I read a Facebook profile recently “Don’t try to understand me, just love me.”
When I read that I wondered what life would be like if that was God’s Facebook profile. I think life would be pretty much what we see.
There are three other options presented to us for a potential God’s Facebook profile:
1. Religion - “Don’t try to understand me, just obey me.”
2. Nothingness - “ ” (well actually there would not even be a profile - How Facebook came into being would then need to be explained.)
3. Relativism - “Ho, Ho, Ho… What do you want for Christmas?”
None of these three could possibly result in the Universe we see and experience.
Original cause and ultimate effect, as I have already said, must be relational.
Faith is different to the other three, it is relational. Because no one has faith in a concept, or a ritual, or an equation, or in a theory. We can only have faith in a person.
But you may say, “not so, I have faith in gravity, that gravity will keep me on my feet when I leave my office to walk to my car, and gravity will keep my car on the road all the way home.” But that is not faith, it is merely expectation, and you would have no claim of injustice should it not happen - since gravity did not shake you by the hand and promise to keep you grounded. It makes no promise at all; and no one guarantees it. You can only have faith in someone, particularly in what they promise.
We take a lot for granted, gravity is one of the many essentials we believe will continue. But we believe this because all we know and expect is order - but we have no reason to expect order and even less to expect order to continue. In fact a truly reasonable man will expect entropy, not order.
And just because a thing has happened one way for 17 billion years is no reason, in itself, to expect that it would continue to happen in the same way, or even to happen at all.
We are creatures who expect a lot, take a lot for granted… that is not faith, and it is not very reasonable or rational.
Faith has substance, it is grounded on a great rock in a stormy sea. We can only have faith in a person, in what a person promises. I have faith that my wife will remain true to me till I die. I have substantial confidence in her promise (not mere expectation) and I have a real claim should it be broken.
When it comes to the option of Faith one would think that there are many faiths to examine, but there actually are not.
Only a handful of Religions can also be called Faiths, because only a handful of them offer promises to their adherents, and almost all of those promises can be shown to be fruitless with very little effort. Religion on it’s own, as we have seen, cannot explain anything close to original cause or ultimate effect.
Let’s get back to God’s Facebook profile: “Don’t try to understand me, just love me.”
Well Love is a kind of understanding, amongst other things.
In the bible a man was said to “know” his wife at the consummation of their wedding, and there is a lot of other kinds of knowledge gained before that. Think of how a mother knows her baby, or a captain knows his crew.
Certainly Love is a kind of knowledge, but it is a relational knowledge; and intra-personal knowledge. I would argue that Love is the fundamental kind of knowledge. All other forms of knowledge are dependent on it.
A doctor make be brilliant but his brilliance will easily land him in jail, without Love. In fact it is easy to see that loveless knowledge is extremely dangerous.
Moral development is the first development in a child; for a very good reason: All the others, physical, intellectual, perceptual,… are all dependent on moral development. Imagine a person who developed intellectually, or physically without any moral development at all! That person you imagine would be a psychopath.
I don’t think that mathematics is the Universal language at all. It may be a Universal language, but Love is the Universal language.
So perhaps God’s Facebook profile should read “You will understand me, if you just love me.” I would like to suggest that if you truly examined this Faith option as an explanation of original cause and ultimate effect, not only will you understand as much of God as you possibly can, you will also understand as much of everything and everyone else as you possibly can.
There is a reason why real, sacrificial romance is so much more attractive than theories and equations. Real romance is what we are made of.
So what Faith presents God with this Facebook profile?
I can only think of one.
In the Christ of the New Testament, Jesus, we have real, tangible and personal promises. In Him we have the ultimate person making the ultimate sacrifice and achieving the ultimate goal through the ultimate miracle: the ultimate effect, 100% relational. In the Trinity we find the original cause to be 100% relational too.
In the God of the bible we find that the ultimate love story is true… which gives us great hope for all the lesser love stories we live each day.
