Heavy Theology | The Hardest Concepts in Christian Thought預覽

‘Infinite Beyond “to infinity and beyond” ‘ 

Moving beyond infinity, as Buzz Lightyear would have us do, takes a Wellsian leap past time and space. Notice I didn’t say through time and space. Perhaps it was the pre-Einsteinian conception of spacetime, perhaps it was the absence of iWatches that track the minutia of minutia inside datapoints that time by the milisecond and that track NASDAQ shares (that is to say pieces of companies) by the thousandth decimal point, or perhaps the lack of any number of modern assumptions that permitted this premise to be adopted sooner by the medieval mind. 

We folk in the 21st century can conceive of infinite time now because we can conceive both of the ways time bends and of an infinite number of time bound moments. We can conceive of infinite space because we can conceive of an infinity beyond the view of Hubble. We can conceive of the interplay between an infinite number of moments and an infinite number of empty spaces because of our conception of gravity wells (which, honestly, isn’t all that different from the way the medievalists tracked the influence of the heavenly tides upon the individual, what they called “the music of the spheres”). 

But these are not infinity, per se. Infinity, period.

So how is God Infinite Beyond “infinity and beyond” ?

Gods infinity is perfect self-sufficiency: dependent upon no moment, dependent upon no measurement, no number or space or any other containable perfection. If you assume an infinite cause (God makes) and its finite effects, whatever pure perfection — being, truth, goodness, intelligence, wisdom, justice, holiness — we find in finite creatures like ourselves or the angels must both, by way of affirmation, exist in its cause and also whatever imperfections we find in our own being, truth, goodness, intelligence, etc. cannot exist in the cause by way of negation or exclusion. 

In other words, God is infinitely good in all the ways we are and is not evil in the ways our goodness is evil. God is infinitely true in all the ways we are and is not false in the ways our truth is falsehood. His attributes have no limit. 

He is infinity and beyond our “infinity and beyond.”