For me, life is given ultimate meaning by my central belief that a loving Creator has planned and created all things including planet earth with its life and its ecology. I believe that this creation has moved from its primordial and primitive state to its present stage of maturity under the direction of the Creator working in community with humankind as well as his other creatures on earth. When we say, “God is love!” I translate this to mean that our Creator is totally dedicated to bringing about his dream for the future of his total creation. He does not do this in the abstract, apart from his created beings. In fact, in so far as I can perceive it, the plan is that humankind evolve and grow under the guidance of his sustaining hand, until we reach the level of maturity where we can more and more bring about our own future. We will fulfill the dream of our Creator if and when our “arrived future” approximates the planned future—that is the “Shalom” of our Creator’s dream for us.
I do not believe that our Creator manipulates our lives like puppets on a string. I believe that it is part of his plan that humankind have autonomy over its own life and future. It takes an act of commitment on its part to bring its future into harmony with the will of the Creator. This postulates an open future where humans actually have the ability and the possibility of either destroying themselves or bringing about a better and more just and peaceful and humane tomorrow. The only assurance that the Creator gives is that things will work out according to his plan, and he has faith in himself. He has faith that he can create a being who will ultimately make the appropriate decisions to fulfill the Creator’s dream for the future of humanity. This is also the source of the deepest human hope for the future. I too have faith that the Creator has the wisdom, the love, and the ability to fulfill the creative process he has begun—and that he is committed to doing this “with” humankind and not “for” them.
As a Christian, I see in Jesus of Nazareth the picture of what true reality is like. I see Jesus as somewhat like the lens of a camera. When I look through the lens in one direction, I see the picture-taker. As I look into the face of Jesus, I get the best picture of what the Creator is like. He is at least as loving and caring and concerned as Jesus of Nazareth. The Creator’s dream for the future of humankind is at least as good as the dream in the Sermon on the Mount.
When I look through the lens the other way, I see the picture that will be portrayed in the photograph. In our model, this is a picture of what it means to be human. For me, Jesus of Nazareth is the best picture I have of the human in the Creator’s dream. He is the human who stands in every human being’s future to show him what it really means to be truly human.
The great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that Jesus of Nazareth was our “impossible possibility.” He was speaking from an ethical perspective. What he means by this is that Jesus is always for us the human being of the future — the one who stands in our future to show us what we can be.
He is the “impossible” one because he always is so far ahead of us that it seems we can never really approximate his maturity in our daily life and experience. He is the “possibility” because he was human, and he lived a life in our midst that brought him so near that we can always stand beside him and measure our lives by him.
My faith that the ultimate future of humankind and the whole ecology of creation will be better than the present is based on my belief in the Creator and his ability to create that which is capable of fulfilling itself with his help. I also believe that he never helps us in a way that violates our freedom as human beings.
Note: I am very uncomfortable with the male pronouns used for the Creator in this brief paper. I purposely did not use his/her because I do not feel comfortable with that either. We urgently need to develop new, non-sexist pronouns.
Reverend Arthur Schwabe Blog 