A being that doesn’t want for anything doesn’t want anything. And if there’s nothing it wants, it won’t do anything. It won’t do anything not because it wants to conserve its energy. If there’s nothing it could want, what would it be conserving its energy for?

So imagine a being – the God-Sufficient-Unto-Himself, for example – whose energy was inexhaustible. It’s true He wouldn’t need to conserve His energy, but He still wouldn’t do anything unless He wanted something He didn’t already have. So the very fact of Creation shows that, if there is a God – of at least if there once was – then prior to Creation His set of desiderata-satisfied was incomplete. And that, unless I’m missing something, is a knockdown proof that the God-Sufficient-Unto-Himself is an oxymoron.

What follows from this alone is very little. But if we add – which pretty much all three Abrahamic religions do – that a) God wants something He can’t get without us, and that b) we want something we can’t get without Him, then what we get is c) a voluntary exchange of value for value between jural equals, otherwise known as covenant. Whether that covenant is made through an ancestor, as Jews and Moslems believe, or individually through the Cross, as Christians prefer, this fundamental understanding of our relationship to God remains the same. And any departure from that understanding renders our faith both stupid and toxic. Stupid because it would be a series of non-sequiturs. And toxic because it would have us commit acts, including atrocities, we never agreed to. We’d do them because we’re told to.

This is not to say we couldn’t agree to do as we’re told within certain domains. Civil society requires it. But we agree to the rule of law because we get something out of it. By contrast the static immortality, indistinguishable from death, envisioned by kindergarten Christianity is not what any thinking person would consider a payoff. Nor what any thinking God would. So this absorption-into-the-One talk is empty blather all the way down.

As it happens there isn’t a God. But if there were, let Him be superior to us by any measure save one. He’d have to be our jural equal. And in that sense – which is the only moral sense that matters – He’d be one of us.

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Categories: Philosophy of Religion

Tags: Christianity, Covenant, God, high theology, Islam, Judaism, jural equality