Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Tuesday, May 07, 2002 Thought for a Sunny Day (from my book, Contentions) 78 What is justice to God? Most people assume it is punishment for evil, reward for good. Humanity was punished collectively for the act of Adam and Eve. No forgiveness was possible until Jesus "paid" for the guilt in blood. Crazy. Even Scripture has Jesus offer a system of rewards and punishments - "store up treasure in heaven", the sheep and goats will be separated at Judgment Day, do good works. If this is what Jesus offered, he was wrong; a victim of his society and conditioning. What are we left with, then? We have a creator God, but we don't know why things went so wrong for us except that by giving us his power of will and freedom to choose on behalf of the flesh or the heart - somehow we ended up severely compromised and victims of an endless sequence of follies and their effects passed on. If God is only about love and patience, then Hell is merely separation from the kingdom of Heaven. If God ever reveals himself to all his children, the story ends happily for all. If God allows all his children the same freedom now as later - resentment, pride, obstinacy, and stupidity keeps most out of Heaven. God is not a punisher, though. He invites us to engage him and learn how to trust him. He doesn't punish us for not doing so. We punish ourselves and make a hostile and perverse world. As Aquinas said, a disordered mind is its own punishment. The Gnostics, in some respects, were a few who seemed to see how "knowledge" of God was essential to faith and prayer; yet most of them probably abused the concept, too, as some other Christians complained. (But then those Christians were no great shakes at fidelity to moral perfection, either.) Gnostic dualism and cosmologies attempted to answer the question of how man and the world fell into evil and error. The question is unanswerable. It demands that God submit to interrogation and reveal what he does not reveal except that everything he does is done in love and in patient understanding. (I almost eliminated the word 'understanding' because it pictures God standing under us rather than the reverse. Yet, on further thought, I realized that his humility doesn't reckon such degrees or dominance. He is pleased to stand under his creature if that is what we need. God, in fact, has no such quality of humility since he has no virtues to practice. He is not self-aware of his goodness. He simply is.) God acts miraculously and enters into the world to reveal one thing: that he loves. Proof of love leads us to realize we are immortal - that God who is love will not destroy or punish. What he creates, he loves and created forever. Anything less would be unmitigated evil and cruelty to rational beings. Nor is it malicious to allow what he has created to act evil or suffer evil. Will Jesus come again? He does come again to everyone who opens their heart to him; and he must appear as wrath to the lost and proud in their moment of death. Pure love has that quality which can invoke dread in the fearful. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:41 AM | |
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