I had a conversation recently with someone who was very vehement about God’s will. He used as a guide to his life the idea the God doesn’t will anything but love. And of course, if God is love, as the Scriptures teach us, then it makes sense to say that God wills nothing but love: all God does and intends flows from the love that constitutes the Holy Trinity and overflows into the created order.
So my friend concluded that the entire Old Testament, and some things in the New Testament, and probably most of the history of the Church, were contrary to God’s will. This is a really old heresy which has cropped up in many different variations over time. There are so many problems with this idea that it’s impossible to address them all in a short newsletter.
But we can start with what ought to be the very plain fact that all that we know of God, including God’s love, we know only by analogy. God is utterly beyond our comprehension, except as he has revealed himself to us in the teachings of the Church, which include the Scriptures. If by “God is love” we mean that God’s being and acts are determined by the human emotion of love, we will get very quickly into quicksand. If we test the teachings revealed to us in the Church by that standard of human emotion, then we’re already up to our necks in that quicksand.
Another point that should be clear is that because of sin, our spiritual faculties are very much impaired: we’re not firing on all cylinders. Our loves, like all of our appetites and desires, can and do go astray. The fact that we feel strongly about something, or that something calls forth a deep emotional response in us, is not a reliable guide to anything. There are countless intervening and preexisting ideas, habits, and ways of being that come to bear on our thoughts and emotions before we’re even conscious of them. And we’re not used to wading into the thorny bramble of those ideas, habits, and ways of being to determine where their roots lie.
In another article in a different venue, I’ve used the example of my sentimental attachment to the album John Denver’s Greatest Hits. This was one of the first albums I ever bought, and I got it in elementary school after (or maybe during?) a family camping trip to Colorado. If I were to encounter this album for the first time today, I’m not sure I would like it. It has a lot of musical elements that I usually dislike: soppy lyrics, goofy country & western touches, and overbearing string arrangements.
But all of this slips right past my critical faculties when I hear “Sunshine On My Shoulders”: all I can think about is our Coleman pop-up camper, campfires and the smell of woodsmoke, the rushing of mountain streams, and pancakes with bits of campfire ash in them. I’m all in from the first few fingerpicked notes. I never get tired of playing it on my own guitar and singing those words again and again.
It may not do me any harm to allow a few John Denver songs to slip in, but so often music fans simply adopt the philosophical or ethical assumptions that are embedded in many songs or that are explicitly stated by the artists. Despite my attachment to the songs, I would not use John Denver as a guide to anything except some lovely chord changes. And that’s even more true of scores of other musicians and authors whose works I like.
I can’t use my emotional or aesthetic attachments as a guide; I have to weigh them against what God has revealed in the Church. The importance of this process grows as the implications of any attachment become more universal in our minds. If I have some presupposition or position that begins to inform everything else I do, I’d better be sure that I’ve spent time down in among the weeds and thorns to figure out where its roots lie. When we don’t do this, we wind up judging God’s revelation by the standards of our culture or of our own predilections and tastes.
Goodness is not a product of our own manufacture. It’s not made in the USA or anywhere else. It flows directly from God, and when it reveals itself in created things, it does so to call our minds back to the God who is its source. The teachings of the Church are a true fountain of goodness, and we need to spend time getting to know them, letting them challenge our own ideas and desires, and then submitting ourselves to God as he has revealed himself in the Church. We will have to prune some things. We will have to uproot some things. But the result will be worth the effort.
