If God Learned to Love, Then God Can Teach Us How

By Tim Miller

Because God evolved and had to learn to love, God is a perfect teacher for us as we struggle to master love.

 

Love Power

Love is the commitment to do what you can to maximize the joy, fulfillment, flourishing, and creativity of a being or group of beings you can influence. And to help them endure and learn from inevitable growing pains.

Power is the ability to bring a goal or dream to fulfillment.

What is God’s goal, God’s dream? That all conscious beings, including God, build a community of mutual love, joy, and co-creativity that never ends.

Does God have the power to realize this dream? It’s not looking good. Things have been rough in our corner of the universe for a billion years or more. The universe is evolving, though, and it appears that God is too. Because God can evolve, I think there’s a fair chance that, with the help of creatures, God’s dream can come true.

Reality is Open and Relational

To say that reality is open is to say that God and all conscious beings have freedom and are immersed in time, co-creating a future unknowable even to God.

To say that reality is relational is to say that all conscious beings create in cooperation with each other. No one works alone. What I do influences you and what you do affects me. What God does affects us all and we influence God.

God is absolutely good and so does not coerce creatures but instead lures and persuades us with reason and love. Creatures do not have the power to coerce God but must lure God using reason, love, and sometimes less well-intentioned means that often sadden God. Creatures, ones who are physical, can sometimes coerce each other, and this usually creates great suffering. But more often we try to lure and persuade one another, sometimes using love and reason but other times intimidation and threats.

God’s Dream—True Universal Community

True community begins when beings join together in renouncing intimidation and coercion. It solidifies when they commit to using creativity and love in hopes of maximizing the joy and flourishing of all the beings in the community while minimizing suffering.

True universal community arises when all conscious beings choose to come together in true community.

Because all conscious beings have at least some degree of free will, true universal community may never arise. But if it does, it will include every conscious being in existence, all of whom renounce coercion and destruction and embrace luring, persuasion, love, and creativity. And, as many have hoped and prayed through the ages, it may contain all the conscious beings who ever lived or whoever will live.

It’s very difficult for creatures like us to imagine much less commit to true community because reality is currently in a contrary and brutal state. I will speculate below on why God allowed such a state to arise, but one aspect of it is that many creatures are powerfully motivated to seek their own flourishing above that of fellow creatures and often at their expense. One way of describing how this came to be, and how it reinforces and replicates itself over time, was first framed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-1800s: evolution by natural selection acting on mutations that emerge through random processes.

God longs for true universal community but knows, due to the free wills of creatures who can’t help but be selfish and divisive, that it may never come about. If God could sleep, this would give God many sleepless nights. But God has a special weapon in God’s love arsenal: God’s reality is not just open, it is wide open.

How Open is God’s Reality?

All those with a soft spot for open and relational theology—let’s call them open and relationals—believe that God evolves in some ways. Since God is in time, and the future, being co-created even now by us and by God, is unknowable, God’s knowledge increases with time. God learns. Perhaps God can even learn from our creativity. God’s mind can also change in that God can decide upon new approaches depending on how creatures act and react. There are plenty of examples of this in the Old Testament. By acting, creatures lure God in new and unforeseen directions.

The kind of love God prizes is self-giving, uncontrolling love. Let’s call this SGU love for short. Can God’s willingness and ability to practice SGU love grow over time and through experience? Can God’s mastery of SGU love evolve?

Some open and relationals say no. In their view, God is everlastingly committed to SGU love because it is part of God’s essence. God cannot not SGU love without no longer being God, which would mean ceasing to exist. Can God choose to renounce or contravene SGU love? God can’t. This is a perfectly reasonable, highly explanatory point of view. For instance, it helps explain why evil and suffering exist. If God cannot control, God can’t intervene to prevent the evils creatures choose to commit.

But other open and relationals think God’s commitment to and practice of SGU love can evolve, can grow stronger and better, and that God is free to or not to SGU love any time God chooses. If God evolves to embrace perfect SGU love and then practices it unfailingly forever after, that is because God always chooses to do so. Can God be steadfast in SGU love forever by choice? God can. This is so because God reasons that it is the only way to make the dream of true universal community become real.

If God sometimes uses coercion or acts unlovingly, and creatures see or experience God acting that way, they will naturally conclude that some circumstances call for sidestepping SGU love. Since SGU loving can be very difficult, especially in a reality like ours that runs on natural selection, creatures will be strongly tempted to sidestep it if they know that God sometimes does too. It really just comes down to Kant’s categorical imperative: act in a way that, if everyone acts that way, the best outcome will result. Even though God is free to act unlovingly, God never would because God can see that this would keep God’s beautiful dream forever unrealized.

Power shared multiplies in a chain reaction. Some chain reactions are destructive—uncontrolled nuclear fission, for instance. Others are constructive. The infectious sharing of SGU love is the most powerful force in all of reality if the ultimate aim is the realization of everlasting true universal community.

The Power of a God Who Learns

If God had been SGU loving from eternity past, if SGU love were part of God’s immutable essence, then God would never have gone through the process of learning to SGU love. How one learns to love in that way would be a theoretical concept for God, something God could, at best, only imagine.

The most effective teachers are those who show others how to master a process they themselves have mastered through struggle and striving. Because creatures like us came to be through evolution, SGU loving is not natural to us. We need profound teaching to master it. We need someone to guide us through the very difficult process of choosing to master such love in the face of formidable headwinds—our countervailing desires and aversions chiseled by natural selection. God will be our best teacher if God has mastered that process experientially through suffering and struggle, sweat and tears.

God can learn by observing us. But God could not have learned how to master SGU love this way because our evolution has been too tough. Not one of us could master such love without being coached, inspired, guided. So the only way God can learn this process, deep down in the core of God’s soul, is to struggle through the process firsthand.

God’s power to bring about true universal community is thus multiplied by God’s having mastered SGU love through suffering and struggle, sweat and tears.

How Could God’s Amipotence Have Evolved?

Imagine that, in the beginning, God was not all that God is now. God was deeply interested in creating a reality that evolves. God found this a fascinating technical challenge. Working out the laws of physics that would spark and undergird an evolving reality—what could be more exciting and challenging than that? Yet God failed to foresee that conscious beings, not unlike God in some ways, might arise in such a universe. That would have required more forethought than God was willing to put in before acting.

And so God went ahead and created. But when God’s initial labors were over, and conscious life did begin evolving, God could not help observing the struggles and suffering that the emerging creatures were forced to endure. Lucky for us, deep in God’s soul lurked seeds of empathy and compassion. As God continued to observe, God’s empathy and compassion sprouted and grew. God became deeply distressed by the suffering, but what was God to do? Making it stop would require terminating the reality God had created and that would mean exterminating all the creatures who had evolved. Or it would require tinkering with the laws of physics while they were in operation. Small changes might well introduce unforeseeable consequences, possibly multiplying the suffering or spinning the universe out of control.

But even while God felt powerless, God’s wisdom was growing. And it told God that the only course was to steer reality in a better direction through love-based luring and persuasion. As God tried to figure out how best to do this, God’s ability to love intensified. And finally it grew so vast that God became utterly committed to SGU love, and to working with and guiding all conscious beings in a monumental process of co-creating a glorious reality through SGU love.

This is the process we are all engaged in today. But let us steel ourselves, for we face an ungodly amount of striving and struggle in the vast ages to come. The reward will be great, though, should our better natures prevail: true universal community that never ends.

Bio: Tim Miller earned a Doctor of Theology and Ministry in the Open and Relational Theology department at Northwind Theological Seminary. He is a retired software engineer and is taking the Episcopal Church’s year-long lay preacher training course. He is an avid gardener and loves walking and hiking.

OORD’S DRABBLE* RESPONSE

Tim Miller proposes an intriguing vision of divine development—an open and relational view in which God evolves. While I affirm that God learns, I maintain that God’s essence is eternal, self-giving, uncontrolling love. Tim suggests God grows stronger over time, eventually embracing this love more fully. In his view, God did not practice love perfectly in the past but has come to do so now. I respectfully disagree. Though God may discover new ways to express love in changing contexts, I do not believe God ever lacked perfect love. God has always known how to love from the beginning.

For more on Oord’s view that God’s essence is unchanging love, see this article.

* A drabble is an essay exactly 100 words in length.