Back in March I wrote
Recall Jack Miller’s query as to whether believers who affirm that God loves them are willing to concede that God likes them? Is our presentation of God’s love for sinners something like Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice? Does God confess that he loves us in spite of his better judgment and even against his character? Do we give that impression? Would it be good news if we did?
I happened to be looking at some church website designs just now and stumbled on this one with a quotation from C. S. Lewis’ Weight of Glory:
…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
God is not the unmoved mover [but see Joel’s comment for how badly I mangled this term]. He is moved by us (whether we like it or not).
Just to quibble, “unmoved” in “unmoved mover” isn’t an affirmation that God is without emotions or active love and delight towards his creatures.
Rather, it’s to say that God is pure act: that God is so loving and full of delight, that it is impossible that he could be any more so.
Joel,
I thought “unmoved mover” as a reference to God being the creator and/or Ultimate Being. Sort of like saying God is the uncreated creator.
Who coined the phrase?
Yes, but the term involves a particular notion of what it means to be the creator.
Things in the world (and the cosmos as a whole) are in motion, where motion is defined in terms of what is potential proceeding into what is actual (e.g., my car engine potentially runs and thus fulfills itself as a car, but that potentiality is actualized when I, who am already fulfilling my various potentialities – including the ability to operate machinery – start the engine).
But the fact of some things being in motion (and their setting and drawing other things into motion) doesn’t explain motion in itself, why things proceed towards ends at all.
Thus, one needs the concept of a Being who is distinct from the world of motion and the creator of the world of motion, but who is not moved by anything else. The only way such a Being makes sense is if that Being is purely acutal, without any unrealized potential – a Being who is already everything that such a Being possibly could be and thus could serve as the origin and end of all created being, from which creation proceeds and to which it is drawn as its final end.
While the term comes originally from Aristotle, later neo-Platonists (roughly, Platonism revised in light of Aristotle) picked up the notion and realized that for there such a Being, motion would somehow to be eminently pre-contained within the Unmoved Mover and thus posited the idea that there must be an eternal, fully actualized procession and return within the life of Being, such that there is a doubling within Being that is, at the same time, an identity and which serves as the archetype of finite, created motion.
This was then, in turn, picked up by the church Fathers, where it was given a fully biblical creationist and Trinitarian understanding.