Letters to Theophilus - What Kind of God

Letters to Theophilus

by Dr. Alexander Melnyk melnykca@aol.ca

4. What Kind of God?

Dear Theophilus,

I feel that I left you in the last letter as they used to leave the audience in the weekly serials - dangling over a precipice in danger of the hero crashing to death. Well, as I promised you last time, I will try to share my feelings on the important questions raised in my last letter.

At the outset, permit me to state something which is very important for all of us. We must beware, as the Fathers of the Church write, of a particular sin and that is the sin of spiritual gluttony. Strange, isn't it to talk of spiritual gluttony. By this what we are referring to is a state of curiosity for curiosity's sake. You only want to know, without changing in any way and without modifying your behavior. There is no good that comes from knowledge such as this - so what good is it to have it?

Let us get back to the question that was raised in the last letter that I wrote you. What kind of God is it who created the universe and who created us also? We saw some disturbing pictures from the Old Testament and this, in part, has caused some people to lose their trust and faith and to go so far as to deny the very existence of God.

Remember what I had mentioned earlier - words can be bandied around but they must be married to action. And this is exactly what God did. He could have come out with evidence that He is not capricious, He does not want human sacrifices (in fact, in the psalms, He says the only sacrifice pleasing to Him is a humble and contrite heart). He tries to show His love and care. And then, he goes for a complete "vindication" of Himself. He becomes incarnated and dwells among us and shares our fate to the extent of a painful and ignominious death. This is God's definitive and most powerful answer to those who see Him as a tyrant who sanctions human suffering. This is the most definitive answer to the existence of evil in the world. God has experienced all that we experience.

Let us now expand a little further on the topic of what kind of God we believe in. God is eternal and by this we do not mean that he lives in endless time, but His relationship to time is very different from the time that we usually experience. We experience what is referred to as chronos, that is fleeting time - this second passes, the next one comes and so on. The time that was is gone forever, left behind to be never retrieved. God's experience of time is quite different - He exists simultaneously with all of time. Therefore, Christ says that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. The dead are dead to us because of chronos time - for God who encompasses all of time, they are not dead.

Another problem area for us is to grasp the relationship of God and the universe. Let us be honest at this point - don't we sort of see God as being very, very big? How can God be everywhere at all times - hearing our prayers here, making sure the universe is working out there, and so on. Here we run into a problem again because we are trying to make images of what cannot be imaged. And secondly, science itself tells us that the concept of the universe and time and space are a lot more complicated than our everyday experiences lead us to believe. Our concept of space is some volume which contains something but this is totally contrary to the most recent studies done on space. Space is better described as a relational concept. I know that this is hard to envisage but all that I would like you to do at this time is simply bear in mind that space is not simply a volume. Another idea that we find easy to accept and there are reasons for this, is that somehow matter is 'bad', that it is somehow opposed to spirit, which is good. God is not opposed to matter - remember, He created it. We therefore affirm creation and celebrate the food and the wine and the scenery of nature. These are all gifts to us. God loves us and creation not because He has to but because He wants to, freely. When we say that God is immutable (literally, unmoveable) what we are saying is that God is trustworthy and when He promises something, we can be assured that this will come to pass. He is just, which does not simply mean that he dispenses rewards and punishments based on some obligatory behavior on our part, but what this means is that He is merciful, wanting above all else, that we be saved and in this He binds Himself, as the sacrifice of Christ indicates. To a large extent, we cannot make pictures of God because He is beyond all images but this does not mean that our God is some abstract being but, rather, that He is uncontrollable by us, His actions are unforeseeable but are demonstrated in revelation and in history.

I could go on and on, but I think I have given you some of the salient points about God that you may want to consider. As we go along in our discussion, other points will come up and we will deal with them as need be.

Strange as it may first seem, but the God that we worship, the God who created the universe, is the God of the 'godless', the God of the abandoned, and we too often forget this. Did not Christ call out from the cross - my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? A strange God this is (and it could be no other way or he would simply be the object of our fantasies) and not at all the vindictive and judgemental God who is supposedly portrayed in the pages of the Old Testament.

I think that you will agree with me that the lynch pin to our understanding of God is Christ. There has been much debate as to the person of Christ. Early in the Christian era, there were already those, headed by Arius, who claimed that Christ is merely a human, albeit a very good and honourable human being. There are inherent problems with this view, because,if you will remember, the problem of evil keeps cropping up its head and if Christ is merely human the problem of evil remains unanswerable. But this is arguing, in a sense, from a backward position. Look what results if Christ is not divine; therefore, to avoid this problem, we will accept that he is in fact divine. This is not the right way to look at this question where it seems we are playing with words simply to score points for our view. However, the point raised above does gain strength if we argue points in favor of Christ being divine.

Here, again, we must be honest with ourselves. We cannot comprehend what it means that God becomes incarnate in Christ - this is a mystery beyond our comprehension. But this is the way it should be - if we could explain it completely, it would smack too much of an invention of our creative imagination. But, if we come across something that we cannot fully explain, this does not mean that we give up the struggle to express our faith. We still search for ways to make our faith more defensible, using reason as a tool, all the time being fully aware of the limitations of our reason. Apophatic theology clearly calls to our attention that God is a profound mystery whom we can in no way describe exhaustively or come close to describing completely.

The other point I am sure that you would want to raise would be the question of the relationship of Christianity to other religions. Aren't we being arrogant by claiming our faith to be founded by God? Doesn't our position disparage other religions and make them less worthy? Doesn't this attitude feed Christianity's feelings of superiority and thereby bring on the colonial put-down of other beliefs by Christians? All these are powerful points because they bear within them some truth, as the history of the Church will attest to. But, having confessed to our sins, this does not necessarily mean that we must abandon the view that Christ is divine. At the bottom of all arguments against Christ's divinity is not a wealth of historical arguments but an a priori belief that it is impossible that God should be incarnated. In other words, what is the true criterion of what is possible or not possible is a position determined solely by our opinions. So having said this, let us prepare to look at some hard evidence, at some rational explanation of why we accept the position that we do and this, we will do in our next letter.

Yours truly,

Bar-Abbas