By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Some thoughts about the “fundamental option” idea so popular among liberal theologians. The idea is that it is the overall pattern of a person’s life that saves or damns him, a pattern of love of God, on one hand, or rejection of God, on the other.
So far, so good, but the problem is that the idea tends to be construed so as to imply that particular acts don’t really matter much, if at all — in other words, that the fundamental option is not embodied in and lived out in particular acts that either accept or reject God. If you go far enough with this, you can end up with an absurdity like someone saying to himself:
“Well, granted that I commit adultery and fornication at every opportunity, that I have arranged any number of abortions (made necessary by the above activities), that I hate my enemies and do everything in my power to get revenge on them, etc., still — I’m not rejecting God!”
A variant on this way of thinking would be to ask how anyone could be damned for an isolated “indiscretion.” The answer is that no one is damned for an isolated “indiscretion” (meaning sin). But what isolates the sin? Obviously, repentance and forgiveness. But if you don’t repent, then the sin simply stays with you — it is as if in every instant of your life you are continuing to commit that same sin, even if you never actually do it again.
A more precise way to look at it is this: The law of God is not something somehow external to God, that is, a set of rules which God arbitrarily imposes on His creatures (governments do this — God does not). The law of God is the order, the harmony, the rightness which God gives to His creation in the very act of creating it, not something imposed on it.
That order is built into the very structure of all beings, and is grounded in the reality of who God is. God is the pure act of existence — He does not have being but is being, and what He wants for every creature is for it to have being, and hence share in God’s life, to the full extent of its capacity for having being. What God wants for us humans is for us to become fully human, to become the image of God which we are.
Acts which darken or destroy that image frustrate God’s loving will for us and in doing so they reject God. The law of God is God. When we disobey God’s law we reject it and hence we reject God. To say that we can reject God’s law without rejecting God is saying that we can reject God without rejecting God — a contradiction. As Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
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For Christians, there is no place for the notion of a career. When we choose a career, we choose work which we hope will aggrandize us, make us wealthy, or give us power over other people — that is, give us an advantage over our neighbor.
A Christian should have a vocation, not a career. To choose a vocation is to choose a kind of work which you hope will best enable you to serve your neighbor, not lord it over him.
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Benjamin Wiker does an excellent job, in his book on Darwin (The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin), in showing that the latter, in formulating his theory of evolution, was strongly motivated by the desire to produce an explanation of the world that leaves no place for God and requires no recourse to a Creator to explain its coming to be and its growth and development. Many scientists even today, some of them very brilliant ones (I’m thinking especially of Stephen Hawking), share this obsession.
In order to free the universe from its Creator, those who suffer from this obsession need to see it as a self-contained, self-explaining system which requires nothing beyond it to account for it. But there seems to be more than the idea that the Creator is not needed. There seems to be an attitude that since the universe is so autonomous (if we have autonomous individuals, then why can’t we have an autonomous universe, too?) that God has no business meddling in it even if He exists.
But is the universe self-contained? Gödel’s theorem, whose logic I cannot even pretend to follow, seems to say that no system can fully account for, and ground itself, no system can be self-contained and self-explained. That includes the system made up of all things. This is equivalent to saying, as St. Thomas did, that no contingent being can explain its own existence, for which it has to depend on another or others, nor can the totality of contingent beings be its own ground.
In order to ground it, you need a reality of a wholly different order which needs no ground because it is the ground — that is, transcendence, God. The universe cannot be self-contained, no matter how much certain scientists, with their allergic reaction to God, might want it to be.
A further important point is that, when these people imagine God “meddling” in the material universe, they are imagining a being external to the universe involving Himself in its workings. They are right to reject such a God because no such being exists. But the real God, Creator of all things visible and invisible, is not external to the universe. If He were, He would be simply another being alongside the universe.
God is a reality of a wholly different order, beyond but not outside the universe. He is, as the Baltimore Catechism told us old people many years ago, everywhere. That means that He is intimately involved with and active in the creation and preservation of the universe throughout time. His presence is part of the reality of the universe, and needs to be taken into account even, perhaps especially, by scientists. The universe is the work of God’s self-giving love, and in giving Himself to the universe, God endows it and all things in it, according to their capacity, with the need to reflect that love back to Him.
The universe glorifies God simply by being. Since the relationship to God is an aspect of what the universe is, scientists trying to understand the universe need to see and appreciate that reality. For the universe to in some way return God’s love means for the universe as a whole and each creature in it to seek, whether consciously, as in the case of rational creatures, or unconsciously, to become fully what the Creator created it to be.
There is, I would say, something in all living things which drives them toward the perfection of what they are, and it really appears that in some mysterious way every species seeks more and more perfect solutions to the problems of living that face it. That means that every creature actively seeks to become better adapted to the world and more perfectly what it is.
Just how this happens is quite mysterious, though it seems plausible to me that in part at least it involves the DNA actually modifying itself, not just passively being shaped by natural selection, a process which, as the 19th-century English Catholic biologist St. George Mivart demonstrated, cannot possibly account for a large part of the evolution of species. It is this process of active evolution which scientists need to be exploring and researching, but it is anathema to most of them because it is really inconceivable outside the active presence of God, so, in order to avoid God, they constrict science within the parameters of natural selection.
Those who want to see the universe as self-contained and in no way involved in a relationship to its Creator do so, I suspect, because they want to see themselves that way. The obsession is a rejection of love and a turning inward on themselves.
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The latest nuttiness about “gender” and its bearing on who gets to use what bathrooms would be entertaining if it didn’t have such obvious potential to take away even more of our liberties, especially freedom of religion, and if it didn’t manifest such obvious insanity on the part of those obsessed with it.
First of all, everyone who comes into this world is a man or a woman — period! There are no other possibilities. Of course, some people experience emotional conflict or confusion in relation to the gender that they happen to belong to, but that doesn’t change anything.
A homosexual man, for instance, is still a man. A transgendered man is still a man, even if he has had himself carved up by some ethically challenged doctor to look (sort of) like a woman.
Things like this are deformations of one’s manhood or womanhood, they are disorders, but they do not take it away the underlying order. This whole “gender” ideology is still another manifestation of the existentialist idea that we create ourselves, that we choose who and what we are, when the truth is that we receive ourselves as a gift.
The people who are promoting “gender” ideology need to be placed in a nice home where they will be unable to harm themselves or others.
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(© 2016, George A. Kendall)
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