More on Creation...

So we had an interesting discussion Monday night in my men's group about the nature of God creating humankind in God's own image. Then I read a collection of homilies given by Pope Benedict XVI when he was Archbishop of Munich & Freising during Lent of 1981 that were based upon Genesis; these were published in book form in 1985 and were recently republished.

The Holy Father taught that our creation in the image of God means that, like God, we exist in relationality. God, as Trinity, is a relationship. God created us to be in relationship with God and with each other, to be able to love and receive love in a different way than other creations. The Holy Father's teaching, consistent with the theology of Vatican II that he formed with Karl Rahner and Hans Kung as a recovery of the earliest patristic expressions of faith, was that God created the universe in order to ultimately create mankind so that God could express Godself to us.

An important part of this (important because it is something upon which Catholic and Orthodox theologians agree but many Protestants don't understand or embrace) is that in order to fully receive and express love from and to God, we have a will that enables us to choose whether to accept God's love and to choose how we respond to that love. Along a similar vein, St. Thomas Aquinas posited that natural creations cannot choose whether or not to love their Creator - that it was a part of their nature. As natural creatures, we do therefore have an innate tendency to love God. But we also have a sinful nature that manifests as a tendency to love Self and to place the desiresof Self first. This sinful nature is a part of our very being but was not created in us by God. Through our reason and intellect, with assistance of God's grace, we choose which of these aspects of our nature to respond to.

In my own theological studies, I have seen it posited that each of us is created with an emptiness inside us, like a doughnut with a hole, and we have a deep longing for that emptiness to be filled. God's plan is to fill that emptiness with Godself, if we are open to receive that. If we choose not to be open to the experience of receiving Godself, then we may choose to try to fill our emptiness with other things. Our sinful nature leads us to consider other ways than God of filling the emptiness within us, but the choice is ours (with the assistance of grace).

Where the Fundamentalist model is flawed, and fatally so, is that it allows for a sinner to continue to choose Self with no commitment or response to God other than a single profession of faith. Yes, we do have the example of St. Dismas, who experienced conversion while suffering on his own cross alongside Christ. The proper view of that example is that St. Dismas had a conversion experience and lived a life of conversion for the rest of the short time that he had.