Logic Times

Soul-Making

Posted by Aslan.  Comments (1)

God created us because love - which He embodies - is missing something when it is not reciprocated. He could create a robot that walked around saying, "I love you, God! You look marvelous today. Don't tell me, that's a new toga. Love you, big fella!" This would be meaningless.  Love requires freedom and freedom requires a true choice.  God now has a tricky objective - how to grant freedom and, at the same time, reveal His plan. If He reveals His plan by sitting in your rocking chair and lecturing you on theology, He erodes and or destroys your freedom. C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters says this best: “Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo...”

But to successfully woo Man is only part of His objective.

God wants something from you. This is not a free ride, this is a challenge. He is soul-making and you are hopefully a soul that will be made into something hinting at the divine, worthy of your inheritance. What is soul-making? It is something that happens when you are confronted with fear, doubt, evil, horror and pain and you choose, the divine road rather than the mundane.

We are created with free will so as to hopefully exercise a choice to love and honor God. This desire for the sharing of love with another "free agent" has value inasmuch as the sharing takes place with another "theological sentient," which I will define here as successful acquisition of God-like qualities (i.e., honor, courage, justice, temperance, love, etc.).

When you loved your turtle as a kid, that exchange of love was certainly one way. The turtle possessed none of the characteristics that make for a rewarding exchange of love. A dog, on the other hand, possesses some of the human characteristics of love and thus the relationship is more rewarding - the dog's loyalty, recognition, affection, etc. are the traits that start to establish a tangible relationship and make it fulfilling.

God seeks to share love. In some sense, those free will created beings who choose to love and honor Him do so in proportion to their Sanctification (a Christian term for becoming more like God). The more Godlike traits possessed by this theological sentient (admittedly we can never come near to actually being Godlike), the more this moral free agent brings value to God.

So if courage, as an example, is a desired trait, it begs a question: what is the source of courage? Courage is defined as: "The state or quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face danger, fear, or vicissitudes with self-possession, confidence, and resolution; bravery." Without exposure to moral and natural evil, one cannot fully develop the trait of courage. What about compassion? Compassion is defined as: "Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it." Here, too, without moral and natural evil, compassion cannot develop. What about fidelity? "Faithfulness to obligations, duties, or observances." The underlying theme to this trait is a resistance of temptations and enticements to abandon duty. Again without the prevalence of moral and natural evil, the concept of fidelity would be incomplete.

So it is true that the intersection of hardship/evil and free will gives rise to most characteristics of the divine, of a theological sentient. A world without moral and natural evil would be as counterproductive to the shaping of God's children, to the inheritors of God's kingdom, as a football training camp without any physical activity would be counterproductive to creating football players. This does not suggest God created the evil - evil came into the world with Man; however, perhaps He did not scrap the project because something of value is emerging from the difficulties.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Dan Hallagan. All Rights Reserved.