Love for the Transcendent<\/p>\n
It is difficult to understand what could bring a person to say \u201cI love God.\u201d What, then, could possibly bring someone to say \u201cI love the Transcendent?\u201d<\/p>\n
As a little boy walking home from Nativity grade school in St. Paul, Minnesota, I once wondered how classmates -usually well-behaved little girls- could tell the nun teaching the class that they loved God. When I return to St. Paul, I frequently pass the intersection -Juliet and Prior- where I had that experience, when about seven or eight, of wondering how people could say that they loved God. My experience returns to me. What were they thinking? Would they feel sad if something bad happened to God? It was so troubling that I kept it in mind as one of the many things I would have to figure out for myself as life went on. I would be embarrassed ever to ask anyone \u201cWhy do you say that you love God?\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, now, in my mid-eighties, I have figured out what I could mean by saying that I love God. Even with the mature, and correct, notion of love as willing the good of the other, I could not understand how I could will good for God who needs nothing. The answer, which should have been obvious to me for a long time, struck me this week after Epiphany when we have been reading the first letter of John. On Thursday we read in John 1:4 \u201cFor the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments.\u201d<\/p>\n
The good for God is what God wills. God wills the good of His human creatures. So, aiming at the good for humans is aiming at God\u2019s good. God has willed that the human goods be attained by humans ordering their lives in accordance with rules for attaining these human goods. These rules are the moral rules and can be considered His commandments. So, by willing to obey the moral rules we will God\u2019s good. That is loving God!<\/p>\n
Consequently, a Divine Command theory of morality is not interpreting God as a moral tyrant who leaves no room for human freedom. On the contrary, a Divine Command moral theory is an explication of what it means to freely love God. For we are free to will to disobey His commands. But we are also free to will to obey His commands which is to love Him.<\/p>\n
What does this have to do with the Transcendent? In my efforts to characterize the Transcendent as the moral authority, I am working towards explicating how we can speaking meaningfully of loving God even when \u201cGod\u201d is understood in the most austere philosophical terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Love for the Transcendent It is difficult to understand what could bring a person to say \u201cI love God.\u201d What, then, could possibly bring someone to say \u201cI love the Transcendent?\u201d As a little boy walking home from Nativity grade school in St. Paul, Minnesota, I once wondered how classmates -usually well-behaved little girls- could … Continue reading <\/p>\n <\/span> Love for the Transcendent??<\/h4>\n