I gave a lecture once at an Orlando conference where the whole point of my lecture was to
deny as emphatically as I could and as categorically as I knew how the existence of God, and when
I began that lecture, I said, “What my task is today is to convince you folks that God
does not exist.”
“Huuh?”
came this gasp from the crowd.
“What are you talking about?
What kind of game are you playing with?”
“I’m not playing.”
I said, “The worst thing that we could ever have happen to us is to discover that God
exists in the specific meaning of the term, ‘exist,’” because the term, ‘exist’,
in our language has derived entomologically from the Latin, ‘existere’, which means
– ‘ex’ means ‘out of’ and ‘stere’ means ‘to stand’.
So somebody who exists is somebody that’s outstanding – but outstanding in what sense?
Well, what was meant by this word philosophically, centuries ago, going all the way back to Plato
and before Plato, was the idea that there is being, pure and simple, and pure being
depends on nothing for its ability to be.
It is eternal.
It has the power of being within itself.
It is by no means creaturely.
The thing that characterizes creaturely existence is not being, but becoming, because the chief
character trait of all creatures is they change.
Whatever you are today, you will be different ever so slightly tomorrow, and today you’re
that much different from what you were yesterday, if it’s only that you’re twenty-four hours
older than you were at this time yesterday.
Now, the idea of existence says to exist is to stand out of something, and the idea meant
to stand out of being, so that something that exists is something that has one foot in being
and the other foot in becoming, or in nonbeing.
Unless it’s connected somehow to being, it couldn’t be.
We wouldn’t be human beings; we’d be human becomings.
But if it were – had both feet in being, it couldn’t be a creature.
Now, the point I’m saying is is that we don’t want to think of God like this.
If you ask me, ‘Is God?’
I say, “Yes, of course God is.”
But does He exist?
Not in this sense, because that would make Him what?
A creature, a dependent derived existence.
But rather, we say God is here.
God is being, not becoming, not changing.
He is eternally the same, and so we say there’s one being.
Now, within that being are not three separate existences.
Remember the difference in the prefix; ‘exist’ means ‘to stand out of being’ or ‘non-being’,
but the word that the theologians use with respect to the Trinity is not the word, three
existences, but three subsistences; that is, underneath the pure being of God, at a lower
dimension, we must distinguish among these subsistences, which the Bible calls Father,
Son, Holy Ghost.
Not three existences, not three beings, but rather, three subsistences within that one
eternal being.