Today I was listening to a recent Bishop Barron Word on Fire podcast. He was talking about St. Thomas Aquinas, one of his favorite topics. He was explaining Thomas’s argument that God created everything out of love; that creation was an act of pure love. Why was it a creation of pure love? Because God is self-sufficient. God needs nothing from what He created, and therefore His only motive could be love.
The belief that God is love and that all of God’s creation is born of love makes all the difference. Every tenet of the Catholic faith and Christianity as a whole, every moral teaching, every particular about the nature of our souls and our purpose in being, hinges on this belief.
Now obviously I’m nowhere near as smart as St. Thomas (or Bishop Barron, for that matter), but I can’t quite see how this argument, which I’ve mulled over for a long time, holds up. Even if God needs nothing from what He created, why does it necessarily follow that His motive for creating everything is love? Maybe creation is an experiment or a test. Perhaps we ascribe to God love as His creative impetus merely as a projection of our hope that love is indeed the ultimate good. But perhaps in the true reality, the full reality known only to God, something other than love is the primary good — something we may regard as not so good, or even something we have no conception of at all.
Being self-sufficient does not of necessity require everything one creates to be created out of love. Does it?
I would love this to be true. I would love to be convinced it is true. I would love to know the argument that proves it to be true. If you can shed light on it, please let me know!
In the meantime, I am logically stuck. I cannot satisfy myself rationally that God’s creation is of necessity motivated by pure love, that God is of necessity love itself, and that everything that follows theologically and morally from that premise is of necessity true.
There is, however, another reason to be believe God is love: God Himself told us so. Christianity is a revealed religion where in the fullness of time Jesus Christ took on human form and told us point blank, in no uncertain terms,
“God so loved the world, that he gave up his only-begotten Son, so that those who believe in him may not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
All throughout the Old and New Testaments we hear this theme of God’s pure and infinite love for us and all of His creation.
Accounting for the nature of God through rational thinking is not possible for me, but perhaps paradoxically, accepting God’s Revelation is. Was Jesus who He said he was? Are the words of the prophets and the Apostles and the other Biblical authors reliable and true ? I think the arguments in their favor are much — much — stronger than those standing in opposition.
My purpose here is not to delve into those arguments; there are many superb resources for doing that. My purpose is only to suggest that determining for yourself the truth of God’s Revelation is paramount. If you are struggling to maintain your faith, seeking greater confidence in Revelation is a path to strengthening it. If you are without faith but seek it, then you must first and foremost come to know Christ. Then and only then can faith be on the firmest possible footing.
