Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
“All things change, and we change with them.”Please note that this blog spans a broad period of time. The intervening years have brought many things into my life, including divorce and remarriage. As such, some older posts reference a relationship which is no longer active. In context, however, the portrayal is accurate.
For many reasons, I have chosen to let entries such as this one remain in the overall continuity of the site.
Stayed up late again last night, past midnight. Had a very long debate with Sandberg about the nature of God.
Somehow along the path of my life, I’ve become a universalist — I believe that all of creation will be reconciled and reunited with God, that God loves and cares for what He* has made. And I prefer to believe in a God that will reach out and gather creation back to Himself than one who lacks the power to save what He loves.
The conversation wandered through all sorts of topics from Free Will to Sin to Judgment to Damnation. If Heaven is the reconciliation of the creator to creation, then Hell is separation from the creator.
I prefer to believe in a God who wants desperately for Hell to be empty. And how can God, a personal and loving creator, wants something desperately but not have the power or the will to accomplish it?
Many people say that universalism is complete heresy.
But I think it’s heresy to suggest that an omnipotent God and creator is somehow subject to creation, that creation can subvert the will of God and His desire for reunion.
I’m a Christian. I believe in Jesus Christ. But I also believe that God — the God that I know — reaches out to creation in different ways. If I can believe in other solar systems and the life that must logically exist there, then I have to believe that the God who created them must love them and has demonstrated that love in very different ways than what we know here.
And if I believe that God has done that throughout the rest of creation, then why would he not do the same throughout this world, throughout the cultures and religions that are scattered everywhere?
And is that love limited to humanity? Is God’s revelation and love unknown to the teeming life that shares in His creation with us? Who knows what mythologies are whispered in the anthill, on the banks of rivers, or inside the rabbit hole?
I believe in a God, a creator, and that He loves His creation and would never allow it to be separated from him. I believe that time is a process, that history is the path that, ultimately, leads back to that reunion.
The conversation tapered off before I could stumble through my “Watership Down” anthropomorphism when it became apparent that we weren’t really talking about God at all, but something else entirely.
* No, I’m not saying God is male (or female). I believe God is larger than (or perhaps outside) the concept of gender, among other things. So back off.