THOUGHTS ON THE LIMITS OF LIFE AND GOD
By Arthur Chang
As we consider the statement, "God won't give us more than we can take," or similarly, "You can only get what you can take," we may not realize these are statements of limitations, of both God and ourselves. We readily tend to slip into making grand notions of God that we easily miss the fact that God being the most potent being, may not be omnipotent in the sense we mean it. Those notions of Greek philosophy spliced into Christian theology by thinkers who lived in a very different cosmology from ours. They were without the knowledge of quantum physics and modern medicine. Today process theology reasons that God does have limits. For example, God works within the limits of the world and without such limits, there would be no world.
It is important not to instantly assign negative values to the notion of "limit." In this sense, "limit" is not the merely the opposite of "abundance," or "infinity." "Limit" relates more closely to "creativity." To create an entity is to give to it definite and desirable characteristics, which are limits, and because they are desirable, we tend not to see them as limited.
There can be no arbitrary Creator of the universe who can do whatever It wants, whenever It wants. That implies limits. If It could, then, the world would not be cosmos but chaos. "God is not the author of confusion." (1 Corinthian 14:33) God has chosen the limit of order. "Order" implies laws, which are limits governing the way things work. God's work, too, must fall within those Laws, or else things would be arbitrary.
We may do well to get away from the notion that limits necessarily mean negative, although some limits are. Similarly, can abundance be negative-example, cancer cells in our bodies, or floods along the plains damaging homes and killing folks. Ask anyone who wants to lose weight if abundant weight is desirable. To be selective about our desires means to require a chosen limit.
We have given the bipolar word, "limit" a bad name despite the fact that every day we wish to be in a safe car, to use electrical appliances that will not shock us, and so forth.
Finally, when God gives us gifts, God gives us according to what we can take. This means that which in our past we prepared ourselves to receive. We do not wake up one day to be a great dancer or mathematician. Moses did not get quantum physics because he was not prepared to receive that. We prepare ourselves for these gifts. Our future, then, is limited by our past. However, this is why we educate our children. If in our past we did not prepare ourselves, then our present will be less creative than it might be because we cannot use our past as the springboard it needs to be to attain the new desired limit we call our future.
May we begin to know we are God's little helpers with the freedom to co-create our place in the universe and to surprise and delight the deity with new limits of creation.
