David Ancell / Friday March 05, 2010
In the last ten years, I’ve been a more avid reader of theological and spiritual books. It wasn’t always so. In fact, I found a lot of the spiritual books I read in the first few years of being Catholic at best bland and at worst depressing. This is one reason why I now keep a list of good Catholic reading on my web page. There are a lot more good Catholic resources than there used to be, but the bad ones are still out there.
One of the most depressing things that I read (I don’t remember where.) was this article that said something along the lines of “The ancient people saw the order and complexity of creation, and they reasoned that there was a God who created it all.” In other words, God has never truly revealed himself. We just kind of guessed at one time that there might be a God.
A more subtle statement was made in a group in which I participated some months ago. It goes somewhere along the line of “If it weren’t for our patriarchal society, we would be calling God ‘mother’ instead of ‘father.'” For this to be the case, our knowledge of God would have to be purely a product of society. At the very least, this person was saying that God cannot reveal himself in any terms other than our societal framework. If this is true, then I have to wonder why we would worship such a wimp.
The proponents of such ideas would have to deny the authenticity of Scripture. In other words, nothing in Scripture could possibly have happened as it is stated. Alternative explanations had to be derived. The problem with the alternative explanations is that they were all based on speculation with no long-lost documents discovered to substantiate the “real story.” There are sources available outside Christianity that speak of Jesus and the early Christians, but none tell us the “real story” of what happened instead of the Resurrection.
Once I realized the highly speculative nature of the skeptics, it opened the floodgate for me to know and believe that God’s revelation, and our salvation, is God’s initiative. God is the one who wanted us to know and love him and be with him forever. He wants this more than we want it. In fact, he wanted it so much that the second person of the Trinity took on human flesh, which he will have forever.
Category: Doctrine
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