Salvation from God

by Richard Dieterle

Religionists are generally given over to an excess which proves their philosophical undoing. One playground for this disposition is in the very concept of God itself. The Christian God is all powerful (omipotent), all knowing (omni-scient), and present everywhere at once (omnipresent). Setting aside omipresence, with its God in the dung heap, and the irrepressible cosmic Peeping Tom, the first two members of the triad alone lead to paradox.

Apparently God chose to create a world in which one thing escapes the exercise of his universal power: human free will (whatever that is). This makes people moral agents responsible for their own actions, and therefore deserving of reward or punishment. Since we have a sinful nature we cannot inherit the eternal reward of the righteous without divine forgiveness. Thus God has sent the Christ (Messiah) to free humanity from the consequences of its own perfidious actions. Here too intervenes that spirit of excess that philosophically damages the whole enterprise: it is not enough that the Messiah be a man as conceived in the various Jewish views of his nature, now he has become more than the son of Man, more than the son of God, now he has become God himself, tramping about the world on an obscure rescue mission like one of the baroque avatars of Vishnu.

God could have created any logically self-consistent world, since he is omnipotent. He could have created a race of people who were perfectly obedient to his righteous will; but clearly such a tribe would have been lacking in free will, and would not have been real moral agents. This is why, so the story goes, that God created people capable of sin. Yet even this isn't necessary. Because God knows all, he is prescient of the consequences of any possible act of creation. He could have avoided creating any individual whose free exercise of will was inconsistent with his own ideals. He knew how Hitler would turn out – all he had to do was arrange that he not be born. God could have constructed a world composed of all and only those people who freely chose to be good. Since these right-choosing people could be souls planted directly in paradise, why have corporeal life at all? The omnipotence and omniscience of God obviates the need not only for a Messiah, but for an earthly existence.

Furthermore, does the Christ really save the world from sin and its consequences? If human free will is essential to our nature, then our souls (as our personal essences) must be endowed with it. Therefore, when a repentant sinner who believes in Jesus as the Christ ascends to heaven, he must retain his free will. After all, we can hardly think of paradise as a place where we loose our free will and become robots: if God disliked moral agents, he didn't have to create free will in the first place. However, given the essentially sinful nature of humanity, how can the exercise of free will in paradise be much different from its exercise on earth? Wouldn't people make poor moral choices there just as they do here? Wouldn't there be crime in heaven, or at least sin? Of course we can imagine that the ordinary people forgiven and saved will try to be on their best behavior in their eternal stay under God's hospitalitas; but given our rather pongid natures, a moral slip-up offensive to God is bound to occur at least once in a while. A sin per year over a million years is a million sins, and such a span they say is but a blink of an eye to God. Imagine someone offending you a million fold every time you blinked your eyes – you would soon repent of such an creation. Imagine too the very slight probability that one soul will wish to assault another in paradise, then multiply this times a million (a very small fraction considering the span of eternity), and the likelihood of heavenly mayhem would approach certainty. For God it would be as if he had expected to receive English gentleladies at a tea party but ended up with a backyard full of riotous chimpanzees instead. So if the Christ's mission was to save us from sin, it apparently fails.

In contradistinction, the consequences of sin are those created by God himself. He set up the morally primitive regime in which retribution rather than enforced atonement was the consequence of sin. The wrath of God falls upon sinners as eternal retribution (excess again); yet it is from this that God has sent himself to earth to save humanity. We end with the absurdity that God found it necessary to send himself sub luna to save his own victims from his own plan. By making God omnipotent and omniscient, and identifying him with the Christ, he becomes an obstacle to his own divine plan; he must placate his own wrath and overturn his own order. This is surely ironic at least, and at most a reductio ad absurdum against the very existence of such a being. In this knowledge lies our true salvation from God.

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