The Faith of a Child

“Oh, Sancta Simplicium!” (Blessed Simplicity.) These words, uttered at the stake by fifteenth century Czech theologian Jan Hus as he was burned for heresy, speak for anyone who has grappled with the questions of philosophy, religion, or even life in general. Invariably, by following the path of reason and inquiry, we do not discover the answers which we set out on the journey to find, but rather end up breaking down every norm by which we live. Then how we long for the simplicity of the mind that trusts in the world it sees. As Christians, how we long for the simple trust of faith. Yet the more our minds are empowered with knowledge, the quicker we are repelled by the demands of faith. We want to believe what we can know. The conclusions of Christianity cannot be deduced through objective reasoning. Thus, we are tempted to follow the logic of observation, which often leads to the despairing conclusion that life is meaningless. Oh cursed be the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

A first glance at life suggests itself to be merely a blip on the journey from nothing back to nothing, and thus, life is stripped of all enduring meaning. Some people are fine with this, others are overcome with despair. But against the pragmatic realism of the atheist, the Christian counters with a foolish hope. This hope declares that life has meaning—a meaning defined by love. Theologians have written countless books and used practically every philosophical and deductive path available to prove the soundness of the theory of theism, and by extension, the fullness of Christian truth. Yet ultimately, no one is convinced. The objection of the atheist against a meaningful world still holds firm. The problem for the Christian philosopher is that this objection never completely goes away. It bothers us constantly. We struggle against the prospect of meaninglessness as an all-consuming despair, hiding ourselves from the phantom of doubt.

The one factor that seems over and over again to prove the atheist right is the prevalence of suffering. Suffering strikes at random, and thereby seems to prove the chance, and thereby the meaninglessness of life. According to Christianity, the problem of suffering is answered by pointing beyond this life, to an age of perfect love, when all sorrow shall cease. For “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) Through belief in an unseen afterlife, Christianity places faith in the way of salvation itself.

In the ancient world, both in Judaism, and in other cultures, life was explained by way of reward or punishment for actions—a sort of cosmic and moral accounting system. It was expected that long life, wealth, and children were signs of a life well lived, while early death, poverty, and childlessness were considered retribution for sin. Yet it was not long before it became obvious that blessing and suffering worked in a much more abstract manner. The book of Job presented the refutation of this philosophy within Judaism. Similarly, in Greece, Plato came to the conclusion that the unjust man will go further in the world while the truly just man “will be scourged, racked, bound, and after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.” (Republic, bk. II) From this, Plato formulated his philosophy of a republic, in which a corporeal, rather than individual justice, is the defining aspect of society, and ultimately, the meaning of life. Christianity replaced Plato’s justice with Jesus’ love. The similarity is that both philosophies explain suffering by maintaining that the individual good is not the ultimate goal of life: in Plato it is the success of the republic, in Jesus, the good of one’s neighbor. As philosopher, Plato made many attempts to explain the meaning of suffering—none are very satisfying, least of all to one who is actually suffering.

Jesus, conversely, did not attempt to explain the meaning of life in neat and tidy philosophical formulae. What he gave was a moral program, which by following would bring the Kingdom of God—a society of love. His answer to suffering was more abstract, but ultimately far more profound and satisfying than that of any philosopher. What he did was to share in our suffering, thus setting an example of love, that we too might see suffering as an opportunity, in Pope John Paul II’s words, to “unleash love… to give birth to works of love towards neighbor,” and by so doing, “to transform the whole of human civilization into a civilization of love.” Thus suffering takes on a truly salvific meaning. (Salvifici Doloris, 30) In Jesus’ passion, the suffering of the world is alleviated through love.

We are still left wondering, however, why we should believe all of this. Might it not all be a bunch of hermeneutical “mumbo-jumbo?” Could this not simply be the work of philosophers trying to make us feel better about a meaningless existence and moralists trying to guilt-trip us into behaving lawfully through fear of perdition? In Plato’s dialogue on the Republic, Glaucon’s objection against Socrates that the unjust man is the most rewarded, still challenges our notion of moral order, for we have seen such men as these reap the benefits of their craftiness. How can we reconcile this? Why would we willingly align ourselves with the just, who are the victims, rather than the unjust, who are the exploiters? Do we have such a strong faith in an afterlife that we can order our whole lives toward that goal and give up the rewards of selfishness here on earth? And how can we reconcile suffering once it touches us, unexpected and severe? How often still in our suffering will we not cry out against God and life? After all the iniquity in the world which we have seen, why would we choose to believe in this man Jesus, who chose suffering, and promised no earthly reward?

If we look for the answer to this question in philosophy and logic, we will be disappointed. Jesus did not answer these questions directly. He did not explain life in the same manner as Plato. The Christian philosophy on life was established over the ensuing centuries, based on Jesus’ teaching, but codified first by the Apostles, and later, by such Christian philosophers as Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, and ultimately Thomas Aquinas. In an attempt to understand philosophically what Jesus had taught morally, these men unapologetically employed the existing Hellenistic and Semitic philosophies. Christianity is not and has never claimed to be uninfluenced by the philosophies of other cultures. Jesus’ mission was to present a moral program, change the way people thought about God, and to identify the meaning of life as love. Beyond this, he left systematic philosophy to the philosophers. He left no comforting conclusions to the existential questions which have tormented us no less since his time than they did before. Thus, to follow him, we must have faith. How much easier it would be if we, the philosophers, could learn to follow in simple faith, rather than tying our brains in knots grappling with questions we will never be able to answer through empirical knowledge.

The mistake we make is to try to “prove” the truth of Christianity through logic. Christianity may be a philosophy, but that was never meant to be its primary aspect. Let us rather begin from the conclusion: why are we trying to prove it? Ultimately we either want to believe it, or else we already do. And why would this be so if we cannot prove its truth? Why would we accept the difficult moral program of Jesus, and a salvation found in suffering when we could more logically come to a conclusion based on personal selfishness, or at the very least, a Platonic corporeal self-service? Ultimately, we want to believe it because we want to believe that love has meaning. Logic cannot reconcile suffering, yet love can, for it is suffering’s answer—its antidote.

Thus, despite its non-philosophical origins, Christianity gives a better glimpse of truth than any other philosophy the world has put forth. After all, Christianity is a window into a completely other realm, a realm defined by love. Where all other philosophies try to explain upward from our own observation, with empirical reasoning, Christianity explains downward, ontologically, from the highest truth down to our imperfect understanding. Thus, to reach even the threshold of Christian understanding, a “leap of faith” is required.

This is where Jesus enters not only the salvation history, but the epistemological history of the world. He transformed the way people would have to think and reason, because he built the bridge between philosophy and God. As a man, he led us to something higher, and only by letting him offer his hand to our inquiry, will we come close to an idea of truth. Pope Benedict XVI compares the human situation “with that of Peter trying to walk upon the water at Gennesareth. (Matt. 14:30) He wants to get across to the Lord, but he cannot. The philosopher, we might say, is Peter on the lake, wishing to step beyond his mortality [human knowledge] and glimpse life, but not succeeding, indeed sinking beneath the waves. The waters of mortality bear down his will to see. Only the Lord’s outstretched hand can save the sinking Peter, that is, humankind… Philosophical understanding remains a walking on the waters: it yields no solid ground. Only God incarnate can draw us out of the waters by his power and hold us firm. His promise is that we will attain the vision of God, which is life, not through speculative thinking but by the purity of an undivided heart, in the faith and love which take the Lord’s hand and are led by it… It is through the patience that faith and its offspring, love, engender, that purification finds its mainstay in the Lord who makes the paradoxical walking on the waters a possibility and so gives meaning to an otherwise absurd existence.” (Ratzinger: Eschatology, V,4,c) Faith, to the philosopher, is just as laughable as walking on the water. We train ourselves to believe that we can answer all the questions of life by ourselves, just as Peter believed he could walk across the water by himself. But it is only once we put our hand into the outstretched hand of Jesus, giving up our intellectual stubbornness, that we can be led across the abyss into truth.

It is at the point where faith is demanded that we feel God’s comfort for our restlessness. God does not ask us to understand him. He asks us to believe in him (Rom. 10:9) “Thou shalt believe!” Søren Kierkegaard beautifully identifies this shalt, as the only place in which we may find the repose of eternity. (S. K. Works of Love) It is belief—faith—that holds the key to salvation.

Our stubbornness, or perhaps simply our mortality, wishes to unravel the mysteries of our existence in an orderly fashion, but that will always be impossible. Even in science this has proved futile, as each set of answers only manifests new questions. We are like children, incapable of understanding the fullness of truth that surrounds us, and yet obliged to obey for the sake of the truth we do not yet know.

Yet what truths do we, and what truths do we not know? We may try to forget everything we have been taught and begin our philosophy at a true beginning point, but that is nearly impossible. In modern society we cannot divorce our notion of morality from what we have been taught by institutional religion. It can even be argued that the basic principals of Christianity are so ingrained in Western society that any contemporary philosophy has to be first a point of departure from them, before they can be anything else at all. We first must break down what we know about life and morality in order to build it back up again in a new way. Then we have to ask if we are truly philosophers, or only rebellious children attempting to break down the truths we have already learned. This very question resolves the philosophical denouement in Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina, when the character Levin observes a group of children making mischief. Their mother makes the children stop what they are doing, explaining the wastefulness of their activity. The children do not understand that they are wasteful, or that their actions are the first step in a breakdown of that very order which gives them their security, they only know that their fun has been curtailed. Levin then compares his own philosophical journey away from the Church to the activity of the children: “Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, and living on these blessings, like the children I did not understand them and want to destroy what I live by… Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing taught by the Church.” Tolstoy then turns the question to that of philosophy at large: “Don’t all the theories of philosophy try by the path of thought, which is strange and unnatural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher’s theory that he knows what the chief significance of life is beforehand, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?… Well then, leave us with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any explanation of moral evil. Just try to build up anything without those ideas! We destroy them only because we’re spiritually satiated.” (pt.8, ch. 13) The character of Levin was able in the end to abandon his philosophical angst in Christian tradition, which is truly a corporeal exercise in faith. And love, once again, is the offspring of faith. (Ratzinger: Eschatology, V, 4, c)

We are expected to trust in God with the same simplicity with which a child must trust its parents. Our philosophizing is viewed by God with the same tender compassion with which the parent answers the child’s naïve questions. Perhaps the parent gives incomplete answers, not to conceal information, but to fill the child’s knowledge as it is capable. Similarly, God enlightens us to the extent we are able to understand. If we think we can answer all the questions of life through the power of our own reasoning, we are as foolish as the child who thinks it could order its household as well as its parents. The wise philosopher will submit his inquiry to the wisdom of God, just like the child who thirsts for education, welcoming the enlightenment that is given with the faith that the answers beyond his understanding are safely in the hands of one much wiser than we. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully.” (I Cor. 13:11-12)

Let us return now to Kierkegaard, who touches this same theme: “From the spiritual point of view it is like a child brought up in the home of well-to-do parents, who quite naturally forgets that his daily bread is a gift; now since the Christian religion has many times been rejected by those who were brought up in it, because they preferred all kinds of novelties, just as wholesome food is refused by a person who has never been hungry, in favor of sweets; now since the Christian religion is everywhere presupposed, presupposed as known, as given, as indicated—in order to go further: now it is certainly asserted as a matter of course by everyone; and yet, alas, how seldom is it considered, how seldom perhaps does a Christian earnestly and with a thankful heart dwell upon the idea of what his condition might have been if Christianity had never come into the world!” (Works of Love) Christianity has taught us the selfless love upon which we rely in our time of need. If we had never been given the commandment to “love thy neighbor,” what would the world be like? Would it be a world we would want to live in?

It is this commandment—the heart of Jesus’ moral program—which gives both the promise of the future, and the answer to the problem of suffering here and now. By observing the good that can be gained in the world through love, particularly through the step-by-step elimination of suffering when we confront it with our individual acts of love, we see Christianity’s answer to the philosophers’ question. The meaning of existence is love, and love as an active force in the world is the only satisfactory explanation for suffering. Jesus did not teach as a philosopher teaches, but, more than a philosopher, he taught through actions that are more powerful than words.

This is why the Apostle said that we are only justified through faith (Rom. 5:1), For neither deductive reasoning, nor moral purity can put us into that childish trust, that faith which is necessary to believe that God became man, and that our destiny is with him in a life of everlasting love. Further, it is faith which can inspire us to order our lives toward the good of one another. Now we can see the salvific nature of faith, that it gives an assurance, both of greater knowledge to come, and a sublime destiny of love. In his latest encyclical, Benedict XVI said that “faith is not merely a personal reaching out toward things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for… faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet’. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality.” (Spe Salvi, 7) It is faith which begets love, and it is love which can bring the Kingdom of God to fruition.

So what, by way of a conclusion, should the Christian philosopher regard as his tool of inquiry?—Faith, which is the water over which we would walk, but can only traverse by giving our inquiry over to the hand of truth to pull us up as we flounder in the abyss of our own reason.

The Work of Social Justice

For religion to be relevant in the world, it cannot simply stand on the sidelines of world events, but must be willing to make a stand for the truth. Members of some religions may disagree with me, but as a Catholic, my religion demands involvement in the work of social justice and human dignity. This is missionary work that carries weight. Spreading the gospel through word is only as good as our deeds. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.” (James 1:22). “What good is it if you say you have faith but do not have works? Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” (James 2:14, 18) Without action to go along with our belief, religion is vain. Catholic teaching speaks of “taking part in salvation history,” meaning that through the practice of our religion we actively work to bring humanity toward the fulfillment of God’s kingdom.

If we are created by God and through his love given all the gifts of the world, and if Jesus is the living incarnation of God on earth, loving us enough to bear our suffering on the cross, then that knowledge carries a consequence. We must follow his commandments and example. Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:28). If we love our neighbor, we cannot stand by when injustice is done.

Building on the knowledge that all men and women are made in the image of God, The Catholic Church maintains the rights to the basic dignity of all human persons, the defense of which, Pope John Paul II states, has been entrusted to us by the Creator, and to which the men and women of every age are responsible. (Sollicitudo rei Socialis, 47) The Second Vatican Council declared it the individual Christian’s “inescapable duty to make ourselves the neighbor of every man, no matter who he is, and if we meet him, to come to his aid in a positive way.” (Gaudium et Spes, 27) The right of everyone is affirmed to have life and the basic means necessary for living it in a dignified way. The reason why the rich man’s turning of a blind eye toward Lazarus (Luke 9) was so reprehensible was not only for the rich man’s greed, but because he denied Lazarus the ability to achieve the basic dignity which was owed him. (ibid)

We are made in the image of God. Following this truth through to its logical conclusion, we discover an obligation toward charity. If the most marginalized human being was made in the image of God, then I must help that person in their time of need. If I fail to do so, Christ may rightly say to me “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” (Matt. 25: 42-43) What presumption on our part, not to aid one who bears the image of God!

Jesus’ commandment of doing good to our neighbor comes from a call to love. Catholic teaching lays an additional responsibility upon us by making this call also purely out of justice. It is just that all humans be given their basic rights. Of course love is the higher calling, but where love is lacking, justice can still be achieved.

What forms does our call to work for social justice take? The most urgent areas are to help mitigate the suffering caused by poverty, malnutrition, disaster and disease. The suffering of humanity—the bearers of God’s image—is the suffering of Christ, etiam pro nobis. Helping those in need is not optional for the Christian. The blind eye we turn is an eye we turn away from God. If we, with our many blessings do not help the needy, who will help us when we are in need? Our selfishness will seal our doom. But by living with unselfishness, generously coming to the help of those in need we may share in the beautiful vision of St. Martin of Tours, who after giving half his cloak to a beggar at the gates of Amiens, saw Jesus that night in a dream wearing the same cloak, saying, “I was naked, and you clothed me.” (S. Severus, Vita Sancti Martini 3) We all share the image of God; it is for the good of all that we bear each other up. If the beggar across the street is the image of God, I must go to him and offer what compassion I can. Whenever we give compassion to another human, we are showing compassion to God.

Additionally, the Christian must work for peace in the world, opposing war, and all forms of violence. Throughout Christian history, and still today, wars are defended as necessary in the name of justice. So much has been made of the “just war” doctrine, which in certain extreme cases permits the use of arms in defense against an aggressor. Recall that this originated from St. Augustine as the city of Hippo faced an imminent siege. Throughout the rest of his writings, Augustine vehemently opposed the use of force or arms. The fact that this allowance, made out of extreme self-preservation, was used to justify the crusades, and is still used to defend modern wars is an abomination. The guidance must still be Jesus’ commands to “turn the other cheek,” (Matt. 5:39) and even in a case when according to the “just war” doctrine it would have been acceptable to defend oneself, Jesus still told Peter to “put your sword back into its sheath.” (John 18:11) Even in stating the just war doctrine, the Church makes certain to affirm its “clear duty to spare no effort in order to work for the moment when all war will be completely outlawed… The Church intends to propose to our age over and over again, in season and out of season, the apostle’s message: Behold, now is an acceptable time for a change of heart; behold, now is the day of salvation. (II Cor. 6:2)” (Gaudium et Spes, 82)

If we are to work for the greater good of humanity through peace and charity, then it naturally follows that we make it our duty to work for the good of the world itself, being the good stewards of the environment we live in, which was demanded of mankind from the very beginning. The same selfishness which causes us to spurn charity as we live well and humanity starves at our feet, also prompts our indiscriminate consumption of resources at the expense of the world’s future.

Social justice further demands that we fight for human equality. Within justice and charity there is no room for racism, sexism, or discrimination of any kind. Love abhors such vileness! The concept of a “chosen people,” still maintained by Jews and Muslims today, is ridiculous if you believe that all were created in God’s image. In Radhakrishnan’s words, “such an exclusive absolutism is inconsistent with an all-loving universal God. It is not fair to God or man to assume that one people are the chosen of God.” (“The Hindu View of Life,” chap. 2) The “chosen people phrase has not been officially proclaimed by Christians, but it has certainly colored Christianity throughout the ages. White Europeans, and by extension, white Americans have persecuted Jews, warred against Arabs, and slaughtered people of all other races in the name of Christianity. To use religion as an excuse for racism negates any goodness in the god claimed to be believed in.

A people are chosen if they choose God. Abraham, the patriarch of all three mono-theistic religions, first chose to have a personal relationship with his Creator, and thus his descendents could become the chosen people. Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder describes the “chosen people” status of the Israelites in his usual scientific terminology, as a control group, through whom God provided the covenant and the law upon which so much of world culture and religion has been built. It is not that the Jewish people are intrinsically better than anyone else, but by being first to choose one God, God chose them to work through. (“The Science of God,” chap. 5) We all have the opportunity to make this same choice.

Likewise to force women into lesser roles, both in society and the church, runs counter to a creed based on love. God did not create man in his image, but humankind. Just because man has throughout history forced women into submissive roles through his superior strength, does not mean that God has ordained such. Many wickednesses have been with us since the dawn of man. We do not say they were ordained by God. Why should man’s dominance over woman be different? It is true that men and women have different strengths and weaknesses, and are better suited to certain roles. But this is no judgement on the importance of each role. When Jesus was teaching at the home of Mary and Martha, Mary sat at his feet learning. Her sister Martha tried to call her away to complete her role as hostess. Martha was essentially saying that the teachings of spirituality should be left to the men, while the women served them. But Jesus said “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41). Jesus was not condemning Martha’s efforts of service, but vigorously condemning the claim that spiritual participation and the learning of scripture are restricted to men. Mary is afforded the same place in the spiritual company of Jesus as his male disciples. Despite Jesus’ words, Christians have been “taking the better part away from her,” ever since. Like Martha, women in Christianity have been given the servant’s role, while the men maintain their authority and priestly order alone.

Far from condemning Martha’s serving role, Jesus later said “Whoever wants to be first must be servant of all.” (Mark 9:35). The women who have been kept out of the Christian hierarchy will be rewarded for their service, while the men who excluded them will be forced to answer for their bigotry.

As the practicers of a religious creed, we must never lose sight of our duty to work for justice, dignity, peace, and equality. The Dalai Lama rightly describes religion as the medicine which cures human suffering (Spiritual Advice for Buddhists & Christians, chap 1.) It is the accountability that religion gives its practitioners that spur them to bring this medicine, in the form of charity, to the poor and marginalized of the world.

Love is a labor without end. It must be given to all, no matter how difficult those people are to give it to, or how much our self-righteousness tries to separate us from them. The more you learn to act with compassion, the more need for it you discover. Sometimes the world’s despair, and the rifts in humanity, seems too much to heal by one person’s act of love, but it is not too much. You are lighting the first candle and the flame will spread. Love is contagious. Don’t be discouraged because your offer of love seems small. The only way the world can ever change is one person at a time.

Union with the Cross of Christ

“He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
A man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
And as one from whom others hide their faces.
He was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.”
(Isaiah 53: 2-4)

Isaiah’s portrait of the suffering servant who becomes the savior of mankind is jarring. We expect our redemption to come from heroes who can overpower evil with their might and skill. At Isaiah’s time, Israel was expecting a great leader, a new David, someone akin to Achilles or Æneis, not a tragic figure who would die in oblivion. Though by now we have grown accustomed to the idea of Jesus, we would still never choose a deliverer who looked like him. It is difficult to put our trust, our very lives in the hands of one who appears weak and despised. Why would God manifest himself as a suffering servant, rather than as a heroic leader?

Jesus came as he did in order to bring hope, through his own suffering, to those who suffered. If he had come in power he would have converted the powerful and won the respect, though not the love of the weak. But his sacrifice gives us the opportunity in our own suffering to be united to him. He carries our sorrows and feels the sharpness of our pain. Thus our suffering is eased by contemplating his suffering on the cross. Isaiah’s prophesy graphically depicts the physical torment which God himself was already preparing to undergo. Few of us will ever face pain so sharp, or rejection so deep. Yet he who was least deserving of suffering took on the greatest suffering of all.

That anyone could do what he did is incredible. That God did it is laughable. It turns on its head all notions we ever had of glory and grandeur. Why should God, being perfect, become not only something unperfect, but the lowest of all men? Logic fails in imagining it. Plato considered it “impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being the fairest and best that is conceivable,” for “would anyone, whether God or man, desire to make himself worse?” (Republic, II). How could he take on any other form than his perfection, lowering himself to a point where we would hold him of no account, having nothing in his appearance that we should desire him? Yet against all logic or explanation, Jesus “did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” (Phil. 2:6-7). If God is perfect, powerful and glorious, how can he also be this suffering servant, the lowest of all?

God cannot be defined as power, or glory, perfection or even goodness. God can only be defined as love. Thus God is capable of taking on a lowly, inglorious, imperfect form exclusively to prove his love. While a conventional hero, redeeming through his might, also exalts himself through his strength, showing himself to be more powerful than those he has saved, this hero conquers with no other weapon than love. For the lover has no shame in taking a form lower than the beloved. Jesus’ passion and death are the most acute signs we have of God’s love, for he bears our grief on his own shoulders. His act does not free us from suffering, but it gives us God as a companion in our suffering.

When we observe the pain so prevalent in our world, we are tempted to question God’s power or goodness. Jesus’ passion does not answer all the questions surrounding suffering, but it does show that he can empathize with our suffering, for he has faced suffering much worse than our own. Whenever we feel weighed down by our pain, depression, or loneliness, we can remember that Jesus was betrayed and abandoned by his friends, ridiculed, scoffed, and finally executed. He can understand everything we suffer, because he has endured it as well. This is the God we worship—a God who suffered unimaginable pain and torture for us.

When we are despised and rejected by others, we may remember that Jesus was there. When we know suffering and infirmity, Jesus was there. When others turn away from us, hiding their faces, Jesus felt that rejection as well. When we are held of no account, as if our trials matter not, we share the fate of Jesus. Only from one who has shared this pain, can we feel the truth of sympathy, and that is why Jesus is our greatest companion, our truest friend, the one who has shared the road of misery. But while we walk that road because it opens before us against our will, Jesus put off glory and chose that way—the way that leads to death on a cross—as a sublime act of love.

Who can behold a crucifix without tears? Who can contemplate this act of love, performed by a free and perfect God out of love for us in our depravity and not be moved with pity and shame?

Nor was this act of crucifixion an isolated event two thousand years in history. No, it is a continual event. Our suffering is still God’s suffering. The words of the Catholic creed say “Crucifixus etiam pro nobis.” What this phrase says is not just that Christ died for us, but that Christ is still dying for us. Jesus’ love for us is so great that our suffering is his suffering, our pain is his pain, and our death is his death. He feels each moment of our suffering as if it was his own. As the nails pierce us in the daily crosses we bear, they pierce him afresh. For true love feels all the pain of the beloved. He loves us so much that he will do all he can to put our suffering on his own shoulders.

Can we ever hope to love God as much as he loves us? We can express our own love for God through an appreciation of beauty, through charity and community, recognizing all our human companions as God’s creation, through obedience and goodness. But with our suffering we have the opportunity to love him in a new way. Because of his act of love—bearing our sorrows as he hung on the cross, the pain we are forced to endure places us in unity with him. Our suffering becomes, in the words of Pope John Paul II, an “apostolic expression.” “Christ has opened his suffering to man, because he himself in his redemptive suffering has become, in a certain sense, a sharer in all human sufferings. Man, discovering through faith the redemptive suffering of Christ, also discovers in it his own sufferings; he rediscovers them, through faith, enriched with a new content and new meaning.” (Salvifici Doloris, 20). Our experience of suffering thus becomes an honor. We are allowed to share in the Cross of Christ, and “to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.” (Romans, 12:1)

Only if we know suffering can we begin to love Christ in the same way that he loves us. Then we begin to feel compassion for his suffering. When we contemplate his cross we can feel the pain of his nails and his lashes. We as the lover have compassion for him, the beloved, and finally God’s gift of love is reciprocated in a truth that could not have been achieved unless he was willing to undergo suffering for our sake, and we endure our suffering in union with him.

Through our suffering we have learned compassion, and our compassion for Christ who suffers with us, is what will achieve our redemption. If we love him as the beloved, how could we wish him more pain than he has already suffered? He bore our sins, and it is the continuation of our sin that causes the nails to hurt him as badly today as they did on Calvary long ago. Our sin is what makes his crucifixion constant, that he is still dying for us—etiam pro nobis. Only with great selfishness could we look upon his act and not desire to turn away from sin. How can we, without a second thought, say “Yes” to Jesus’ bearing of our sins and still look him in the eye? (H. U. von Balthasar: “Love Alone is Credible,” p, 66)

By uniting our suffering to the suffering of his cross, we begin to understand his pain, and our sin becomes more terrible, as we continue to pile the sin of the world on his shoulders. In our love for him we are forced to reject sin. We turn away in horror from the sin that gives our beloved Jesus such pain. If by living with goodness and righteousness, we can release the nails and bring him down, love must desire to accomplish that mercy. Thus we are motivated to live in holiness, purely out of love. It is our suffering, and our understanding of his desire to suffer with us, which has taught us this love.

God and Time

This is the final chapter of a three part exploration into the relation between science and God. In Part One we looked into the beginnings of the universe. In Part Two we saw God in the process of evolution and complexity of micro-biology. Now let us examine the relation between God and time.

Throughout this inquiry, we have seen how science leads us to a point where it can no longer answer its own questions. Science shows itself this riddle in the uncertainty principal inherent in the study of quantum physics. Most frustrating is the limits of science in the subjects covered in each of the three preceding chapters: regarding the origin of life, the beginning of the universe, and the very fact that there is something rather than nothing—the problem of sum.

When taking the time to fully examine the workings of science in the evolution of life and the Big Bang, science reaches its limit just as we realize that chance could not have been the efficient cause. And the answer to the question of sum, is the love of God.

Now that we have admitted that there is a cause outside our understanding of science, we cannot fall into the trap of attempting to explain God with our laws, the lesson learned at the end of the last chapter. For human knowledge is not large enough to contain the truths of God.

In order to allow our minds to separate the rules we know through our experience, especially the laws of science and logic, we must do away with some of our most basic assumptions. Otherwise we will never begin to grasp science’s place as the language of God, nor see how God and science are really not at odds.

One of our first problems is that of time. We touched on this in Part One, stating that using a word like “before” when speaking of the Big Bang verges on nonsense. What we have learned regarding time in the last Century can be extremely helpful in understanding God and the way he interacts with our universe.

Until Aristotle, the common belief of the philosophers was that the world was on an infinite time-line. The implications of Aristotle’s teachings on cause and effect, which we discussed in some detail in Chapter Two, was that this could not be the case. Effects could not follow causes back ad infinitum, and therefore, time could not go backward to infinity either. Aristotle did not himself explicitly connect his principle of cause and effect to time. This teaching had to wait until St. Augustine, who first named time as a property of God. “What times should there be,” he asked, “which were not made by thee?” (Confessions, XI, 15) St. Augustine almost predicts the science of the Big Bang when he declares that before the creation, time was not. And while God is eternal, no time is co-eternal with God (ibid. 40), in other words, time cannot be infinite. Aristotle’s teaching of first cause is finally reconciled with our observation of passing time, which seems to suggest a prior infinity. It had been a paradox which only the insertion of a force unbound by time could answer.

St. Augustine addresses his argument to those who ask what God did before he made the universe:

“If the roving thought of anyone should wander through the images of bygone time, and wonder why Thou, the God Almighty, and All-creating, and All-sustaining, the Architect of heaven and earth, didst for innumberable ages refrain from so great a work before Thou wouldst make it, let him awake and consider that he wonders at false things. For whence could innumerable ages pass by which Thou didst not make, since Thou art the Author and Creator of all ages?… Thou art the Creator of all times… nor could times pass by before Thou madest times.” (ibid. 15)

He then addresses the very issue we were discussing in the previous chapter, the futility of measuring God with the laws of this earth.

“Those who say these things do not as yet understand Thee, O Thou Wisdom of God, Thou light of souls; not as yet do they understand how these things be made which are made by and in Thee. They even endeavor to comprehend things eternal; but as yet their heart flieth about in the past and future motions of things, and is still wavering… Who will hold the heart of man, that it may stand still and see how the still-standing Eternity, itself neither future nor past, uttereth the times future and past?” (ibid. 13)

God is eternal, and his present contains not only our present, but our future and our past. God’s reach extends to all time that ever was and ever shall be. This is very difficult for our minds to comprehend, but it is God’s nature to be incomprehensible. Thus, Augustine says, “If we could understand him, he would not be God.” (De Trinitate )

In all our dealings with the Divine, we must recall our limits of understanding. As human intelligence grows, we really come no closer to answering the fundamental questions without allowing faith to enter the equation. Yet the temptation exists to become cavalier with our knowledge and, in either science or philosophy, present a partial and imperfect view as the complete reading of all reality. This, Pope John Paul II calls “philosophical pride,” endangering us to forget the primacy of enquiry, which always reminds us what we don’t know, along with what we do. (Fides et Ratio, 4)

Discarding the notion of absolute time opens up a vastness to our perception of God. We can see how he watches us, guards us, and hears our prayers intimately, each as if we were his only child. We no longer ask “how does God have time to hear all our prayers?” Nor “How can God know everything?” God is vast enough to contain all ages and locations within his intimate present. There was no “before” God created, for creation is a constant act of unending love. As we saw in Chapter One, God’s love was so great that what we call existence sprung out of him. With our law of time, we can rightly say that creation happened at a moment, as measured by our location in the cosmos, and that a certain amount of time has passed since that moment. But from God’s perspective, the first creation is always in the now.

God’s love is the first efficient cause, what Aristotle calls “the first principle,” and time is merely one of his effects. Aquinas says, “Everything that is outside God is from God as from its first principle. Therefore, besides God nothing can be infinite.” (Summa Theologica, I Q.7 A.2) This conclusion applies not only to time, but to all the laws of science, and especially to our knowledge, which cannot have the kind of infinity we may attribute to God.
Augustine saw no paradox in our observations of time and its limitations of past, present and future. God cannot be thought of in such terms, for his presence, his love, and his creation are always in the now. St. Augustine’s insight was truly ahead of his time, yet his teaching was considered purely theological. The scientific implications were not fully considered for another fifteen hundred years.

In 1905, an unknown twenty-six year old physicist wrote a paper showing that the speed of light, which until a few decades before had been thought to be instantaneous, was actually a constant velocity, and the fastest speed by which anything can actually or theoretically travel. Further, all motion of matter can only be defined, relative to other matter. These conclusions lead to the famous formula, E=mc2, showing the relation of mass to energy, and space to time. The young physicist, of course, was Albert Einstein, and the paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” led to the theory of special relativity. It has been proven that no matter can actually reach the speed of light. Only energy particles (such as photons) can travel at light speed. As matter particles are sped up to very close to light speed, their mass increases. At this speed, time also slows down. The effect on time is not seen until particles come very close to the speed of light, so it is not a phenomenon we can observe in our actual experience, but it has been proven, nonetheless. Therefore, time, even within the limits of our universe and our science, is not a constant. Time travel has become theoretically quite possible. If we were to travel into space at close to light speed, and then return to earth, we would return at a much later date. One year could have passed for us in our space ship while ten years had passed on earth. When we gaze at the stars in the sky we see them as they shone thousands or even millions of years ago. When we see a shooting star we are actually witnessing an event of the distant past.

What Einstein teaches is that time must no longer be a limitation to our understanding, for it only exists in relation to space, and might be described differently by two bodies in varying states of motion. Even the progression of time might have variation. It is not necessarily a constant and straight line. St. Augustine would undoubtedly have been very excited by Einstein’s work, which has opened up a whole new understanding of science in the last century.

The actual working of special relativity was further clarified by the discovery of the Big Bang, for it shows the way bodies, specifically, planets, stars and galaxies, are moving in relation to one another. The universe is expanding at a measurable rate, from a predictable beginning, about fifteen and a half or sixteen billion years ago as measured by time on earth. (This last point: “as measured by time on earth” is very important, as we shall soon see.) The Big Bang initiated space, which has been expanding ever since, and motion, which is the act of expansion. Time only exists in relation to these two. Aristotle believed that “there must always be motion without intermission, and thus there must necessarily be something eternal, a unity or plurality that first imparted motion, and this first movent must be unmoved… the first movent must be one and eternal.” (Physics, 258b10) Aristotle is proven correct by the Big Bang.

The picture now arises of God in the center of the universe. He, the first mover of whom Aristotle spoke, who is one and eternal, hurled out the firmaments in a Big Bang, setting them in a motion which has continued ever since. Time is our method of measuring the space traveled by the matter of which we are a part. We seek to solve the puzzle of the cosmos, measuring it with our telescopes and radio equipment, and have been successful at observing the universe as it was at a very young age. We have been able to reconstruct the history of the universe for almost the entirety of its roughly sixteen billion year history. This is how old we believe the universe to be as measured from here. But Einstein has shown that time may be different for two bodies in varying states of motion. How might the universe be measured from God’s perspective, from the vantage-point of one who had not moved since the Big Bang? Christians frequently try to argue proven scientific theory because they believe it contradicts the Bible. Ultimately, they usually end up looking quite foolish. Examples include Copernicus’ and Galileo’s teachings on the Earth’s place in the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and recent discoveries on the age and growth of the universe. Genesis describes the creation of the earth having taken place in six days. Many Christians do not want to hear any science regarding a longer development. Typically I do not take the time to address such arguments, for it belittles science and takes the beautiful creation poem of Genesis woefully out of context. Genesis was written over three thousand years ago from an oral tradition carried by the Israelites since the time of Moses. It must be read from the historical and scientific perspective of the time. Yet it is fascinating to observe how special relativity unites Genesis to modern science, and eliminates the debate of six days versus sixteen billion years. Let us follow this idea to its conclusion.

The universe is expanding at a much slower rate now than it was just after the Big Bang. In the early moments everything moved at just under light speed. It has been gradually slowing down ever since. Now time slows down for an object approaching light speed. Though earth did not yet exist, let us suppose that we had a clock to measure time ever since the Big Bang, which was now with us on earth. Though our clock has been ticking steadily ever since the beginning, as the motion of the universe has slowed, the clock will be ticking slower in relation to an unmoving object still at the center of the universe, watching earth move away from it. In the early moments, the clock would have been ticking much faster, meaning that for the stationary object at the center, much less time would have passed than on our moving clock. From our perspective on earth, time was always steady. But from the perspective of one standing at the beginning point, things would have seemed to be going very fast. Indeed, if seen by the stationary being, the earth clock would have been ticking many times faster than his own clock.

Throughout all the empty space in our universe there is an observable radio frequency (called the “Cosmic Background Radiation”) which is literally left-over heat from the Big Bang. Through it and through our lab experiments which duplicate some of conditions shortly afterwards, physicists have managed to predict the relation between present earth time, and time as it passed in those early moments. The formulas are complex and I do not want to weigh down this writing with intricate science and mathematics. But These formulae allow us to predict how much time has passed from earth perspective, and how much time would have passed for an observer from the central point.

Gerald Schroeder, the Israeli scientist who I referenced extensively in our discussion of biological evolution, has created a model to compare time as measured on earth, with time as it stood from the perspective of one still standing at the moment of the Big Bang. (“The Science of God” chap. 4) This stationary being, of course, is God, the first mover. With the Big Bang, God created the universe and began the line of time. Proven physics tells us that by the time one day had passed from this perspective, eight billion years would have passed on our moving clock measuring earth time. But as the rate of expansion slows down, so does our moving clock. So by the time the second twenty-four hours had passed for God at the center, four billion years would have passed on our clock. On God’s third day, two billion years would have passed on the earth clock. On God’s fourth day, one billion years would pass. On God’s fifth day, five hundred million years would pass. On God’s sixth day, two hundred and fifty million years would pass. Thus, after six days for God, fifteen and three quarter billion years would have passed on our earth clock. “For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night.” (Psalm 90:4)

The old Ussher calendar, which some Christians guard so fiercely, describes the history of the world in approximately six thousand years, plus the six days of creation. The physics of the expanding universe and the Big Bang predicts that the universe is approximately sixteen billion years old. Through Einstein’s law of special relativity, we see that the two time-lines agree almost exactly.

What about the Bible’s description of what happened on those six days of creation and science’s account of what took sixteen billion years? Schroeder goes on to make this comparison (ibid. p. 67) and the correlation is almost spooky. The writer of Genesis actually got the science right! The following is based on Schroedr’s model, comparing the days of Genesis with the corresponding stretch of time as indicated above, along with my own interpretations of the verses of scripture in the context of science.

Genesis 1:3: “Then God said, ‘let there be light.’ And there was light.” Gloriously so! This is the moment of the Big Bang. It further says “the earth was a formless void.” (Gen 1:2) Indeed matter did not yet have form and there was no earth. “And God separated the light from the darkness.” (Gen 1:4) As matter formed out of energy, indeed, dark space appeared, separated from the continued light that permeated all at the very beginning. By the end of the first eight billion years, galaxies had formed. This was the first day.

Genesis 1:6: “And God said, “Let there be a dome in the sky, to separate the waters.” A lot happened on the second day, the next four billion years. The sun and earth are born. And indeed, at the end of this period, liquid water forms.

Genesis 1:12: “And the earth brought forth life.” As soon as the earth cooled enough for water to appear, the first forms of life arose. Bacteria and primitive algaes began to grow in the waters. This was the third day.

Genesis 1:14, 16: “And God said, ‘let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night,’ the greater to rule the day, and the lesser to rule the night.” During the one billion year span of the fourth day, the earth’s atmosphere became transparent so that the sun and moon could produce light on the earth. Through photo-synthesis, oxygen develops in the atmosphere.

Genesis 1:20: “And God said, ‘let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures.’” Based on our comparison of cosmic clocks, and time as it is passing on earth compared to God’s time, God’s creation of “swarms” of living creatures lines up exactly with the Cambrian explosion! The fossil record shows this immediate abundance of life which Genesis tells us happened on the fifth day.

Genesis 1:24,26: “Then God said, ‘let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind,” and finally, “let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” According to the Bible, these happen on the same day, day six. And the fossil record agrees. It was about two hundred and fifty million years ago that animals first lived on dry land, and finally, the homo sapien appeared.

The way the two accounts (scripture and science) line up is startling. Not only does Genesis get the order of events exactly right, but describes the times of their occurrence correctly as well. Did the writer get lucky? Is it an accident that the Bible predicts science so well with an account that has been often relegated to myth? Rather, we must appreciate, as Schroeder says, that “the Bible is eerily true and filled with wisdom,” which in the case just outlined, could not have been known at the time it was written. (ibid. p.70)

We have now been able to go beyond St. Augustine, who said that God could not be described by time. Now we can describe God by time—a relative time through which science, long thought to disprove creation, now actually helps to prove the truth of Genesis!
To conclude this topic, we see in the relativity of time, just as we saw in the Big Bang and through evolution, the work of God’s love in every phenomena of the universe. St. Augustine told us that time is a tool of God. Einstein showed us how this tool works and relates to our place in the cosmos. Our understanding of things divine will always fall short, but through science we come ever closer, though however much we discover, God’s knowledge remains ineffably above ours. Aquinas says “God’s act of understanding is measured by eternity, and since eternity is without succession, comprehending all time, the present glance of God extends over all time, and to all things which exist in any time, as to subjects present to him.” (Summa Theologica, I Q.14 A.9)

The Language of God

This is Part Two in a three part exploration into the relation between science and God. In Part One we looked into the beginnings of the universe. Now we must examine what followed, particularly with regard to life on this earth. Could it have all come about by chance, or must it have been directed by God?

It is startling to consider the complexity of our world and life as we know it, remembering the smoothness and total simplicity of the universe at the moments just following the Big Bang. From that total simplicity it is incredible to consider the formation of the elements, not to mention the formation of complex worlds, organisms and bodies. Similarly, once the bang itself was over and the universe began to cool, everything was chaos. Elements formed, broke apart, re-formed, crashed and splintered with one another at an alarming rate, as it all shot away from itself at close to the speed of light. Yet from this chaos arose the order of the universe, the forces of nature, the grand dance of space and time.

When our world was formed it was chaotic, but from that chaos rose the complexity and order of the atmosphere, land and water, and eventually, life in the incredibly complex bodies of the plants and animals. Where in nature do we see any examples of complexity arising out of chaos? On the contrary, we observe that the opposite takes place. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the disorder in a system always increases. Yet evolution seems to imply that order can arise out of chaos. Could this be true?

When Darwin first posed his theory of mutation through multiple generations, plant and animal bodies were not thought to be as complex as we now know them to be. It may have taken a leap of faith to believe that we developed slowly over millions of years, from single-celled protozoa to humanity, but not as much of a leap as it takes today. I do not argue that evolution occurred in the development of the world, but in this chapter I wish to point out, using strictly scientific data, the impossibility of chance as the only answer. In the end, believing that life came about by chance is no more scientific than belief in a deity.

Without considering the dramatic complexity of our entire bodies, let us merely examine one cell, and then consider the possibility that it would have evolved through chance mutations, without some force driving it toward life.

So how does a cell work? What makes it so fascinating and beautiful? Within a cell are hundreds of proteins, each designed for specific functions. They all combine to make the cell behave in such a way that your organ or limb then behaves in the way you expect it to. Let us look at one example of what happens within a cell, this example within the nerve cell of a finger after touching a hot surface, as described by Professor Gerald Schroeder in his book, “The Hidden Face of God.” (2002, Simon & Schuster)

You’ve touched something too hot for comfort. The heat stimulates the sensitive endings of the nerve, inducing it to rapidly send the message to its target receivers, in this case the spinal cord. The signal, a cascade of ions, travels from the receiving dentrite, past the cell body, and on toward the axonlike extension. At this point the action potential is generated that, as a wave, transmits the signal the length of the axon to the synaptic terminals at its end. Since the axon terminal does not actually attach to the target neuron’s dendrite… the nerve has the electrical action potential within the axon stimulate the release of chemical neurotransmitters into the synaptic gap. The electrical signal has become a chemical signal. These neurotransmitters have been “conveniently” stored in organelles called Golgi apparatus near the axon’s terminals. The Golgi package the neurotransmitters at their point of manufacture in the cell body and then, with the help of motor proteins, transport them and other essential molecules from within the cell body, down the axon, to the location of use near the cell membrane. The Golgi, upon command, release the neurotransmitter into the synapse, where it diffuses across the opening, attaches to the target dendrite, and in doing so triggers a secondary neural signal to start on its way… The trip from the cell body where the Golgi and neurotransmitter are made to axon terminal can be up to a meter distant, [and would take] about two days when traveling via motor protein… [But] when called into action, the Golgi move within a millisecond. The Golgi fuses with the inner surface of the axon synaptic membrane, and then, in a process known as exocytosis, bursts through on the outside, into the synaptic gap. (Chapt. 6)

I know this is a bit complex. But that is the point. When I think of this process I visualize something that looks more like a big factory than my own little nerve cell. It is stunning to think of it all taking place each time my fingers strike the key on which I am writing. It all occurs within a split second. And consider that a million such processes are being carried out by the cells of your body right now. Your cells are actively breaking down nutrients into ATP, using that energy to build various proteins, just like the Golgi and motor proteins described above, so that they will be ready for action as soon as they are needed.

Professor Schroeder urges one to think of all the instances, just in this one process described, when small parts of your cells seem to act with knowledge and intelligence in performing their tasks. The design is so intricate. If it was not created with knowledge, then knowledge must have been written into the system. In other words, the laws of science pre-destined intelligent life. Yet to say that such complexity is written into the laws of he universe would be just as amazing as the complexity we observe. Who gave the Golgi, the axons, the neorotransmitters in your finger their knowledge? If it was the laws of science, then how did the laws of science acquire its knowledge?

I would advise everyone who thinks that their bodies could have come about by chance to really make a full examination into the world of molecular biology. I would highly recommend Schroeder’s book which I quoted above. The ingenuity of it is absolutely stunning!

How carefully God ordered everything in our bodies. For a human being to engineer the complexity of a single cell would be an invention unsurpassed by any other. To think of even one cell coming about by pure chance defies logic. Those who try to use such science to explain away God are like those of whom the book of Wisdom says, “seeking God and desiring to find him, while they live among his works they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful. Yet… if they had the power to know so much that they could investigate the world, how did they fail to find sooner the Lord of these things?” (Wis. 13:6-9)

The more I learn about the inner workings of my body the more I am stunned by its order and complexity. Little of this complexity was known when Darwin suggested that varying species came about by random mutations.

Find the most complicated machine, or appliance in your house. Examine it for awhile, then think about the possibility of someone who knows nothing about it taking its parts, laying them on the floor, stirring and arranging them in a variety of ways, heating and cooling the solder at random, and eventually the machine comes to be in its present, not only functional, but well designed and beautiful form. This exercise, of course, is ridiculous! Fifteen billion years would not suffice for it to work. Yet this is not far off from Richard Dawkins’ model of random evolution! And your body is a million times more complicated than the appliance. St. Dionysius observes that “no object of any utility, and fitted to be serviceable, is made without design or by mere chance, but is wrought by skill of hand, and is contrived so as to meet its proper use.” (De Natura, II)

But maybe it did all come about by chance. Maybe the elements were pre-disposed to combine in such ways to make this complexity happen. Before you confess to such a theory, remember that we are bound by the laws of our world. If there is no power that is outside of and greater than our world, then we must imagine such things coming about in the world as we understand it to operate. And where in the world, in nature, do you find any example of complexity arriving out of chaos? Where has it ever been shown that elements could spontaneously manifest into complex forms? When left alone, nature decays, rather than creates. The only example we see in nature of the opposite is from a parent to a child.
But does the theory of random evolution demand that it happens more than once? Darwin stated that given enough time a species can beget a vastly different species through mutations and generations of intermediate varieties (“The Origin of Species,” chap 9). Darwin’s theory is widely supported by the fossil record for the evolution within a particular genome (dogs evolving into other types of dogs), within families (an ape evolving into a man), but nowhere do we find evidence of one phyla giving rise to another (a sponge evolving into a fish). This latter type of evolution is purely speculative. Darwin theorized that it could happen, given enough time.

But in the years since, notably in the work of Elso Barghoorn during the 1970s, and through the analysis of the Burgess fossils in the 1980s, it was proven that life forms developed over a rather short period of time. The first single-celled organisms came to be between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago, and more complex organisms came into existence about 530 million years ago. This period, when multi-celled life begins to appear in the fossil record, is known as the Cambrian Age. The ideal conditions on earth at this time gave rise to every additional phyla (animal group) that has survived to the present day. Some phyla died off in the ensuing Ordovician Ice Age, and the rest have come to represent all the species we know today. This huge diversification of life has come to be known as the “Cambrian Explosion.” The climates were warm, wet and mild, and ocean currents moved freely, baring the significant build up of ice formations. (M. Alan Kazlev: “Palaeos,” 2000) The Cambrian Age only lasted 53 million years, a “blink of an eye” in geological terms, yet all the complexity of multi-celled organisms came into being at this time.

Classical Darwinian evolution shows how a single ancestral line can change through beneficial mutations and then gradually take over the entire population with the new trait. It takes a very long time. The speculation was that over many millions of years, new species would be formed and grow. But what the Cambrian explosion tells us is that the time was not long enough for all species to have come from a single parent. Complexity arose out of simplicity, not once, but dozens of times. These discoveries prove that the chance manifestation of complexity which we see nowhere else in the natural world did not just need to happen once. It needed to happen numerous times within this “short” period. The type of progeny which Darwin describes relies on a much longer stretch of years.

So, knowing that time was too short for all the new phyla in the Cambrian Age to have come from a common ancestor, could these species have come to be without the benefit of a parent? The kind of chance manifestation of complexity which Richard Dawkins claims could develop naturally? This would require cells to form and combine on their own. Think again of the experiment with the household appliance, and the forces of nature being the maker attempting to put the parts together. Let us just look at the possibility of one single protein evolving on its own (not to mention a whole cell!).

The average protein consists of 288 amino acids, of which 12 are different types of amino acids. The absence, addition, or replacement of a single amino acid in the structure of the protein will ruin it. Every amino acid has to be in the right place and in the right order. Now 288 amino acids could be arranged in a number of ways approximating ten to the three hundredth power. Since we know that only the exact amino acid chain is viable, the chances of creating these viable proteins by chance are approximately one in ten to the three hundredth power. Furthermore, one protein cannot survive in nature on its own, without a cellular structure to protect it from outside forces. The human body contains an estimated 100,000 proteins. Even given an ideal setting, with a rapidly evaporating amino acid concentrated Cambrian pool, the chances of even one viable protein forming by accident is microscopic! (G. Schroeder: “The Science of God, chap. 7 1997)

I wonder how discouraged Dawkins, or other “neo-evolutionists” who argue that chance brought it all about, would be if they tried to put together a mathematical probability equation for their theory. The scientists who pay more attention to mathematics realize how unlikely it is for ten to the three hundredth power to occur a hundred thousand times! Then think that it has to happen in all the new phyla that came about during this period, and that it only has 53 million years to complete the work. There is no way to make a mathematical case for this theory. Dawkins’ model for randomness seems to imply that it is possible, but he starts out knowing the answer he is trying to reach and thus, the evolution is essentially directed toward that goal. In this experiment, Dawkins plays God, knowing the final form and then directing the hypothetical mutations that way. The problem with thinking that nature might have known its goal, would be that for multiple generations, the organ would have remained only partially evolved, in which state it would have been useless. St. Dionysius anticipates Dawkins and proves him wrong with the plain truth that when anything is not in service, not useful, then we observe in every case that it begins to break up indeterminately, and decomposes and dissipates in casual and unregulated ways, for the wisdom which constructed it no longer controls or maintains it. (De Natura, II)

Dawkins himself admits that “it is vanishingly improbably that exactly the same evolutionary pathway should ever be traveled twice.” (“The Blind Watchmaker,” 1985 p. 94) Yet Schroeder points out, using the example of the eye, how this trait of vision had to have developed simultaneously in multiple Cambrian era phyla. (“The Science of God, chap. 7 1997) The eye is vastly more complex than the nerve cell described above, yet it seems to have evolved almost simultaneously and nearly identically in multiple phyla. Could an organ as complex as an eye have sprung into existence just through blind luck?

Rather, the details prove the careful work of the love which created us. The beauty of science is to begin to understand the language with which our Creator works and to see its marvel in ever greater detail.

Imagine if life on earth came to a close. All our cities are destroyed and buried beneath dust. After a thousand years some intelligent species from another planet comes to the lifeless earth. There are curious archeologists in this group and they begin to uncover the remains of our cities, starting with the most recent. They first dig up our huge skyscrapers and sprawling malls. Then they dig up some brick apartment buildings from a century before, noting the difference, and the added complexity of the newer buildings. Eventually they get to the ruins of medieval castles and churches, then of Roman times, and finally to the huts of primitive tribes. Knowing nothing of humanity, they return to their planet and publish their findings, concluding that these structures evolved over thousands of years, pointing to the gradually increasing complexity. At some point, they observe, electricity suddenly and inexplicably manifested itself in these buildings, giving a whole new range of functionality.

Did human architecture evolve? Of course! But to think of it happening by chance is ridiculous. And do we blame early humans for the mistakes they made, or how long it took? No. We marvel at their ingenuity and creativity.

Why do we not allow our Creator the same? Must it either have all been created at once, perfect and complete, or have evolved completely by chance? When we look at the complexity and beauty just of our own bodies, not to mention the rest of the world, is it beyond our concept of God to suggest that maybe it was hard work and took some time? Is God less magnificent if we suggest that the work may have taken several billion years, or that the engineering was in some cases left to the species itself? Is this a concession of sovereignty?

Such chance occurrences as Dawkins supposes cannot truly be considered a scientific theory. Admittedly, neither can my assertion that life was created by God. For a theory to be scientific, according to Stephen Hawking, it must “relate quantities in the model to observations that we make… A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.” (“A Brief History of Time,” p. 10) Aristotle thought that philosophy itself could discover all the laws of the universe, but beginning with Galileo, scientists began to test their theories with more and more rigorous experiments. (ibid. p. 15) This is now the accepted scientific method. Dawkins’ view on chance, and mine on God, must now be considered philosophy rather than science, since observation and prediction does not apply. What science can show us is what philosophy may be incorrect or highly improbable. It is easier to refute than to prove. In my mind, the examples shown of the complexity of micro-biology, and the speed at which it had to evolve disprove the philosophical theory of chance.

Surrounding all the details of life’s evolution is the over-arching reality that existence is balanced on a preverbal knife-edge. On a micro level (species), one cell, or even protein altered could kill an organism; at its onset, that alteration would have precluded the species from having ever existed. On an intermediate level (earth), a slight atmospheric or temporal alteration would wipe out life on this planet; and with all the evolution that has occurred over the years, it is hard to imagine the atmosphere would not have even briefly been altered in a deadly way. On a macro level (universe), in the last chapter we looked at what disaster would have occurred if the Big Bang had propelled things a fraction faster or a fraction slower. This slim balance of life does not suggest randomness but order. Where in life or our experiences do we see any evidence of order arising out of chaos? Science fits so perfectly to existence. How can something so precise be utterly random?

Even if we claim that science had laws which forced the precision and urged matter toward complexity and life, how did the laws of science arise? That presents us another puzzle just as unsolvable as the first. Some scientists, realizing the implication of the new discoveries described above, now argue that the universe was pre-disposed toward life. The laws of science themselves urged life to spring from the chaos. To this theory I would make two remarks—first that we are already doing away with the laws of science by saying this. The laws of science, if they are laws, must behave consistently, and we do not see this occuring anywhere else in observation or experiment. Any such theory leaves the realm of science, for it is inconsistent with the laws. Remember what we have defined as the accepted guidelines of scientific theory. This leads us to the second observation—that any “urging” which caused life and does not fit in with scientific law, is a definition for God, just as any “cause” of the Big Bang, which is outside science, would be a god. My own definition of God may be different than how the agnostic describes this outside force, but as they relate to science, the difference is obsolete.

Truly, God is not outside the laws of science. God is the laws of science! Science is the language of God. St. Thomas says “the word ‘God’ signifies something of which nothing greater can be thought.” (Summa Theologica, I Q2. A1)

We hate to admit that there is something beyond our ability to explain. If something does not fit into science, we are disposed to think it cannot exist, or perhaps our understanding is incomplete. This leads us into the trap of trying to explain away God with his own language of science. God does not fit into the scientific method. The scientific method makes the claim to truth being the simple facts that we can observe. In Latin, Verum est Factum. There is no room for mystery, or for a set of rules beyond the reach of our measurements.

I have tried to present these theories to some scientists who write the whole thing off before they even consider my arguments because it does not adhere to the scientific method. It is not a theory which can be tested and proved. (They seldom have an answer to my own claim that chance is not a proper scientific theory either.)

Yet does science always even fit the scientific method?

For the answer, let us leave biology and take a closer look into the field of quantum physics. There we will find how the scientific method has led us astray, and perhaps an answer to how we must approach our queries into the divine.

At the onset of the twentieth century the entire study of physics was turned upside down, mostly by the work of Max Planck and Albert Einstein, who discovered the fact that Newton’s laws, which work very well when applied to large particles of matter (let us call them macro particles), break down when applied to a single atom (quantum particle). This brought about the study of quantum physics. Let us look at the surprising results that we achieve from experiments with quantum particles.

You may be familiar with what is known as the “Two Slit Experiment.” Atoms are fired one at a time at a screen with two slits cut vertically from each other. There is another screen set on the other side to pick up the interference pattern. Now if light were shown against the slits we would expect the interference pattern to show up as a series of fuzzy lines because of the wave quality of the light. The astonishing thing is that atoms, shot one at a time at first seem to be hitting the far screen in a random pattern, but after many have been fired, they begin to show the same sort of interference pattern as the light. The end result of this experiment is one of the proofs that quantum particles, though they leave the gun and are recorded on the far screen as localized particles, actually behave as waves and seem to go through both slits at once. What scientists have come to believe about both light and the components of atoms is that both behave as particles and waves simultaneously. The particle aspect is the localized actualization of a potential created by the wave. Thus, we can never be completely sure where we will find the quantum particle at any point in measurement.

Needless to say, scientists have attempted to observe this phenomenon at work. But something very strange happens when they do this. If any sort of detector is placed near the first screen to “watch” the atom going through the slits, the interference pattern disappears, and the atoms appear in two groupings on the other side, as we would expect if we were sending macro particles through instead. The simple act of watching causes the atom to behave as a particle throughout the test, and never as a wave. This has confounded physicists for decades.

The act of detecting the quantum particle actually changes its nature. This is unavoidable, because if we were to shine a single photon of light at an atom, the photon would interact with the atom, changing its behavior, in some cases even its atomic makeup. Remember that the photon, just like the atom, has the properties of both a particle and a wave. The photon becomes entangled with the atom. For this reason, in our observation of quantum particles, we are never able to know everything about both their location and their movement at any time. Einstein theorized with his 1935 Gedanken Versuch that we can observe the atom’s particle nature or its wave nature with near complete accuracy at any time, but not both. Thus, we encounter a failure in our ability to predict the behavior of an atom. We can determine the probability of an atom’s location or velocity, but we cannot pinpoint it for sure.
Yet, even understanding that the measuring system, by means of entanglement, alters the behavior of the quantum particle, nearly a century later we do not know why it causes the interference pattern (seemingly the entire wave aspect) to disappear. We cannot explain what goes on behind the so called quantum curtain. Niels Bohr argued that it was useless to theorize what happened in the absence of a measuring device, since the only way we can learn anything about quantum behavior is if we accept the interaction it has with the measuring device; the observer is central to the behavior of the atom, photon, or electron. This is a simplistic summary of the Copenhagen Interpretation, spearheaded by Bohr. It is pretty much saying that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, it does not make a sound! I am not so quick to give up, and I expect that time will lead us to further discoveries in our ability to measure the quantum system, but Bohr’s interpretation does lead us to the heart of the problem. We, the observer, our measuring device, even the very surroundings we are giving to the experiment, are soundly entrenched in the macro plane. We are subject to classical Newtonian laws of physics. Meanwhile, the tiny quantum particle we are playing with is obeying different laws altogether. When we attempt to measure it, we are subjecting it to laws it was never meant to obey, and terminology by which it was never meant to be described. We cannot understand how anything can behave simultaneously as a particle and a wave, nor can our measuring systems, and thus have we inadvertently forced the quantum particle into a macro world. The only way we could truly measure the quantum particle would be with quantum measuring systems and a truly quantum observer. Obviously this is impossible, and so for now we must be content to accept that the truth is a mystery. Verum est Mysterium. It is there. We must believe it. But for now, we cannot see it. The scientific method gives us no help when observing quantum particles.

The two important conclusions we are forced to draw from our observations of quantum particles is, A: we cannot be sure that the rules we know for one system will apply to another system and, B: truth is sometimes more than the facts, even in science.

Do you see the similarities we face when discussing the realm of the divine? God is in a metaphysical realm while we try to observe him with physical laws. It is impossible. God made the rules, yet put us in a different system, subject to different rules. Similarly, since we and all matter are made up of millions of quantum particles, we could say that the quantum particles “made” the classical, Newtonian laws with which we then attempt to view the quantum world. We do not understand how an atom can be both wave and particle, yet the truth is that we, who do not understand, would not exist if this were not so! Similarly we do not understand God, the metaphysical realm, or what happens to us after death. We cannot fit God into our understanding just as we cannot fit a quantum particle into the observance of a macro system.

Every new discovery in science has given us a closer glimpse at the image of our Creator, and the great loving care with which we were crafted. Our selfishness attempts to explain away the need for the genius behind it, but all of nature, all of science confess the creative energy and the tremendous love with which we and all the gifts we share were made. That God does not fit into our rules is not an argument that there is no God, but rather an argument that there is!

How did it All Begin

This will begin a three part inquiry into the relation between God and science. In this first piece, we will look at the origins of the universe. In the second part we will look for God in the history of biological evolution, and in the final part we will look at the relation between God and time. This exploration builds on my earlier article, THE PROBLEM OF SUM.

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Humanity has wondered where they came from since they were first able to reason. Early societies invented myths and fantastic legends about our history. The Jewish people presented the theistic account of Genesis. The philosophers of Greece tried to discover the answer through reason, but even they often fell into myth. Finally, modern science has attempted to answer this question. But where do we now stand? Are we really any closer to knowing how it all began?

This exploration will transport us to the beginnings of the universe and carry us with its history as it evolved, asking the question: could this all have come about by chance, or does it point to a Creating Love behind, the very love which is the reason for existence itself? To arrive at my conclusions I will be exploring deeply into the revelations of modern science and ancient philosophy. Because of the fact that science leads me to the conclusion that the world was created, I understand that much of my views will be immediately discarded. The very mention of a potential Creator, or God, is anathema to much of the scientific community. But I would ask my readers to follow with me through the ensuing arguments, and consider the implications of my conclusions.

Scientists currently like to refer to the Big Bang as the accepted beginning of existence. Exploration beyond this moment tends to fall into the realm of fantasy. Certainly, there have been some interesting theories posited to describe the circumstances which may have led up to the Big Bang, but it is impossible to test such theories, and so they remain and will continue to remain speculation. That the Big Bang was the “beginning” is clear in so much as there was no time before this event. One can suppose that all the laws of our universe (including time) were birthed at this moment. So if there was something prior, it could not be measured by our time, nor theoretically by the laws of science as we know them. Even using words such as “before” in reference to the Big Bang verges on nonsense. In the final chapter we will look deeper into the concept of time and its limitations.

Instead of handicapping ourselves by using words indicative of time to speak of a circumstance when time did not exist, let us speak rather of causes. The Big Bang was the cause to which the universe and time itself are the effects. Aristotle teaches convincingly that causes cannot proceed from prior causes ad infinitum. (Metaphysics: 994a1) Thus we are obliged to ask whether the Big Bang was itself an effect, to which there was another efficient cause, or was it the original cause?

When scientists do speak of what may have caused the Big Bang, or what may have come before, they tend to arrive at two generalized conclusions: those who find the Big Bang to be an acceptable beginning—in that time, matter, motion, and the laws of science sprung out of it. They agree that to speak of a before is nonsense, nor do they speak of any prior cause. The Big Bang is itself the first cause of which Aristotle spoke. The second group pose theories of potential antecedent universes, or a universe in an infinite pattern of expansion and contraction.

Let us first treat the latter conclusion. Here again, Aristotle’s law of cause and effect must be considered. For if the Big Bang was an effect, what caused its cause? If the universe has been contracting and expanding repeatedly, what started it off the first time? Or if it has been proceeding ad infinitum, how did the effect which is us, ever come to be? The only way around the necessity of a first cause is through an acceptance of infinity. But there can be no infinity in actuality, only in theory and potential. Once something reached the infinity which had been potential, it would no longer be infinite. If time went back infinitely, we could not have reached a now. By reaching the present, time would have become finite. As another example, scientists speak of the possibility of the universe being spacially infinite, but by that they simply mean that it has the potential to expand infinitely, yet at every point toward that expansion, it will still be finite. Aristotle defines infinity as “that which is incapable of being traversed, or that which admits only of incomplete traverse.” (ibid. 1066a35) This definition confirms that infinity is in potential, for in actuality it is never traversed. Those who speak of an infinite prior history try to defend it through the relativity of time and motion, the knowledge of which indeed refutes one of the Philosopher’s primary examples in his argument of cause and effect. But while time and motion are indeed relative, cause is not. Therefore, to posit an infinite series of causes leading up to the Big Bang, it would require an infinite causal path to have been traversed, which is impossible.

Let us now proceed to examine the possibility that the Big Bang begat everything. This is certainly a neat and tidy theory. Through experiment and observable data it has become increasingly obvious that the Big Bang is a true theory (obvious enough, in fact, that scientists now often refer to it as “the standard model”). But to stop the search at the “how” of the universe’s birth without asking “why” this supremely hot, supremely dense something was there to go Bang! is rather like me saying that it was the work of God. The Big Bang might indeed be the cause of everything which followed, but it cannot have caused itself. St. Thomas Aquinas says, “there is no case known (nor indeed, is it possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself, because in that case it would be prior to itself, which is impossible.” (Summa Theologica, Q. 2 A. 3)

For those who argue that the Big Bang itself is the first cause, they are essentially claiming that it also caused itself, and thus, it is very like a god. This is as much a statement of faith, as the Christian who claims God as the first cause. In both cases there is an admission that science has reached its limit. The Big Bang itself, becomes God, or if you prefer, that something which Banged is the cause, the creator of all.

I am arguing from the assumption that there was something which banged. Some have tried to argue that there was not something, but that the bang itself, out of pure nothingness, caused the first matter. They defend this with lab evidence of particles popping into existence from pure nothingness. But this argument is simply a play with semantics, for these particles which they claim to be popping into existence are borrowing from the energy of their surroundings, in accordance with Einstein’s E=mc2 equation. For this to happen, it requires both the presence of energy and the necessary (extremely hot) environment. This may indeed approximate many of the conditions at the time of the Big Bang, or shortly thereafter. But we cannot say that something came out of nothing, for as Einstein has taught us, energy is itself something. There comes a temperature and a density at which matter and energy are indistinguishable. Thus, cause and effect still apply, just as Aristotle taught so long before this era of quantum physics.

The existence of a first cause is absolutely necessary based on our laws of science and logic. The surprising thing which is hinted at by this truth, is that this first cause does not seem to be bound by these laws of science and logic. Either our knowledge is incomplete (a frustratingly likely possibility), or else the first cause of our universe came from a realm outside our universe and was therefore not bound by our laws (otherwise, how could it have caused itself). Though the Christian speaks of this as God, many mystics and scientists speak of similar possibilities. Whatever you want to call this something which is outside or unbound by our laws—and in that it gave what birthed our laws, it must be considered greater than those laws—it is a god, just as the Big Bang, if it effected all existence, would be a god. Is what I speak of an abstract essence outside our universe, or is it a very personal, creating God? Did the Big Bang happen by mere chance, or was it ordered and directed?
Perhaps we can discover an answer in the Big Bang itself.

This is not the place, nor am I the scribe to give a detailed narration of the Big Bang. If my reader is interested in exploring what actually happened in the moments following the universe’s inception, I would recommend Stephen Weinberg’s short but informative book “The First Three Minutes” (Basic Books, New York, 1977). Yet by discussing several of the general circumstances which have been shown to be present during the bang, it will shed light on our present question.

At the moment of the Big Bang, matter and energy were said to be infinitely dense and infinitely hot. In such terminology, theoretical physicists have blurred theory with reality since, for reasons just discussed, infinity cannot actually exist. But that it was hot and dense beyond our ability to measure or define is certain. As time and space unfurled in the bang, matter and energy (which at that density and temperature are the same thing) spread out over the new expanding universe. At that moment, existence was completely smooth, in that everything was exactly the same. It was incredibly simple. Scientists speculate that rather than the four forces we observe in nature (strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational) a single unified force existed. This has not been proven, but it seems likely.

As it quickly spread and cooled, the first molecules formed. The forces separated. More molecules formed and nuclear fusion began to take place. Eventually stars and galaxies formed, a chunk expelled from a supernova became earth, and now here we are to speculate about it all.

When studying these events in detail, two remarkable facts appear. The first is how unlikely it seems that from such a chaotic expulsion of energy, the universe would have survived in a way to produce the complexity we see, and that life could have survived, even in this one tiny corner of it. If the bang had propelled things even a micro-degree faster, the solar systems would have burned up before they had a chance to form. If it had been a micro-degree slower, the gravitational forces would have crushed everything before it had the remotest chance to develop as it has. If any of the four forces had been even the tiniest bit stronger or weaker, they would not have been able to maintain balance, nuclear fusion would never have occurred, and the universe would either be nothing but free particles, or else one dense, impenetrable mass. From a mathematical perspective, the chance that it would happen as it did, must be considered a statistical impossibility. So why did it happen like it did?

The second remarkable fact may shed some light on the first. This is that the laws of science themselves developed. Why are there four forces? Why the relationship between energy and matter, between space and time? Why the marvels of chemistry and biology? Why does it work? To this question Einstein answered smugly, “I doubt the good Lord could have made it any other way!” Were these very laws what forced the Big Bang to happen in a way that allowed the universe’s survival, and life therein?

Even if we accept that it was these laws of science which forced the precision of the early universe, urging it toward complexity and life, we must ask how these laws of science arose. Could there be a potential world where science behaved differently? Or is the fact that this is the only way it can be cause not to question it, not to ask why science is how it is?
I think not. Rather, in these two remarkable facts about the Big Bang, we are pointed back to the moment of its beginning, the cause for everything which followed, including the laws of science. In any fine work of human hands, be it a building, a work of art, a symphony of music, or scientific formula, we are pointed back to the genius of the maker. So the world points us to the genius of its cause. As the artist, in his creating, is not himself limited by the same laws which govern his canvas, so that which caused the Big Bang, is not limited by the laws of science. There must necessarily be a force that is outside these laws, which causes all the subsequent effects. We spend so much time analyzing the book of science that we forget to ask who wrote it!

We find it difficult to admit to the existence of a divine being (and here divine can be defined as anything existing outside our laws, which may have caused the Big Bang), because it is so outside our realm of thought. Our laws of science cannot get us over the hump into the realm of the metaphysical. And so we keep trying to explain away God with the science he created.

We are left with a final question—Why?

Why were these laws of science written, either by God, or by conditions as they were in the universe or ante-universe, such that we could be given the gift of life? Why did the Big Bang happen at all, and why did it allow for all the wonder of our world. The answer is love.

Because of love, God gave the Big Bang as his breath of life. The first cause was goodness and love. Because of love he made certain that the statistical impossibility became a reality. And because of love, he created all the science which we use to comprehend his work… and to explain him away. Yet we can only speak of scientific law because God allows us some knowledge of his work. We cannot examine God with the same type of knowledge with which we analyze the things of this world. Doing this, we approach the implication that God is, because we can think of him. But rather the opposite is true. As St. Augustine says, God does not know us because we are, but we are because he knows us. (De Trinitate, XV. 13)

The logic of cause and effect show us that there must be a first cause, and the laws of our science and logic necessitates that the first cause be unbound by these laws. Because infinity is impossible to traverse, there must be a beginning. Through our observation of the Big Bang, we are led to conclude that its cause ordered it for success, and if so, this would be an act of love. This love, we know as God.

The Holy Trinity

It is a daunting task for any theologian to attempt to tackle the subject of the Holy Trinity. It is perhaps the most profound and indeed, non-intuitive, of the Christian mysteries. Yet it is also the central mystery of our faith. While it is sometimes tempting to avoid the complexity of the Trinity, it must be addressed in order to speak clearly and knowledgeably of the Christian creed as a whole. Because of its mysterious nature, it is one of the most misunderstood tenets of Christianity, and easily the one round which the most objections have been raised. Thus, it is the dogma most jealously guarded by the Church, and consequently, one which many theologians are loath to touch.

Pope Benedict XVI referred to this as “a realm in which Christian theology must be more aware of its limits… where the attempt to gain too precise a knowledge is bound to end in disastrous foolishness; [where] only the humble admission of ignorance can be true knowledge and only wondering attendance before the incomprehensible mystery can be the right profession of faith in God.” (Ratzinger: Intro to Christianity, 1,V)

The Trinity will always remain a mystery. Yet it is a beautiful glimpse into the nature of God, a threefold nature which our feeble minds are not capable of fully grasping. The extent to which God has deemed to enlighten us reveals a remarkable love in God’s interaction with his creation. It is an awareness of that love, a fluid and threefold love, toward which I hope to point this inquiry.

THE DOGMA

First let us examine the Church’s summary of the dogma, according to the Catechism:

“The Trinity is one. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the “consubstantial Trinity.” The divine persons do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole and entire. Each of the persons is that supreme reality, viz., the divine substance, essence or nature.” (CCC, 253) “Now this is the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity, without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person of the Father is one, the Son’s is another, the Holy Spirit’s another; but the Godhead of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty co-eternal.” (CCC, 266).

The Theology is based primarily on Jesus’ final commandment, to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matt. 28:19) While having hinted at the triune Godhead throughout his ministry, here at the end, he states it clearly. While he does not name it a Trinity, or describe the relationship of the three, the deity he describes is definitely “triune.” This cannot be ignored.

There is nothing in our lives which can be likened to the relationships of the Trinity. In our experience a father must always precede a son and nothing can be both the same and individual. It is little wonder that the Trinity has caused so much controversy. The demand of the dogma is to accept the mystery. We must accept that God is larger than our understanding. If he was not, then he would not be God. Far from the complete truth, the Trinity is an attempt by feeble minds to grasp the nature of God, as the Holy Spirit has enabled us. We humbly continue to call it a mystery, for it would be impertinent to assume we fully understood God. “We see now in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully.” (1 Cor. 13:12)

Even so, I will attempt to explain this mystery as I understand it, not to solve it like a puzzle, but merely as an effort to eliminate confusion in the minds of my readers, and to illuminate the love at the root of God’s nature, which has been revealed to us through a Trinity. This will by no means be a “proof text,” for I do not presume to have a proof for the Trinity. I am coming from a perspective of belief, using argument and metaphor to support that belief, rather than arguing a position beginning from a point of complete neutrality.

THE FLUID NATURE OF GOD

One of the oldest, and I think the best, metaphors for understanding the mystery of the Holy Trinity is the idea of water. Water is a single entity, but it is manifested in three states familiar to us: ice, liquid water, and steam. Yet any of these can be accurately described by the same chemical name, H20. Similarly, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit can all be rightly called God. Their individuality comes in the ways they are made manifest to us through experience and revelation.

Water is the most abundant thing on our earth. It gives life to all the plants and animals. It can be all places at once, and even when it is ingested, processed, polluted, and evaporated, the water in our world is not lessened. Its transition between ice, water and steam never threatens its unity. So can God be in all places at once, in all three of his forms, as the world needs him most.

Trinitarian theology has come to us slowly over the history of the Judeo-Christian religion. Many scholars argue against it because it is not specified emphatically by Scripture. The Bible certainly describes the workings of all three essences of God, particularly when read with a hermeneutic interpretation fitting to the post-Apostolic era, and there is the defining passage already quoted from Matthew, but the Bible does not name them as a Trinity. The first extant Christian texts which use the word Trinitas are those of Tertullian, at the beginning of the Third Century. But it should not surprise us that our understanding had to grow over time. It was necessary for God to increase our enlightenment as our knowledge became more prepared for comprehending the mystery. Just as, while we have understood the connection between the three essences of water for many centuries, it was not until the development of modern chemistry that we truly understood the phase transition it undergoes.

St. Gregory Nazianzen outlines the long-term development of the doctrine: “The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely. The New manifested the Son, and suggested the deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself. For it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son; nor when that of the Son was not yet received to burden us further.” (Oratio, 31, 26) God uses time and the advancement of human knowledge to gradually enlighten more of the truth of his mysteries.

Early man, with his understanding only of God’s fatherhood, can be likened to a civilization living in an ice age, or high on a mountain where the temperature never warms past freezing. The life-giving nature of water can be gained, but it is more difficult. This civilization knows the necessity of ice for their survival, they love it, but they also fear it, knowing it can and will destroy them if they do not give it the proper respect. These people will never know the beauty and warmth of liquid water. This was the state of the Israelite nation in the Old Testament.

Jesus was like liquid water coming into the world, giving a life that sprung from the Father, but was altogether new and fresh. “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14) Jesus is like the stream flowing out of the glacier which is the Father. As he says “The Father is Greater than I” (John 14: 28) and “I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.” (John 14:31). The dawn of the Christian age was like the rolling back of winter into spring. The new essence of God that came to be known took nothing away from the old, but it made life more accessible to all humanity.

Imagine now a civilization which has come to know water in its liquid form. Suddenly, this people learns to harness the power of steam. This discovery gives them a sudden advantage in heating, transportation, and all manner of industry. Such a sudden advancement can be likened to the disciples’ receipt of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Though the Holy Spirit was at work all throughout the Old Testament, explicitly revealing its power and nature to humanity was not necessary, as we were still endeavoring to learn the nature of the Father. Now that the Son has given us new life, new law, and new opportunity, the power of the Holy Spirit is tantamount in our works and our comprehension of truth.

It is ridiculous to speculate on which is greater—ice, water, or steam. Obviously, ice is easier to grasp, so an ignorant mind might think it was greater. Water is most visibly abundant, and steam is invisible. But though different, they are one, and it is nonsense to discuss which is greater. So it is with the Trinity. All three are God. We encounter them differently, but each holds the full power of God.

DIFFICULTIES OF UNDERSTANDING

A problem with rightly comprehending the Trinity comes from some of our careless definitions. We seek to describe the mystery with words we can understand, to describe God with terms we have created and defined. Yet God is beyond all definitions or words we might devise, and beyond all comprehension our brains can muster.

I feel that the use of the word “persons” in describing Father, Son and Spirit, is misleading, and has confused Christians throughout the ages. It leads us to think of them as a group, even a committee, rather than as one. When defined as a group, the idea of a hierarchy naturally replaces that of equality. Father, Son and Spirit are not persons as we know the term to mean, just as ice, water and steam cannot be accurately discussed without recognizing the behavior of the others.

Addressing the difficulty, the Fourth Lateran Council stated that while there is a distinction between the three, there is a “unity of nature. They are not different realities… all are contained in a certain supreme reality, incomprehensible and ineffable, which truly is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the three together and each separately.” (Lateran IV, 2)

Pope Paul VI sought to further contextualize the use of terms when discussing the Trinity. He does not consider the use of terms such as “persons” as an attempt to “submit the faith to human wisdom, but [that their use] gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand.” (Solemni hac Liturgia 9, CCC 251)

Father, Son and Spirit are essences of God. The presence of one does not signify only a portion of God, or negate the possibility of the others. Any encounter we have with the Father, the Son or the Spirit is an encounter with the complete and total fullness of God. God is never reduced by his manifestation.

If the Trinity were three parts of a whole, then God in heaven would have been somehow reduced by Jesus’ incarnation into the world, and perilously endangered by his descent into hell after crucifixion. Yet God is never reduced by the giving of himself, and though present in many forms and in many places, he is always fully God. Jesus was fully God through all his life on earth. He died as fully God. As fully God he descended into hell. And as fully God he rose again. All the while, the Father in heaven was not reduced by the fact that Jesus was also fully man. The Father was still remarkably present, listening to Jesus as he prayed from the garden. The Father nourished Jesus in his suffering, just as a glacier’s melting feeds the lake, maintaining its strength even in the heat of summer.

We refer to Jesus as the Father’s “only begotten Son.” We also speak of the Holy Spirit as “proceeding from both the Father and the Son.” These statements make us think, was the Father there before his Son? and, were both there before the Spirit? Does this not connote a separation of the essences, making them more of persons, and giving the Trinity a necessary and unavoidable hierarchy?

The difficulty we face with words like begotten, from and before, is that they are indicators of time. Time, as St. Augustine first taught (Confessions, XI), and Einstein eventually proved, is not absolute, and therefore cannot be applied to God. Time is a law of this earth, it is relative to the observer, and it is certainly not as limiting a factor as we once thought it was. “What times should there be, which were not made by thee?”(Ibid) Time is nothing more than a creation of God, just like every other phenomena we observe. It is a measuring device that accurately describes the passage of events in our universe, but it cannot be used to describe God. Ergo, we should not fall into the trap of over-analyzing the concept of Jesus being begotten by the Father, yet being co-eternal with him. Once we eliminate the obstacle of time, we do not find it to be such a conflict.

CONFESSION OF NON-OBJECTIVITY

Before addressing some of the various arguments against the classical view, I wish to make an honest confession of non-objectivity regarding the Holy Trinity. Certain of the heresies, which keep cropping up over time, seem attractive. The Church has always had to fight to keep the doctrine pure. My search, insight and prayer has led me to a belief in the dogma of the Trinity as taught by the Catholic Church, and surely, if the evidence pointed me elsewhere, I would readily admit it. But the truth remains and I must confess that I want to believe it. Therefore, if my arguments seem to come from a positive point of belief, I am not apologizing. My belief in the Trinity, while strong and defensible, cannot be considered truly a priori or a posteriori. Rather, it is upheld by the teachings of the Church Fathers. The Trinity is not something which can be proven, nor even a mystery which can be fully understood. Accepting mystery is a requirement of the Christian faith.

Modern philosophy finds such non-objectivity naïve. But I would argue that a small portion of naïvety, from an epistemological perspective, is wise. As a Catholic, I draw on two thousand years of literature and tradition which support the classical view of the Trinity. I feel it would be naïve to banish the teachings of such wise men and women and search for an answer contrary to their findings. I would rather begin from a place of affirming their concept of truth, and if I truly, prayerfully, and academically find that I cannot agree, then I will make such an admission.

Biblical and theological scholars now days are tempted to be drawn into studying scripture, “Etsi Deus non daretur” (As if God did not exist). Their exegesis then necessarily becomes strictly scientific and historical, allowing no place for revelation. While I am certainly not belittling the use of science and history, if scripture is read from these perspectives alone, it will inevitably lead to a dead end.

Even if scholars do not go this far, a recent trend in Christianity, particularly in certain Protestant traditions, has been to strip away much of the dogma which has come into Christianity after the conclusion of the Apostolic era. They wish to purify their theology by limiting it to the writings of John, Luke, Paul, and the other New Testament writers. However, if we are to believe Christianity, accepting its mystery and wonder, then we cannot discount Jesus’ final gift—that of the Holy Spirit. The inspiration which came upon the believers at Pentecost was not a one-time event. It continues to this day. The Spirit of Truth led the development of Christianity, even through its corruptions. If we believe any of Christianity, then we must believe in the Spirit’s inspiration, and if we believe in the Spirit’s inspiration, then it would be inconsistent to expect the Spirit would not have stayed with us.

The development of trinitarian theology is not surprising. In the fourteenth chapter of his gospel, as well as in other places, John explained the Trinity to the best of his ability with his own limited understanding of the mystery. It was natural for later Christians to attempt to understand the mystery further, and eventually to name it. If we limit ourselves to John’s words, without acknowledging the work of later dogmatists like Tertullian, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Augustine, we do ourselves a grave disservice, and blaspheme the work of the Spirit in the lives of the later Christians.

The interesting thing about trinitarian belief is that it assigns miraculous power to the work of the Holy Spirit. Once we believe in the Spirit’s work, we have to observe the development of the Church and its dogma within this context. Our belief in the Spirit necessitates admission of the Spirit’s guidance of those who immediately succeeded the apostles. Belief in the Trinity therefore supports itself philosophically, if not entirely exegetically.

In his monumental book “On the Development of Christian Doctrine,” John Henry Cardinal Newman offers the following explanation: “It may be objected that [Scripture’s] inspired docu-ments at once determine the limits of its mission without further trouble… The question is whether those ideas which the letter conveys from writer to reader, reach the reader at once in their completeness and accuracy on his first per-ception of them, or whether they open out in his intellect and grow to perfection in the course of time. Nor could it surely be maintained without extravagance that the letter of the New Testament, or of any assignable number of books, comprises a delineation of all possible forms which a divine message will assume when submitted to a multitude of minds.” He goes on to say, “This moreover should be considered—that great questions exist in the subject matter of which Scripture treats, which Scripture does not solve; questions too so real, so practical, that they must be answered, and, unless we suppose a new revelation, [they are] answered by means of the revelation which we have, that is, by development.” (II, 1)

With this background, we can now address some of the arguments which have been put forth against the Holy Trinity. I hesitate to call them heresies, even though the Church has defined them as such, because most often those who held to these views were on an honest search for truth, and in human weakness, failed to find it. Yet if their search was indeed for the face and character of God, then their search would not be in vain, even if dogmatically they may have been in error. As the Second Vatican Council so poignantly reminds us, “Whatever good is found sown in the minds and hearts of men, or in the rites and customs of peoples, these not only are preserved from destruction, but are purified, raised up, and perfected for the glory of God.”(Lumen Gentium,17)

True heresy is when a man or woman attempts to lessen God or promote humanity, done with a will toward selfishness or freedom from moral law, not simply out of a philosophical error. While some of the arguments against the Trinity can indeed lead to such faults, this is seldom the intention of the arguetant. Even heretics must be treated with compassion, for in most cases, their search is valid and commendable, even when the answer is wrong.

ADDRESSING THE ARGUMENTS

Though the Trinity may not at first seem intuitive, it holds up more logically than the arguments against it. Let us examine three of the most commonly recurring non-trinitarian viewpoints on the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Arianism is a hierarchichal view, with God the Father having always existing, being the greatest and only true God. Jesus Christ (only-begotten) was born before time began and while still God, is lesser than the Father. The Holy Spirit, then is subservient to the Son as the Son is to the Father. This view was widespread throughout the early centuries of Christendom. In many parts of Europe and North Africa, the membership of the Arian churches surpased that of the Catholic churches. It was in response to Arianism that the council of Nicea coined the word “co-eternal” to describe the relationship of Father and Son. Though Arianism fell out of vogue for many centuries, many of its tenets have returned in some present day sects, notably, the Johovah’s Witnesses.

One of the main problems of believing in a hierarchichal Godhead such as Arianism, is that it turns Jesus death into a blood sacrifice. Whether it is the Father’s order or the Son’s choice does not really matter here. The point would be that God’s justice had to be avenged for human sin, and Jesus gave himself as the sacrifice to appease God’s anger, just as the Isrealites sacrificed lambs and pigeons to God, and the Romans sacrificed bulls to Jove. Although this type of terminology is widespread in Christian literature, the reality of trinitarian theology is that Jesus’ death is an act of love, more than a blood sacrifice.

Jesus’ death is an act of personal love and mercy from God, the lover, to humanity, the beloved. By being truly God and also truly man, Jesus fulfills the words of the prophet Hosea, “For I desired mercy and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God, more than burnt offerings.” (Hos. 6:6)

If Jesus is less than Father, then the Father sacrificed the Son on the altar. But the marvel that arrises from knowing that Jesus is one with the Father, that he is Very God, is that Jesus laid himself on the altar. He was not a lamb who was sacrificed. He is the lamb who sacrifices himself as an act of love. Jesus is fully God, and shows his love for us by walking with us through the darkest time of our existence—death and descent into hell. Jesus, as fully God, but experiencing the totality of human weekness, freely chose to shoulder the sin of the world. Only by truly being God, does the crucifixion hold its marvel. If Jesus was not one with God, but subservient, then his death implies a character of the Father which is unlike the character we know of him. Of this kind of God, who would order his own Son’s slaughter, the Pope says “one turns away in horror from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.” (Ratzinger: Intro to Christianity, 2, II, 3)

Arianism is an attempt to put God into terms we can more easily understand. While it makes more logical sense than the Trinity, it puts a limitation on God by implying that the Father, Son and Spirit have a relationship similar to that of earthly progeny. It also implies characteristics for the Father unlike that which Jesus attempted to show us.

Another view which was popular in the early days of Christianity was Modalism. This is the belief that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are different modes, or aspects of the same single God, rather than three distinct persons (or to use my prefered word, essences). God could reveal himself as one or the other, but was always God in his completeness. Thus, Jesus was an actual incarnation of the entire Godhead. Tertullian pointed out the implication inherent in Modalism that the Father himself would have suffered on the cross (pater passus) and even descended into hell. While this would truly be a heroic God, it is also somewhat terrifying, for Jesus truly limited himself to the human experience during his years on earth. If the entirety of God was contained in the suffering Christ, then for that time the world was truly in the devil’s hands, and during his three days in the grave, the world was void of God.

Gnosticism is a widely encompassing term, but I wish to address one form of it here because it has again gained popularity in the present day. According to certain gnostic views, Jesus of Nazareth was born a man and through his goodness, became like unto God. He is thus the embodiment of God incarnate on earth. Many people find themselves attracted to this view because it implies that the goodness of Jesus is something toward which we can all aspire. Jesus is divine in that he manifests the true divinity inherent in humanity, and has risen to the level of sitting at the right hand of God in heaven. The novel “The Da Vinci Code” has brought gnostic thought back to the foreground in the last few years, along with attempts to scientifically and historically disprove both the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. However, if Jesus is not in fact God, then ultimately we find ourselves cut off from God. For Jesus is the God who meets us and guides us. If he is only the greatest man, the highest of the Saints, then we are isolated from God, reduced to the Communion of Saints as our only access to the divine.

As mentioned previously, I come from a position of belief. My inquiry, using logical and scientific means, have led me to a belief in Christianity, including a belief in Jesus’ divinity. The Trinity holds Christianity together. Some of these other views of Father, Son and Spirit seem attractive, but if I dispense with the dogma of the Trinity, the rest of Christianity begins to unravel. The Trinity itself may not appear entirely logical, and cannot be proven through argument. But when it is married to the rest of the faith, it is supported by other dogmas and teachings which are logical and intuitive. Believing in the Trinity is the point at which faith is demanded. We observe God’s love, but he also requires us to accept his mystery.

LOVE IS ACT & GIFT

So what is the Trinity? The Trinity is love. It is a God who is both individual being, and relationship within himself, thus being both the act of loving and being loved in one, perpetually existing as the completeness of love.

“Oh Eternal Light, Thou only dwell’st within
Thyself, and only thou know’st thee; Self-knowing,
Self-known, lovest and smilest upon thyself!
That circle—which begotten so, appeared
In thee as light reflected.”
Dante: Paradiso XXXIII

God contains the completeness of parenthood, the completeness of childlikeness, and the complete spirit of Truth within himself. God is love, and love is gift. God is perpetually in a state of giving life and love, not only to us, his creation, but to himself through the unity and relationship of Trinity. This is how the Father begets the son, while still one in being, and how the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Pope Benedict XVI identifies the names of the “persons” of the Trinity in relation to this giving love. Father and Son describe God as an act, not as a stable state. God is Father in the act of self-giving. God is Son in the act of being given. The “begetting” of the Son is not contained by time, but is a constant state of gift. (Ibid. 1,V,2,b)

Love is gift. The blood of the cross is the greatest gift which God has given us. It is this act of love whereby Jesus redeems our sins and requires us to take part in our own redemption, by following his example of love for one another. Through the Eucharist we are made one with Christ’s sacrifice, and our redemption is achieved through his love. Furthermore, seeing the Trinity as an acting embodiment of the fullness of love, Jesus had to rise from the dead, else love in the Godhead would no longer have been complete.

There is no love where there is not act and gift. Love is most truly manifested in the action of giving oneself to the beloved. This is God’s gift to us through Jesus Christ. Only if Jesus is Very God, equal to the Father, does this gift constitute true and perfect love.

God reveals his love to us through countless actions and gifts. We can see the Father’s action and gift profoundly in the beauty and blessings of our world and our lives therein. We see the action of Jesus through his life and ministry, and his gift in his loving death. The Holy Spirit enables our action, and our gift.

GOD’S THREEFOLD LOVE

God has blessed us with three ways of interact-ting with creation. He interacts with us in his fullness as Creator, Companion, and Confidence.

As Father Creator, God breaths life into us, and gives us the phenomenal bounty of his gifts. God, as parent, is in a perpetual state of giving, pouring the totality of himself into every corner of the world. God’s love was so great that creation burst out from that love, and we are the unworthy recipients. Our Creator interacts with us through love, through gift, through beauty, and through grace. Our Creator contains the fullness of parental love, both fatherhood and motherhood. The Creating Love is the first essence of the Trinity.

God also chose to walk among us as our Companion. Jesus took on the humanity of his own creation, experiencing not only the joy of created life, but also the pain, sorrow and suffering. Through Jesus we know that God is always with us, helping us, guiding us through the twisted journey we call life. The profound blessing of Jesus is to know that our God has empathy for our struggles, having lived them himself. Knowing that he is fully God enlivens and sweetens his sacrifice and his example. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” (Heb. 4:15) The second essence of the Trinity is Jesus, our Companion.

But unable to walk with us forever as a man, God sent the comforting Spirit of Truth into our hearts. The Holy Spirit enables us to know God’s truth, to confidently interpret Scripture, speak of our faith, and witness it to the world. “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” (Is. 11:2) We can be assured of the true development of Christianity over the ages, through the guidance of the Spirit. He is more than truth; he is also our Comforter, with us through our trials, gently assuaging our fear. God is intimately with us every day, both as an inspiration to know the truth, and as a comfort when life is too much to bear alone. The third essence of the Trinity is our Confidence, and our Comforter.

The Trinity gives us a glimmer into the breadth of God’s love for us, his creation. God is beyond our comprehension, and we do our best to understand with conceiving of three essences that describe God’s manifestation to the world, but our minds will never be able to fully comprehend God’s love. For love is so complete that it encompasses the entire world and every substance therein. God’s love is present in everything. We see that love manifested sometimes as Creator, sometimes as Companion, and sometimes as Confidence. In the words of St. Augustine, “In that simple and highest nature, substance should not be one thing and love another, but that substance itself should be love, and love itself should be substance, whether in the Father, or in the Son, or in the Holy Spirit.” (De Trinitate, XIX, 29)

Let us embrace God as the mystery which is the Trinity, and trust that the Holy Spirit has given for our knowledge that which we need to understand. Above all, let us see the Trinity as God’s incomprehensible love, pouring out to us as the Creator whose very love necessitated gift, as our Companion, who loves us so much that he walks with us through life, even to death, and even beyond the gates of hell, and as our Confidence to know and proclaim the truth.

Forgiveness

In last week’s article I argued that hell is truly our own choice, and that God’s love constantly reaches out to us, we need only to accept it. Yet this fact should not give us a false sense of ambivalence toward following the rules of morality. Rather, it enlightens us to the radical source of these rules, which is to point us toward fulfilling our life-long desires, answered in the embrace of God’s love. We should be terrified to lose out on this reward. What greater motivation do we need for living with charity, compassion and love?

The punishment for living a selfish life will not be a torture chamber designed by Satan within the allowance of God. The punishment will be an utter severance from Love. The fiery image of hell, however, does not even begin to describe such pain. It will be the complete and total absence of love, community, and the embracing companionship of another. And we will have built our own torture chamber through the selfishness of our sin.

Should we then fear God? By no means, for God wants so desperately to love us. God’s justice must be viewed in the context of his love. Love desires communion with the beloved and if our selfishness does not allow that, then it is just, that we are separated from God. We may fear that our sins are two great for God to forgive, but only if we are still living in the state of selfishness that causes that sin. If so, we are in a mortal state in a perilous separation from Love. But as soon as we turn to God with an open heart, the sin has already been forgiven. No sin is too great to be forgiven, but forgiveness cannot come to a heart which is not penitent. Once that heart is ready to accept forgiveness, which takes humility, for it requires a turning away from self, God comes to us like the Father to the Prodigal Son, seeing him on the road “while he was still far off. The Father ran and put his arms around him and kissed him,” and did not even wait to hear his confession before he had been forgiven. (Luke 15:20)

During Jesus’ life on earth, he did not seek companionship with the sinless, but with those who opened themselves up most to his love, often by seeking his forgiveness. When dining at the house of righteous men, a sinful woman came in, washed his feet with perfume and dried them with her hair. (Luke 7:36-50) This gesture of love touched him more than any boast of righteousness the Pharisees in the house could make. Despite her sinful life, by coming to him, by offering herself to Love’s forgiveness, she is redeemed. Whatever good we may do, we always need forgiveness, and we always need Love. Sometimes it is the most sinful who recognizes most their need for forgiveness, while those who can take some pride for the good they have done, fail to offer themselves completely to Love’s reconciliation.

Nor did Jesus go out and seek the sick that he might heal them. Rather, they sought him because they believed in the healing power of his love. When healing, Jesus always linked not only faith, but forgiveness as the healing power, saying “Your faith has healed you,” and “Your sins are forgiven.” Even with the sick, it takes a turning away from self and pride to seek the healing power of forgiveness.

Within Love there is no pride. Pride only exists in selfishness. Our sense of justice would feel compromised by running out to meet such a prodigal, when we had been wronged so much. This was the reaction of the older son in the parable, but not the father. We have wronged God in the same way, and even in our sorrow we feel we should be made to suffer for what we have done. But Love is not interested in making us suffer. Love is interested in bringing us back. Love has no pride to remember the wrong done. Love has only desire for reconciliation.
We sometimes view forgiveness as a sentence lifted, as if we were found guilty in the court-room, but the judge mercifully suspended the sentence. But the only punishment comes when we remain in our sin. God forgives because his love is complete, and as soon as we turn from selfishness to live in love, we are living in God. (I John 4:16) This is not to make light of our wrongs, which grieve God and hurt ourselves, but to point out that love surpasses all sin. We simply need to accept it. St. Augustine says, God forgives, “not as though he found nothing to punish, but because he found something to forgive.” (Sermon LXIV, 4)

God is heartbroken by our plight. He wants nothing more than to reach out and bring us back into communion with him through forgiveness, but we must allow him to come near us. First we must turn away from sin, for Love cannot be in communion with sin.

Revisiting the tale of the Prodigal Son, when the son had gone out into the world of his sin, the father could not come to him. If he had seen the father following him away from the house he would have traveled faster. If he had seen the father coming after him in the towns of his debauchery, he would have been angry and embarrassed. Even if the father had come to him as he fed the swine as a slave, he would have hidden from him in shame. The father’s heart was never unwilling to forgive. He sat at home longing for the son’s return. But only when the son came back, reaching out for the love he had severed, could the father’s dream of forgiveness come true.

In the same way, Jesus could not give his love and forgiveness to those who did not open themselves up to hear his message. That was why, if it was the sinners who came to him for the gift of love, he gave it freely, but the rich, the proud and the arrogant would not accept his love. He refused his love to no one. He even entered into communion with the Pharisees, when they sought him, as did Simon (Luke 7) and Nicodemus (John 3). The point was that first the sinners, of which we can all count ourselves, had to lay down their pride and offer themselves to the gift of Love.

God longs for our reconciliation, but cannot order us back. We must turn first to him, and then he will come running toward us to embrace us on the road when we are still far off, for we were dead and have come to life; we were lost and have been found! (Luke 15:32)

Heaven and Hell

Previously, in my two part exploration into Dante and the God of wrath, I delved into the theology of heaven and hell.
Part One: A God of Love or a God of Wrath
Part Two: Jesus — Our Virgil
Now I wish to draw a more complete picture of the meaning of heaven and hell, as I see it.

————————————-

We have a great choice—selfishness or love.

Our answer is the ultimate question, which not only affects the happiness of the world, but will determine our fate beyond the grave. While love is humanity’s greatest desire, death is our greatest fear. The Christian religion promises that death can bring us through to love. Heaven is an eternity of love and beauty. But we must earn heaven by living with love now. Love must be given in order to be received. If we wish to receive the gift of everlasting love, we must live lives of giving now.

Selfishness, on the other hand, is the opposite of love by being the opposite of gift. While love opens us up to one another and ultimately to God, selfishness closes us off to others, drawing us inward to a point where we have no one to trust, rely on or hope for, other than ourselves. When we reach a state of total selfishness, we have completely closed ourselves off from Love.

To modern sensibilities, heaven and hell seem mythological. Heaven is a kingdom in the clouds with streets of gold. The souls of the saints flutter around singing “hosanna.” God sits on his throne, bearing a striking resemblance to Michelangelo’s God with white hair and flowing garments who reached out to touch Adam’s hand. Jesus, still looking very much like a Nazarene, sits on his right hand. Hell, conversely, is a dark cave with pools of fire, wardened by hideous, horned demons. The modern reality is that these images of heaven and hell seem to fit better in a story-book than in our realistic expectation of what follows death. Both Christian and non-Christian sometimes prefer to consider heaven and hell as metaphor, and do not think it is worth their worry. It is true that the imagery is metaphor, but heaven and hell themselves are very real, and our exploration into the meaning of love begins to show us what they really are.

Heaven is the perfection of beauty and love. Heaven will be an experience of our soul where love is fulfilled to a degree which we cannot begin to imagine. We will live in a constant embrace of Love. Our desire to possess beauty, which on earth led us into so much wrong, will be fulfilled. All desires will be fully possessed, because, in a state of perfect love, all things will be gift. While we will be constantly giving all that we have, everything else will constantly be being gifted to us. So all things will truly belong to all. This will be true happiness. The paradox of possession is that it can only be fulfilled through giving, and never by taking. Heaven is love, and our closest approach to heaven in this life, is the loving companionship of one another. St. Augustine says “there is no gift of God more excellent than love. Love alone distinguishes the children of the eternal kingdom and the children of eternal perdition.” (De Trinitate, XV 32)

Hell, then, is the perfection of selfishness, where our selfishness grows so deep that love can no longer penetrate. In this state of the soul, God’s gift of love is utterly rejected. What becomes abundantly clear by this definition is that hell is a choice, and not by an abstract formula of punishment for transgressions. Rather, hell is an active choice we are making by prioritizing self over love. Love is always reaching out toward us, but we can choose not to accept the gift, by refusing to give in return.

Pope Benedict XVI identifies hell in relation to humanity’s fear of being alone. Truly what is loneliness but an absence of community, which is love? Our fear of death is a dread for a journey which we can only take alone. “Death,” he writes, “is an absolute loneliness.” “If there were such a thing as a loneliness that could no longer be penetrated and transformed by the word of another; if a state of abandonment were to arise that was so deep that no ‘You’ could reach into it any more, then we should have real, total loneliness and dreadfulness, what theology calls ‘hell.’ It denotes a loneliness that the word ‘love’ can no longer penetrate.” (Ratzinger: “Intro. to Christianity,” II, 2, 3)

Is this not what our selfishness does to us? By relying exclusively on our own capacity, we close off the “You” that would come to us in love. We fear being alone, yet in our selfishness, ego and greed we rush to a place where we will be utterly alone.

Just as love gives us our closest glimpse of heaven on earth, so our selfishness gives us our worst misery, the closest thing to hell on earth. Even in pain and suffering, if we feel the love of one another, our misery is moderated by this comfort. Yet when our selfishness and our pride close us off from one another, we become truly miserable. Ironically however, even when we know we are miserable, it is so hard to turn away from self.

Hell, therefore, is a chosen rejection of love, not a place designed for the punishment of the damned. If a soul chooses selfishness over love, hell will be their fate. If a soul wishes to be with God, and demonstrates it with their own love, God will not reject that wish. Yes, hell is a place of suffering, but it is a chosen suffering, because to be embraced by love, self must be sacrificed.

God cannot reach into hell to save the damned because hell is the absence of love, and there, God cannot go. With Jesus’ final words from the cross we see the darkness of hell grimly depicted. He cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15:34) With his death Jesus descended into hell. With these words Jesus stared at the gates of death, glimpsing the realm where Love was void. God had forsaken hell, because hell has forsaken love.

No soul in hell can ever be repentant, for hell’s darkness is eternal selfishness. When in such a state, there is no desire for change. If we are to experience hell, we will discover that it was our own choice that put us there. I do not only mean this metaphorically, but that we will be actively choosing to be in hell by rejecting love. We see here the awful truth of Jesus’ words, that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake [the sake of love] will find it. For what will it profit them they gain the whole world [selfish possessions] but forfeit their life?” (Matthew 16:25, 26)

There is a third realm which Catholic tradition tells us about, and which we now almost completely tend to discard as mythological: that is purgatory. Yet we should not be so quick to abandon the idea of purgatory. Protestant minister George MacDonald, in an 1890 lecture, said that “when Christians came to the conclusion that three places in the future world were too many, they made the blunder of throwing away the wrong one.” It is hardly conceivable that the moment of death will deliver us immediately into either perfect love or perfect selfishness. Truly, most of us lie somewhere in between. We have not yet learned to love completely, nor have we fully abandoned the will of self. Purgatory is the journey of the soul away from self, toward love. The existence of purgatory is proof of God’s mercy. God wants every chance to gather his beloved to himself.

God is love, and love could not wish any of his creation to suffer eternal hell. With purgatory, we are assured that our opportunity to choose love does not end with earthly death. The journey from self to love will be difficult, but it is a journey we have the opportunity to make. Yet even after death, faced with hell on the one hand, and God’s love on the other, many will still choose self.

The most helpful allegory for me to understand the three realms of the afterlife, was C. S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce.” This book narrates a cosmic bus ride from a dark and dreary city up to a stopping point where the souls are offered various choices. Ultimately the choices lead to the decision whether to continue upwards (to the allegorical heaven) or to return to their city below. The choices all necessitate giving up something precious, whether a possession, or comfort, or security. Interestingly, most of the souls eventually get back on the bus and return. At one point the protagonist asks his guide if the city is purgatory or hell. “For those who stay it was always hell,” explains his guide, “for those who leave it was always purgatory.” (Chap. 5) One of the more interesting characters in the tale is a resident of hell who keeps building a new home further and further away from the bus stop. During his first few years in the city he took the bus up to the point of choice, but eventually, after moving further and further away (deeper into his selfishness, further into hell), he stopped taking the bus anymore. His journey took him in the wrong direction, but it was always his choice. He himself has created the great chasm fixed between the rich man and Lazarus, over which none can cross. (Luke 16:26)

With the common imagery of heaven and hell it is difficult to imagine anyone choosing hell. Rather we view it as a cosmic prison or torture chamber. But Lewis’ book helps to show how it can indeed be a choice. Even in hell our pride may be too great for us to ever want to change. With our pride we hang onto sin even when faced with the promise of redemption. God however, being himself perfect love, has no such pride, and thus, no unwillingness to forgive if we will only ask.

Fearing hell, we have learned to fear God and the punishment he might inflict. But there is no reason to be afraid of God. We should be afraid of ourselves, for our condemnation is always our own doing. God is love. We should run to Love’s embrace as the answer to all our desire. Yet instead we seek to fulfill our desire through selfishness, thus cutting off the Love which offers endless joy.

Heaven is the living experience of perfected beauty and perfected love. There our desires will be satisfied. The lesson Jesus attempts to teach us is that we must give up our selfishness in order to gain this reward. It is not such a strange command, since we all know that true love requires sacrificing our own desires to the desires of the beloved. Shouldn’t this make us all desirous to experience heaven?

What is your choice? Will you believe the greatest longing of your heart, and follow that longing toward everlasting Love by practicing love and charity now, or will you choose the selfish satisfaction of your pleasures and cling to them with the pride and ego that digs the pit of hell?

Jesus — Our Virgil

This is Part Two of my exploration into Dante’s Divine Comedy and the true nature of God. The first part, A God of Love or a God of Wrath should be read first.

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Jesus is the proof that God is love. We may blame God for the suffering in the world, but God’s answer was, rather than denying such pain, to come down from the heaven that is perfect beauty and to share not just human existence, but the worst, most degrading, excrutiatingly painful moments of human existence. By becoming a weak baby, experiencing the joys and sorrows of life from the perspective of humanity, and by willingly taking on the lowest aspects of the human experience, Divine Love not only shows itself, but proves itself, in the person of Jesus.

Jesus came to show us that God was not a distant ruler of humanity, but the Lover of humanity, with us every moment of every day. In Jesus, God became a helpless baby. God worked for a poor family, learning a trade. God studied the history, religion and culture of the time. God journeyed by foot from town to town in an occupied nation. God had friends.

A popular song a few years ago asked the question, “What if God was one of us?” I remember hearing it play on the radio, describing God commuting home from work, experiencing all the menial existence of human day-to-day life. I thought, not only is God one of us, God has been trying to show us that for two thousand years! God became one of us in the person of Jesus. The composer of that song still struggled with the Danteen view of an aloof God, and thus the question seemed to be a marvel. That we can ask a question like “What if God was one of us?” as if it was a new idea shows how much we have gotten it wrong from the very beginning!

Jesus example, his love and his death, shows us what kind of Creator we have. We say that Jesus died for us without further thought. But we must give this further thought. It is quite a difficult statement which centuries of saying has made easier. Jesus chose a painful and humiliating death to show his solidarity with the suffering of the world. What a profound love! Jesus is difficult to believe in because what he did is so far removed from common human nature—to put others first, even unto death. In Christianity, we place our faith in a man who endured humiliation and suffering beyond anything most of us will ever face.

The cross is the symbol of Christianity. We are so used to seeing it that we have forgotten what it is. The cross is the invention of a sick ancient mind, a tool of torture beyond most of our imaginations (though not too far off from some of the tortures described in Dante’s Inferno). At the time of Jesus the cross was a symbol of terror. On the cross pain and despair overwhelmed the mind. Death was a relief so far distant the hours seemed like days.

Crucifixion was also considered the most degrading of executions. The convicted is stripped and their naked body stretched out for the entire community to see. In Jewish culture, this made one “unclean” in just about every sense of the Mosaic law. Images of Jesus on the cross typically give him a courteous cloth around his groin, but the reality of the time was that men were crucified naked to maximize the humiliation of the punishment.

As Jesus, God not only experienced the day-to-day life of humanity, but its lowest moments. God was betrayed by a friend and denied by another. God was ridiculed and spit upon. God suffered. God was executed. God died a painful death, utterly alone. “What if God was one of us?” God was!

Imagine for a moment the experience undergone by Jesus. Imagine looking upon the cross on which you would die—the firm and awful darkness of its wood. Death more certain than if you were staring into the barrel of a firing gun, and a thousand times more painful. Imagine the crippling fear just to see this instrument of your death before you.

Your body is already exhausted from scourging and carrying the cross up the hill as they lay you upon the prostrate wood. As the nail pierces your first hand the shock of pain lashes through your entire body. Your arm is pulled across the beam, yanking your hand sharply against the nail as a second nail is drilled through your other hand. Yet the pain in your hands does not even begin to compare with the horror of the spike which pierces your feet. For a moment you try to relax, but soon your cross is lifted upright, jerking against the ropes that lift it as pain pulsates through your body, pulling against every nail. The pain is far worse than you ever imagined. For the next three hours each breath you take pulls against those awful nails, scrapes your back, already raw from lashes, against the rough wood behind you. If you try to relax your arms it pulls excruciatingly against the spike in your foot. If you try to relax your feet you feel like the skin of your armpits will tear from the weight and strain. There is some comfort in seeing your mother below, but her tears are so painful to witness that you can hardly look at her. Beside her are a few other women who loved you. You look for your friends, the ones who said they would willingly die with you. What a relief it would be to see your companions one last time and feel their support. But of your twelve closest friends, only one stands beside your mother below. The pain of rejection almost surpasses the pain of the nails.

Jesus chose this fate. When he was praying at Gethsemane the night before and the soldiers came to arrest him, he could have escaped. The back-side of the Mount of Olives leads away from Jerusalem, into the desert. Jesus was familiar with the desert and knew how to survive in it. A mob coming up the hill with lanterns and torches, as John’s gospel describes them, would have been seen while they were still rising the hill. Jesus and his three friends would have had plenty of time to retreat on the other side of the hill and escape. Later, when Pilate questioned him, he could have defended himself, but he remained silent. Pilate wanted to acquit him. He could have fled Jerusalem and continued to preach his message. But he chose not only death, but the most painful and degrading death possible, to give his message life, by sharing humanity’s lowest moments. Throughout his ministry, Jesus told his disciples that to die was his redemptive purpose. “Verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

Jesus’ death was not to satisfy a blood justice for our sins, as is often portrayed, but that by dying we might trust the love and compassion he preached: the same love and compassion which God has been giving us ever since our creation. The world suffers because of humanity’s selfishness, humanity’s tireless quest for satisfaction and pleasure, and its unwillingness to share what has been gained. God cannot change the human nature that spawns this folly. To change it would be to take away our free will, and with it, our ability to love. What God can do is to prove how much he loves us by sharing in our suffering, even the suffering of death. This is what it means to say that Jesus died for us.

If we view God as did the poets Dante and Milton, the wrathful God demanding punishment to atone for sin, then Jesus becomes a mediator, standing between us and God’s anger. This theology places Jesus’ death in the context of ancient Jewish sacrificial rites, and against the unity of Trinity. Jesus is a sacrificial lamb. Sin must be atoned for by death. If Jesus did not die, then we all must die. As Dante described, “Ne’er was a penalty so just as that inflicted by the Cross…. that a just vengeance was, by righteous court, justly revenged.” (Par. VII) The problem with this view, still widespread in Christianity today, is that it is entirely inconsistent with the picture of God given by Jesus. If God is pure and perfect love, why would he need blood to satisfy wrath and justice? What God of love would send his own son to slaughter in order to satisfy laws he had created?

Such a doctrine turns God’s love into a kind of currency which can be bartered for through sacrifice, rather than his very nature. Many Christians still think that this is what the doctrine of the cross means, but this is not the case. The Pope himself works tirelessly to dispel this gruesome view of God. “One turns away in horror,” he says, “from a righteousness whose sinister wrath makes the message of love incredible.” Rather, he identifies the cross as “the love that gives itself completely, of the process in which one is what one does and does what one is; it is the expression of a life that is completely being for others.” (Ratzinger: Introduction to Christianity, II, II, 3) This is indeed the description of a God who is by his very nature Love, who’s gift of himself is so complete that the cross was the result. We have here a God who out of unbounded compassion for creation, chose to become one with humanity, showing love by example, and as Jesus subjecting himself to our own worst hours—betrayal, ridicule, torture, and death. (Ibid, II, II, 2)

If Jesus was merely the greatest man who ever lived, or a lesser form of God, then the cross again begins to appear as a sacrificial rite, where God’s justice must be appeased with blood. Jesus, then, as the best man, offers a sacrifice for all humanity. But Jesus was in fact God incarnate. Thus, again in the Pope’s words, “it is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in order to give to him… God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he goes to meet them and reconciles them… The cross is not an offer from mankind to the wrathful God, but the expression of that foolish love of God’s that gives itself away to the point of humiliation in order thus to save man; it is his approach to us, not the other way around.” (Ibid. II, II, 3) Jesus died for our sins, not as a blood sacrifice, but because only by passing through death, even through the gates of hell, can he bear us up with him. This is how he cleanses us with his blood.

How remarkable! Jesus really loved us that much! Jesus is our Virgil, guiding through every terror of our lives, but then he even goes so far as to die with us in order that we, who have earned none of the love we seek, might achieve perfect love. Jesus not only leads the path out of hell, he shares in the suffering of hell, of his own accord, that he might destroy it. Only our selfishness, our egotistical greed, has allowed a place without love—hell—to continue to exist.

It seems ridiculous to believe that God could be so close. We set God in a cloud, not believing he could touch us, and thus we do not need to touch God. Jesus shatters that possibility. Jesus says, yes, it is ridiculous. But love is ridiculous. Love knows no bounds and will defy logic for its be-loved. Jesus says I am love. You are my beloved. This is what I am willing to endure for you!

Dwell on this for a moment. Think about this love that Jesus gave. Contemplate the terror of the cross—the utter hell he endured! Could you willingly endure such horror, even for the sake of your beloved? Yea, not only to endure it for the beloved, but to endure it at the hands of the beloved! What terrible pain of body, and what worse pain of heart Jesus suffered! Next time you feel tempted to blame God for your suffering, realize that God has faced suffering much worse than your own!

In Jesus, God, the Omnipotent Creator stands in solidarity with creation. When Jesus faces the terror of the cross he gives us the courage to stand firm in our darkest hours. This is the love God has for us, that he became one of us. Jesus truly took the sins of the world on his shoulders that day at Golgotha. How he must have suffered, not just in the pain, but to bear the creation he had so lovingly made spitting on him and scourging him. In Jesus, God shows himself to so love the world and pity its suffering to come into it and share its suffering, that by example, the world could have hope.

Let us reflect again on Michelangelo’s two Jesuses. God willingly became the limp, weak frame of the “Pieta.” If we have love, need we fear the wrathful Jesus of “The Last Judgement?” When we die will we face the upraised arm that casts the sinners down to their doom, or will we meet our friend, our own Virgil, the Jesus who walked with us through life’s misery? We all have failed. We all deserve to be punished for our selfishness and rejection of love. We should all be fearful of judgement. But take heart, for the Jesus who judges is none other than he who shared our sufferings and temptations. We fall at the judge’s feet, begging mercy, but he stoops down to lift our chin, saying, “Fear not, it is I.” (Revelation 1:17, Mark 6:50)