When
Christ taught us how to pray in Matthew 6, he started, the now titled: Lord’s
Prayer with the words: “Our Father.” These opening words have become somewhat
of a rallying cry for a juvenilized generation of Christians. This generation
has promulgated and perfected the personalization of a deeply communal
religion: Christianity.
The first Person of the Trinity, the
author, and upholder of the universe, the Lord who the Jews so revered that
they dared not even write his name (electing rather to call him Yahweh), is now
called “Dad” or “Daddy.” This generation of Christians loves their “Daddy” and
their “Daddy” loves them back. This soft and cuddly love affair between the
Creator and his creatures is great for selling books and mass marketing a
religion, but this misguided and childish theology can leave its adherents in
the muck of a real existential crisis when pain and suffering crash their love-
fest.
A theology rooted in the belief that
God is our buddy, our Daddy who loves us, can not withstand the deep
philosophical issue of the problem of pain, hurt, and suffering.
Part of the problem lies in our
current conception of Fatherhood. In today’s culture it is all too common to
hear a father say, “I love my son. I do not care about the morality he chooses,
as long as it makes him happy.” This is certainly not the type of father Christ
was talking about when he taught us to pray.
The ancient conception of father was
far different from the one most of us hold today. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Love
between father and son, in this symbol (Father to Christ), means essentially
authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father
uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly,
and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.”
Love is not utilitarian in nature.
Love does not intrinsically and primarily care about your comfort or misguided
conception of happiness. True love, the love that God has for his creatures is
a demanding love. It demands the perfecting of the beloved. The “kindness” of a
Daddy which tolerates anything except suffering in its child is the furthest
thing from the biblical conception of love.
God is love. All Christians believe
it. All Christians have said it. It makes a nice bumper sticker and cute
picture to hang above your toilet, but what does it mean? Plato rightly taught
us that virtue is one. Someone can not be truly kind or loving unless they are
courageous, temperate and just. “Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity
and justice, leads through anger to cruelty.” God is love. God is also justice
and goodness. Love therefore must conform to the justice and goodness that is
God.
True love, the love of God, may
forgive all infirmities and wrongdoings and love in spite of them: but he can never
cease to will their removal. The love of a father must grind on the son to
change him, not into the person the son wants to be, but into the person that
the father knows that the son should be. This grinding, this true, deep, all
encompassing love can bring about great suffering and pain. The Bible reminds
us that we must die unto Christ. He loves us so much that he can not accept us
as we are. He is not Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin. He is not a senile
benevolence that kicks back in the clouds and wishes for you to choose your own
path, find your own happiness, or just be yourself. “His is not the love of a
host who feels responsible for his guests, but the consuming fire himself the
love that made the worlds.”
Much of the suffering and pain we
experience here on earth is the sanctificatory process leading to true
happiness. ‘What we would hear and now call our happiness is not the end God chiefly
has in view: but when we are such as he can love without impediment, we shall
in fact be happy.”
God is Goodness. He wills the
goodness of his creatures, and our goodness is to fully love him. To experience
the true and eternal love of God is to surrender to his commands. We are
commanded to become Christ-like, to put on Christ. That is to say we are to
become like God. Whether we like it or not we are to become goodness. For God
so loved the world that he wants to make us into himself, to make us love.
With that being said we should do
what we like. We should do what makes us happy. Kant gave us the misguided notion
that we should not admire a man for doing a good act if he enjoyed it. The very
saying, “but he likes it”, implies that the action has no worth or merit. This
modern notion, ushered in largely by Kant, has gained credence due to the
rejection of the truth of Aristotelianism. Aristotle taught that a virtuous man
will delight in virtue. The more virtuous we are the more we will revel in
goodness, justice and truth.
The love of God and the love of a
good earthly father may hurt at first. It may hurt way more for some than
other. Why? Read the book of Job. The answer being—We don’t know. But true love
can not accept evil. It must demand change. It demands change so that we can be
happy--truly happy—happy because we are fulfilling our telos. God is love.
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