Playing Both Sides of the Coin
G.K. Chesterton famously said, “Christianity has not been
tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” He was right.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen often reported that when he came across an
avowed atheist, that person, in truth, didn’t really have a problem with the
Creed; it was a problem with the Commandments.
The phenomenon of atheism, by and
large, is not an intellectual problem; it is a moral problem. I know that there are very intellectual
sounding arguments against God, and that many people have never been trained in
philosophy or theology, so that, even though atheistic arguments have simple answers,
many people simply don’t know how to respond when a professor, for example,
starts to attack their faith.
But culturally, our problem is not
with the Creed, in belief in God; it is with the Commandments, in obedience to
God. A case in point: you will often hear
from an atheist that there could not be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good
God because if that God existed, evil could not exist. The problem of evil, this objection is
called. Yet, that same atheist will also
complain because the Church tells people how they ought to live, even [gasp!]
in the bedroom!
On the one hand, because God has
granted Man a free will, which could be used for evil, He must not exist. On the other hand, because the Church dares
even prescribe (not enforce) a moral way of living, God must not respect Man’s
freedom. Therefore He must be a tyrant. These incongruous arguments will come out of
the mouth of the same skeptic.
The one thing that God never does is
take away our freedom. He has given us a
free will and it is a gift which will not be revoked. All evil and all sin could have been avoided
by the absence of this one characteristic of human beings. But then we would not have been sons and
daughters. And we would not have been
able to love. The quote at the top of
this blog, by Pope John Paul II reminds us that, as human beings, we are made
for love, perfect love, Divine Love.
We can not attain that without free will. Man is not free to choose to love if he is
not free to choose to hate. God has
become one of us, has suffered the wrath of human evil, and He has promised
that, though sin has brought suffering into the world, we never have to suffer
alone.
At the same time, He calls us to be
people of love, and like any father, He teaches us how to love; like any
mother, the Church does the same. He
will not take away our freedom; we are free to obey or to disobey. And He will be cursed for the consequences of
our disobedience; and He will be cursed for asking for our obedience. That is the world in which we live.
That is the world in which He
died. As Christians, we do not belong to
this world any more than He did. But we
must try to sanctify it, as He did. And
perhaps Christianity will be left untried by most people for the rest of human
history. But we are called to live it;
to share it; to be the Hands and Feet of Christ in this world; and to lead the
world to Heaven, one soul at a time.
