challenge the Christian idea of God
Letter to the Editor
This letter responds to Mike Dillon's statements on January 31, 2000 regarding God and our notions about Him. Briefly, Mike weighed in on the occasional debate on premarital sex with the typical individualist position of mutual respect for opinions, and then invoked images of suffering and deprivations, attempting to prove a God non-existent.
Mike makes some valid points. The problem of evil in the world has caused considerable debate since at least the second century A.D. It has been difficult for people to accept a good God who, though being omnipotent, allows evil. I would, however, redirect Mike's question. The God that most persons think of when they make this evils-exist-thus-no-God theory is not the same one whom Christians believe to have been incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ. The sort of God these people hold as their paradigm is not one that any sane person would wish to have over for lunch; such a god is entirely dominating, wilful, and selfish. It does, in fact, remind us of the pagan predecessors to Christian belief. If such a God did exist, Mr. Dillon would not want Him to.
The Christian God is strange. We hold a God high who came down as low as it is possible for God to be—in human form. Thomas Aquinas holds humanity as the lowest among rational creatures; our lives are inherently full of the suffering that Mike wishes to do away with by means of the god he doesn't believe in. I would venture to say that I don't believe in God either, if He is as Mike would have us believe; rather, He is compassionate enough to bear with humanity in all of its foibles, sins, and sufferings so much so that He let us crucify Him as the result of these evils we perpetrate. God's message to us is one of absolute acceptance, shown fully on the cross, allowing even our worst evil while still loving us. We commit evil, the nature of our existence inflicts the rest, and this strange God of ours loves us anyway, forgiving us even when we crucify Him.
What are we to think of such a God? Augustine says that our "hearts are restless until they rest in Him." God's assured and purposeful love asks (not demands) only to be fully accepted, and in consequence to turn our lives in a radically different-oriented direction. A daring direction in which premarital sex and the rest matter far more than anyone's opinion if we are to make a response to the divinely-originated love.
Nathaniel Hannan
Sophomore
Dillon Hall
January 31, 2000
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, February 1, 2000
