"IF THERE WERE NO GOD, It would be necessary to invent him," is how Voltaire put it. I think I like the quote from Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées, better: "In each man there is a God-shaped hole." But Paschal was not naïve: indeed, he also observed that "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." It seems that religious fervor is the breeding grounds of extremism and hatred, as well as of extreme compassion and care. Luther would see this as original sin and original blessing standing in a dialectical relationship: simil iustus et peccator, simultaneously a saint and sinner.
Human beings seek meaning. The absurd to us seems to be untenable. We are willing to believe because the logic of belief is absurd, pace Tertullian, in order to give meaning to our lives. We conceived of some transcendental truth long before we began to peer into the cosmos and began to realize that there was life outside of our lonely spaceship earth. It may be a question of context in the cosmos; it may be a need to believe that we are part of a greater reality that is not nearly as ephemeral as 80 years of lifespan.
I believe in God. What is more, I believe that God believes in us.
Despite my struggles with Christianity, I hold a central truth that is articulated by Luther to be central to my creed: being justified, we are free to be. This means that being put right by God, we are free from the need to prove ourselves, save ourselves, or find religion. We are free to be for one another and to live lives of compassion and grace. So much Christian expression places eschatology before ethics, diminishing ethics in the process. I have always seen a balance between what is to come and what is done as a proclamation of hope as the aim of Christian life. What concerns me is when this becomes a question of the individual in isolation from the body: Christianity demands community. Indeed, this is generally true for any religious expression. It is passed from one person to another, its rituals are agreed upon by the consensus of the faithful, its language and conventions are all derived from a community of faith.
I am very concerned about the idea that the central core of Christianity is individual salvation. This make ethics a personal choice. Is it any wonder that the most personal choices - those that involve our bodies - become the battle ground for a vision of the faith that devalues greater community in the name of the apotheosis of the individual? Put in theological parlance is God "pro nos" or "pro me"? The roots of the priority of the individual are found in Luther. Calvin talked about the elect, those predestined to salvation, as a community of faith. In that he was closer to the Roman Catholic position of a holy community. Luther spoke about the "pro me" as a corrective to the fatalism that had arisen in medieval Christianity. The pro me assumed the community of faith and responsibility to both the earthly and heavenly orders, eschatology and ethics. Again, Luther's idea was that we are free from "sin, death and the devil" to be free for life and to be the Christ for all by doing works of compassion, love, and hope for all. Somewhere that was lost. Bonhoeffer put it well: "There is nothing quite so terrible as evil masquerading as virtue."
I see the Christian Right as an example of what Bonhoeffer and Paschal warned against: religious fervor is all too easily transformed into hatred when prejudices are baptized and presented as dogma. I am struck by 1 John 4:7-8. This is the famous quote in the Bible that says God is love. If God is love, God cannot be content to be alone. Augustine wrote, in De Trinitatis, "thou beholdest the Trinity when thou belodest love: for the lover, the beloved and the love are three." Love demands a beloved. It cannot exist in the abstract as a sterile Aristotelian ideal: it seeks a beloved with which to be intimately involved as lovers are. Thus, it can be said that Voltaire got it wrong: If God is love, then it was necessary for God to create humanity as the object of divine love and care.
As such, does it not behoove us to learn to love and extend compassion to all?
For God's sake, I would submit so.
But I am only a fool...
