transcendence. Hence, we could say that God is good because goodness is ideal, God is just, God is love, God is all knowing, God is all present and God is all seeing.

These attributes of God therefore give us a way of speaking of God as an idea in our minds. We conceive this in special forms of experience in nature, including the goodness of order and the love in beauty. So whatever man does that does not conform to the ideal in nature, when such ideal could be said to be God’s way of working in nature, then man could also be said to be an obstacle in God’s way. If God is good, then we could think that from God’s goodness, God wants the world to be good and humans should be good and moral as well. Hence, when men would rather promote evil and encourage others to be immoral such men become obstacles on God’s way. So God’s immanence makes God knowable. However, the obstacle conceived does not limit God, because God does not become finite in his immanence.

God remains transcendental, perfect and infinite. We give all these attributes to God because we conceive these in our every day experience in nature. Actually, we cannot in a perfect language say that God is good for this would be an understatement since God is GOODNESS ITSELF thus, the human person who is a creature shears in this GOODNSESS. It is out of place then to say that man can be an obstacle to God. Morally, man can be an obstacle to man but this does not limit the Transcendent and Goodness of God. 

He is like a candle that loses none of its light by lighting another candle. If we have this in mind; we will resolve always to do the right thing, this will gratify some people and astonish the rest. Why we say that it is an understatement to say that God is good is that these are attributes we apply to the human beings around us. We see good people around us and many other good things around us so; we give the same attribute to the creator. The fact is that, if things created are good, then the being that created them cannot be just good but GOODNESS itself and if everything in the world including man emanated from this ultimate being the conclusion is that man cannot be an obstacle to the will of God.

Sr. Dr. Stella Bassey Esirah HHCJ is a lecturer and Head of Department of Philosophy at St. Joseph Catholic Major Seminary, Ikot Ekpene, Akwa Ibom State