CHAPTER ONE

THE PILLARS OF ALL THEOLOGY

THERE are two fundamental Truths of Christianity which will be laid down as the pillars of all theology. The first is that God is Love: the second that the will, though not the actions, of men is free.

God is Love

The statement is not that God is loving, i.e. capable of love, but that He is Love, i.e. incapable of not loving. The Love of others is His Nature and dominates all His thoughts and actions. All other emotions of the Almighty, His anger, His jealousy, His compassion, His vengeance, are but the varied reactions of His Love under different circumstances. When He is most angry it is still the Anger of Love: when He scourges every son whom He receives it is only a manifestation of His Love, arising from a longing that in this way His son may come to honour.

Not only is God passively unselfish, He is also actively benevolent. It is not enough that He should not seek His own happiness: He must also be ceaselessly engaged in seeking that of others.

The most dangerous and devastating of all lies is the thought that God created the Universe for His own glory or pleasure. The mistranslation of Rev. 4,11 "For thy pleasure they are and were created" corrected in the R.V. to "Because of thy will they were, and were created" is a reflection of the bad old theory of the divine right of kings, and has led to the absurd contradiction that a God who is Love yet created the Universe for His own pleasure, and so was selfish.

The truth of course is that The Almighty needed nothing to give Him pleasure, but was already completely happy in