The Divine Universe

People have some funny ideas about forgiveness, and some of the oddest centre around God’s forgiveness of our sins. There is the idea that suffering is God’s punishment for sins. The Jews assumed this (although there is a strong challenge in the story of Job), and we also encounter the idea in Hindu beliefs about ‘karma’ and reincarnation. Then there is the idea that we can be reconciled with God by a suitable payment. Ritual sacrifices are still not unknown in some religions. And there is the idea that we need a mediator between us and God in order to find reconciliation. Some religions appoint special officers – priests, witch doctors and so forth – to negotiate with God or the gods. Most of these notions appear in the Old Testament. The New Testament offers fresh ideas and considerable diversity, but Jesus seems to have rejected all these notions.

An important feature of this subject is the debate about the relationship between sin and suffering. Common sense tells us that we bring much of life’s misery upon ourselves by making bad choices, but a lot of our suffering and hardship seems to bear no relationship to past behaviour. Are earthquakes and malaria a consequence of sin? I think not. In fact I think that the relationship between sin and suffering is mostly accidental and entirely natural. Pain is not a rod God has made in order to beat us into submission.

Christians believe that even God suffers; he suffers in and with us, but I’m not convinced that this is entirely due to human sin. Suffering occurs in sensate creatures due to imperfections and maladjustments in nature. Nature is in the process of becoming perfect. The process of adjustment and development causes pain. Though it may end in joy, change causes discomfort, and we are constantly in a state of change.

The whole universe is in a state of change, of growth and formation. The universe and we humans are moving, in God, towards perfection. We are becoming what we truly are. Saint Paul likened God’s creative action to birth: difficult and painful, especially for the mother. And in this case the mother is God. The universe is growing up and learning to live more richly, and the process is painful. However, as with childbirth, joy succeeds pain.

We can speak in this somewhat anthropomorphic way of the universe because, in humankind, the universe possesses the qualities of human nature. Humankind is not an added extra; our feelings are cosmic feelings. And we are not the only feeling things on Earth, and Earth may not be the only sensate planet.

Almost everyone believes that, in some measure, we can make choices: that we have a degree of free will. Because of our complexity and intricate involvement with the wider environment, our choices are limited. But we are not mere cogs in a machine. Sometimes our choices bring pain and sometimes pleasure, and sometimes both: pain first and then pleasure or pleasure first and then pain. And by our choices we are engines of change; to some extent we govern the course of events.

So what is sin? If we deliberately do something that gives us advantage but will hurt someone or something else, it causes a disruption, a maladjustment in the working of nature. The process of becoming perfect is set back. Relationships get strained and dysfunctional. All that generates unnecessary pain, as we’ve learned through thousands of years of experience. But sin is never accidental; it is, by definition, a deliberate choice. That is what we mean by sin.

Benign change, however temporarily painful and disruptive, is irreversible; sin is not. Even though damage may have been done, things can be put back into shape; relationships can be restored. If there is forgiveness, including self-forgiveness, there will be healing and reconciliation.

God shares in this process. He will not interfere with our ultimate freedom to make bad choices or good ones, but our pain and pleasure is a tiny manifestation of something intense within the divine nature himself. God suffers everyone’s pain because God has feeling in us. “Whatever you do to the least, you do it to me.”

God is not the author of pain but he is the author of forgiveness, and his forgiveness does not wait; it precedes the offence. We wait to repent and be reconciled, but God’s forgiveness is already there, independent of anything we do. Forgiveness is an innate divine quality, eternal, unchanging, but we can embrace it or not as we choose.

I said that it is not only humankind; it is the whole universe that is in the process of becoming what it truly is. God eternally accepts and forgives cosmic imperfection, its unfinishedness. He is patient while the universe, with its quantum uncertainty (we could call it ‘cosmic free-will’ perhaps), finds its way towards perfection, inspired by God’s loving desire and creative energy.

We can also tentatively speak of God anthropomorphically because, in humankind, nature manifests dimly and imperfectly qualities of the divine nature. Human forgiveness dimly manifests God’s forgiveness. The liberation and joy that forgiveness brings dimly and imperfectly reflect God’s absolute freedom and perfect joy.

Reconciliation with God may be something we have to strive to embrace; we may have to suffer pain before we are moved even to seek it, but it is not something we have to beg for or need a mediator for or have to pay a price for. Jesus explained this very vividly in the parable of the prodigal son. (Luke 15:11-32) It is all there in that beautiful story which is, by ordinary standards of justice, quite outrageous. The ending of the story even includes some of the weird ideas people have about sin and forgiveness.

Mediators may help in reconciling people, and there are stories in the Bible where holy people like Moses and Abraham intercede with God for others. Even Jesus said, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” (Luke 23:34) But these stories are for our information. They tell us something about God; they don’t refer to a necessary requirement (if you don’t have an advocate you won’t be pardoned). In human reconciliation there may be a need for restitution or there may be some other price to pay. Our bad choices may cause us to suffer; they may cost us dearly, but that is not God’s wish; it is the contingent workings of nature. And there is no need to beg. God’s longing for reconciliation is far greater than ours. “See, I stand at the door and knock.” (Rev. 3:20)