Yeah, God is an absolutist

You can look at our relationship with God as a rigged game, but think about it; there's no alternative to it

Here at Precipice, as well as in some pieces I’ve written for Ordinary Times, Medium and Late in the Day over the years, when writing about how I only came to an authentic, grown-up Christian faith in the last decade or so, I allude to a number of final sticking points that hung me up and delayed my saying yes.

A biggie among them was this scenario, which, despite my kicking and screaming, turns out to be the way things actually are: God gave us this marvelous gift of free will, but we’re inevitably going to use it to do something that incurs His ire. Then we’re going to need a savior to give us an alternative to living in that permanent state of banishment from His presence, and we each have to publicly proclaim this savior as such, and if we miss the boat . . .

Here’s the thing: yes, God is an absolutist. What. kind of God would he be if he weren’t?

Envision this scenario if you will: A kid is born into a family in which her parents, without being boneheaded or heavy-handed about it, mostly by example, instill high ethical and moral standards in her. Since respect is one trait that gets cultivated in such an environment, the child grows up holding her parents in very high regard. Then, when the young person is, say, fifteen or sixteen, she sees her parents behaving according to much more lax standards. Maybe they start getting drunk on a frequent basis, or there are hints of infidelity, or financial shenanigans. But they still conduct themselves like they think everything’s under control.

When out adolescent brings this up, the parents say, “Hey, you know, we’ve found that we don’t have to be so demanding of ourselves. We can loosen up, and life still goes along okay.”

Two things are going to register for the child: one, that these behaviors are not in fact going to end well, and, two, that her respect for them has greatly diminished.

Now, extrapolate that to the level of our ultimate creator.

In a piece I wrote for The Freemen News-letter in the run-up to Thanksgiving, I said this about God creating us:

Each of us is unnecessary. In fact, the entirety of creation is superfluous. Our creator is self-contained and only brought about the universe in order to reflect the beauty of His self-contained nature. Our role is a bit different from the rest of creation, however. We’re the only creatures capable of understanding that the objects of our senses are beautiful. We’re also the only beings capable of creating yet more beauty with the raw materials we find. 

That imago dei kind of creative power we’ve been given is a pretty awesome thing. Think about one component of it: imagination. The first step in any of our creations is imagining. And think about what kind of trouble an imagination untamed by the cultivation of virtue can cause. Does cause, throughout the world, every day.

An ancillary question to the one above is, What kind of God would give the human being infinitely ranging free will and imagination except not quite, except beyond admittedly wide parameters, but parameters nonetheless. We’d have a lot of leeway, but we’d still be automatons.

And don’t forget this component of the situation: the absolute love of God. If we’re sullying his creation, we’re not - at least yet - fit for His kingdom, and that’s where he desperately wants us.

So we need that intermediary, who is human, yet does live according to perfect standards.

So it is a rigged game. But that’s precisely because God is willing to give us a gift with which we’ll break his heart.

It looks different on the other side of yes.