Many people sincerely search for God. The multiplicity of religious beliefs as well as agnosticism and atheism indicate that the evidence is not clear. Why doesn't God make things clearer, so that those of good will reach broadly the same conclusions?
Answer:
This is a great question, and a difficult one. In fact there are two questions in it: What has God done to reveal himself to us in a way that is accessible to us? And, why does he not ‘make’ everybody ‘reach the same conclusion’? So the first question concerns revelation, the second one is about human nature.
God revealed himself to us through one of us, Jesus Christ. It was not only through words and various action of Jesus, but through his whole life as a person. Still more, it was not just a person, but the Word of God made flesh, a divine person. Christ points to the Father, because ‘he and the Father are one’. As Christ is sent by the Father, so he sent out his disciples to preach the word and to love one another as he had loved them. He gives to the Church, which is his Body on earth, the Spirit to guide its members and lead them to the fullness of truth. This is the history of revelation and salvation – in a nutshell.Could this have been done in a better way? This is a speculative question. Surely we can come up with lots of improvements ‘on paper’, but in practice, God’s plan of revelation and salvation did take into account that we are free creatures. A lot of things might have been done otherwise, but humanity acted in such ways that we bear some consequences for what our ancestors did. God has always respected our freedom. So it seems to me that we need to have a closer look at our condition and why it is that we can search for God ‘in good will’ and come up with such a variety of answers.
So let us think a bit about human nature.
The coming of Christ also revealed to us what it is to be properly human. We are made in the image of God, and always strive to achieve a better likeness with God. The image of God in us is our ability to understand and know (and therefore to choose) and to love. This is, however, a process. Nobody is born a ‘complete’ human being. We grow, develop, learn and in doing this we have the promise of the help of the Spirit, provided that we do search. Not everybody is able to do this. Some people ‘of good will’ are oppressed by all sorts of real problems, such as hunger, war, etc. This is where it is not so much preaching the Word by the Church as the works of love that are crucial. We cannot help those who suffer by preaching only. We need to preach by our love, by actively helping them. Other people of good will are restricted in their way of thinking by the culture or society they live or lived in. Think about the reaction of the people to whom Jesus preached: "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" Think about the persecution of the early Church by the Romans, etc. etc. I think that a vast majority of those were actually people of good will, who at some stage of their lives stopped searching for truth. They were comfortable with what they already had, not realizing, I think, that the truth is bigger than them and thier ways, and that the search for truth never ceases. God respects this. The whole beauty of human nature is that it always grows, and always remains free to reject the love of God. Not that the rejection itself is something beautiful but that in our free choice we are like God. We can exercise our free choice so that we reach ultimate freedom by being united with God, or we can choose to confine ourselves in our creatureliness, by rejecting God’s love.
I’m not sure whether this provides a sufficient answer to your question. Probably not, as no sufficient answer can be given ‘in the abstract’. Concrete individuals had their specific history of life, in which they either found the truth, or found some truth, or rejected the truth. Why did it happen? We would have to look at each of them separately, as we can give no common reason just by analyzing our common, human nature. The final point I want to make is that people can reach certain truths about God on various levels. Let me illustrate this: if I attack you in order to convert you to Christianity, I’ll probably fail to do it, but you are most likely to realize that the God you would rather believe in has nothing to do with violence. In this, you would actually reach a truth about God. At the end of the day, was it not Job who, being not a member of the Chosen Nation, was actually the only one who in the Old Testament is said to talk truly about God?The Catholic Church's understanding of how God has revealed Himself to us, and of how that revelation is handed on from generation to generation, is presented in Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum). For the text, click here.
Thank you for the question and for the answer. It is a perplexing question. In the 20c there has been a lot of thought about precisely this question, especially by Christian thinkers. It is good to plunge into this thought, because it helps clarify the questions. The Church has formulated her own answers - have you read 'Nostra Aetate' which is a sketch of the Church's attitude to other religions (it is a Church document, available for free on the Vatican website)?
ReplyDeleteThe key points, I think, are two.
1) the church acknowledges (in her official teaching) that salvation can come to those in other religions. God's will for salvation is universal. The spirit is alive and active everywhere. The Church happily acknowledges that there are things that are 'holy and good' (to quote) in other religions.
2) then there is a question of why God allows a plurality of religions. This is a hard question, but somewhere at the centre of it is an issue about what it means to know God. Consider this: you can be baptised and not know God - the fact that people call themselves Christians does not guarantee anything. There are no guarantees at this level - it is not just a question of being by chance at the right place at the right time, or of signing on the dotted line. God reveals himself most clearly in the face of Christ. But this is a truth that is not just 'out there' like another piece of information. It has to be known as something within us, transforming us, with us all the time. God tries to capture human hearts; not to just get them to sign up to a manifesto. If you want to capture someone's heart and not just compel their mind, is it often better to speak quietly, even ambiguously, in order to call the person out of themselves. Is it so hard to believe that this voice speaks all the time to people who have no explicit knowledge of Christ or the Church? or even call themselves atheists? The church herself does not think so. I don't find it hard to believe.
It is indeed a fascinating question! Thank you for your great comment.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit: neither do I find it hard to believe that people can experience God in their heart, or be saved, even having no explicit knowledge of Christ. Was it not Cicero who was described by Tertullian as ‘a soul by nature Christian’?
I agree that the question of knowledge of God lies at the centre of this issue.
I think, though, that the stress on the knowledge of God that you made in your comment has to be spread out more evenly, that is, it is important to experience 'God-as-revealed' in our hearts.
The revelation is important because we can only know God in so far as he reveals himself to us. In a sense we may speculate that, if there was no revelation whatsoever, some of us (and probably very few) might have come to the conclusion that there is ‘God’, but the word itself would be rather vacuous. We can only attach certain meaning to it on the basis of the revelation, we can know that we experience the (revealed) Trinity because God told this to us that he himself wants to make his home with us (and baptism, in which one is made a part of the Body of Christ, can be a good start on this).
If revelation is not as important, than we may start printing Aristotle’s ''Metaphysics'' or Cicero’s ''De Amicitia'' with the symbol of the cross on the front cover....
So why don’t ‘those of good will’ (having heard the proclamation of the Gospel) ‘come broadly to the same conclusion’?? ....
Thank you for your reply! I take your point about revelation - of course it makes or can make a big difference if you know what happened. People are 'intellectual animals' - it makes a huge difference how they feed their intellects.
ReplyDeleteI would also add a few more points though.
1) 'revelation' is a much more obscure idea than I think you allow. It cannot just come down to propositional knowledge of the creed - i.e. the relations in the Trinity - though that is involved. It must include at some level a sense of something like an invitation. That invitation can come without explicit intellectual knowledge.
2) there is also a question about what you think is the core of Christian truth. Intellectually it may indeed be the Trinity. But there would also be a case for saying that the core of Christian truth is something of a quite different kind. Something like 'it is better to suffer eveil than to do it' or 'he who loves his life will lose it'. I think that lots of people do come to something like that conclusion or similar conclusion. Take, for example, Plato's idea that the evil person is someone who is primarily to be pitied rather than despised. That seems to me to contain profoundly Christian intuitions. There is plenty more like that cf Simone Weil on the ancient Greeks.
3) I would add, that what is being looked for outside Christianity - when we're talking in this way - is not the whole Christian truth. It may well be something more like a preparedness or openness to God. It is something like 'faith before faith', or openness to values not of our own making. Some of the stories in John contain profound meditations on this kind of subject. The man born blind, for instance, entrusts himself for healing to Christ before he has any idea who Christ is. It is not perfect faith, but it seems to be enough.
4) I think your last question is a new question in the discussion. Why don't the people who hear the gospel all respond in the same way? Partly because people are just different from each other, with their own freedoms. Partly it is indeed hard to fathom. What your are talking about is what Christ is talking about in the parable of the sower. That parable states what occurs, but does not EXPLAIN anything. But how many answers do we expect to have? Pascal says tht there is plenty of darkness alright, but there is ENOUGH light for faith.