Is God Good?
by Rebecca Bynum (Aug 2006)
If our culture is to regenerate, and regenerate it must in order to face down Islam over the long haul, then certain core cultural concepts must be revived, and first among these is concept of Goodness. Goodness is pure value, nothing else. It is not time or space dependent. It stands above Reason and gives Reason order. Goodness may also be viewed as a final level of intellectual integration or primary organizing concept. Moving downward from Goodness flows Mercy and from Mercy flows Justice and from Justice flows Honor and from Honor flows Duty. Thus, if the concept of Goodness is lost, all that flows from it likewise becomes meaningless. Without a firm grasp on the transcendent, man is thrown back upon himself, a victim of directionless scientististic dialectic, without purpose, without reason. And with nothing beyond himself to live for or to strive for, man becomes a pitiable creature vainly endeavoring to elevate his lusts to some level of profundity. We see this absurd drama everywhere. The message is, the meaning of life is found in the pleasures of the flesh (money and sex), which of course holds no meaning whatever and creates no life at all.
Man, it seems, is dropped into this world as a questioning stranger born in tension, fear and doubt. No other creature struggles over the purpose of life, no other creature experiences moral conflict. Significantly, no other creature but man bears the gift of language or can express its will with all the subtlety language provides. Each human utterance, each thought, is an expression of will. Thus man seems to be provided with freedom of will above and beyond that of any other living creature, and is endowed with a moral sense and the ability to recognize value other creatures show no sign of possessing.
On the other hand, according to Islamic doctrine, God (Allah) is most expressly not good, and thus the lesser organizing concepts, Mercy, Justice, Honor and Duty, to continue our example, are perverted to their opposite meanings. It is crucial we recognize this truth, for each culture is using the same words, but with opposite meanings, and this is creating great confusion especially among those eager to see good (and thus harmlessness) in Islam.
The question then is, in modern industrial society, can the concept of goodness survive minus an intrinsic identification between the concept of the absolute, infinite and eternal Good and thus with God? In other words, if goodness is reduced to a mere relativity, can it remain good?
In modern Christian doctrine, there is a great stumbling block to the recovery of this concept of God as Good, and that is the atonement doctrine. According to this train of theological thought, God required the sacrifice of His sinless Son in order to propitiate His wrath against fallen mankind. It was only through this, the penultimate sacrifice, that total redemption from sin was thought to have been made possible. Jesus took on the sins of the world, was sacrificed, and thus became the path of redemption. His exemplary teachings were thereby reduced to an adjunct to the centrality of His sacrifice.
Matthew 13:24-30
In this parable, two things are clear. 1) God does not create evil, though he does allows it and 2) evil is a temporary phenomenon. This is entirely consistent with the much, much older foundational document of Judeo-Christian thought put forth in Genesis and quoted at the beginning of this piece: God is good and his creation is also good.
I believe the evil with which modern man attempts to indict God is in reality that of his own creation. I cannot believe, nor will I ever believe God is a source of evil, or that He is angry or vengeful or filled with wrath requiring appeasement through the sacrifice and suffering of the innocent. These are anthropomorphic concepts of God entirely unworthy to be included in modern theological thought. It is my firm conviction the atonement doctrine must eventually be abandoned if Christianity is to recapture the truth in and through the life of Jesus. The religion revealed by Jesus during his life must triumph over the religion that was developed about Jesus after his death. I believe that only in this way can we revive the concept of Good and of God as the personification of the ultimate, eternal and infinite Good.
For without a unified conception of Good, our lives are lost and our civilization is doomed.
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