Preface: Divine and Human Regret

PrefaceDivine and Human Regret Raymond MacKenzie The coming of lent encourages reflection on contrition and penance. A good recent guide to such reflections is a book by Paul J. Griffiths, Regret: A Theology.1 Griffiths's method involves looking closely at the words we use, sometimes exploring their etymologies, a method that often manages to pry out new insights regarding terms that have become too familiar with long usage. Among the key words in this particular study are regret, remorse, contrition, and repentance. In terms of style, Griffiths has an odd but appealing habit of always putting the word Lord in capital letters (as many Bible translations do in the Old Testament for the divine name). Once the reader is used to it, this has a subtle but important impact on the discussion. Thus, his opening chapter is titled "The LORD's Regrets," and it introduces the question of whether God can regret. Sound theology tells us God is perfect, and perfection would imply changelessness, and since to regret is to wish that things had been otherwise, it follows that regret would seem an illogical thing to attribute to God. But Scripture gives us multiple instances of God regretting. To take just two examples: in 1 Samuel, God says, "It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be End Page 5 King" (15:11, KJV), and in Genesis, we read, "It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth" (6:6). Griffiths goes into the Vulgate terms, paenitentia (a noun) and paenitere (a verb), suggesting that our English translations do not do justice to the shades of meaning in the scriptural phrasing. "Paenitentia," he says, "is closer to regret, to wishing otherwise something that is, regrettably, the case. Regret, then, shading into repentance" is what we should be understanding in these and other passages.2 Complicating matters is the fact that, in the very same chapter of 1 Samuel, we read a little later that "the Strength of Israel"—that is, God—"will not lie nor repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent" (15:29). Griffiths's attempt to reconcile the apparent contradiction is based on seeing two different registers of discourse at play, one appropriate for humans, being temporal creatures and inevitably understanding things through and within time, and another closer to the truth, one that does not lead us into seeing God as another creature, like a human. They are two different ways of speaking about God. The first register, Griffiths argues, fits more comfortably, rhetorically and conceptually, in narratives whose tension requires that their outcomes not be known and shown in advance. … The LORD's repentance belongs, narratively speaking, to contexts in which the LORD's involvement with the temporal order is emphasized, and it is a central need of both Jews and Christians to do that: the LORD, for both, is an agent responsive to temporal needs and events, and must, sometimes, be depicted as such.3 This explanation requires us to take a more sophisticated, more literary approach to Scripture, recognizing that different kinds of speech are being deployed at different moments and to different narrative or didactic ends. Four hundred years ago, the poet John Milton wrestled with this problem, and arguably he went too far, in Paradise Lost, in depicting God as like a human. Milton's God laughs scornfully, speaks indignantly, and behaves in general in ways with which we might not End Page 6 be comfortable. In his De Doctrina Christiana, he attempted to write out exactly what his beliefs were; those beliefs being often heterodox, the work was not published and remained unknown until its discovery in the nineteenth century. In that book, Milton addresses the topic in a compelling manner: Since God attributes to himself again and again a human shape and form, why should we be afraid of assigning to him something he assigns to himself, provided we believe that what is imperfect and weak in us is, when ascribed to God, utterly perfect and utterly beautiful? We may be certain that God's majesty and glory were so dear to him, that he could never say...