Dear Theophilus, 

You raise some important points in your letter and I would now like the opportunity to address them. You mention the point, which by the way was already raised nineteen hundred years ago that not much has changed. In spite of all that has been supposedly done for humanity, humankind stumbles along the same path that it had trodden over so many centuries. We still suffer, we still war, we still die. So what is new here?

Maybe I could phrase your question in terms of the Church and approach a possible answer along those lines. The existence of the Church poses a question before us: how do we express the relationship between biological life and the life of communion, the Church? The answer that has evolved goes along the following lines. The true life of communion of true persons is linked to the future. Its roots are in the future and personhood is an image of the future. And I can almost hear you muttering under your breath: here we go again with some promises about some uncertain future and meanwhile nothing has really changed. I hear you, Theophilus, but the picture that you paint is not totally fair and I would like to raise a few points for you to consider. First of all, we never live just in the present but any action that we take is always focused to the future, whether short-range or long term. Secondly, I don't think that anybody would argue with the position that there is something wrong with the world that we live in. Since this has not changed, then this indicates that we are to look to the future. And my third point would be that there are changes that have occurred. They may not be as great and as far reaching as we would want, but there is no denying them. The respect for the person, for example, has grown with the advent of Christ.

One objection that has been raised is the question of truth. How can history which is changing tell us about truth? This is really another way of asking how it is possible that the unchanging God can enter the universe and take part in it. From the outset, I want to say that it takes a lot of audacity to forbid God to enter the universe because we have made some rules about what He can and cannot do. The other point is that we have made truth completely materialist, even sometimes those who claim to be Christian. Truth has come to be seen as essentially of two kinds - facts of science or facts of history. This has become the yardstick of measuring and evaluating events or occurrences. However, using this yardstick, we limit ourselves, terribly. God is just as much a poet as He is a scientist or historian.

The truth of history lies in the future in the sense that completion will come with the end of time. Hence, Christianity talks of the fullness of time. The end of history has irrupted into history through Christ's Resurrection and this assures us of the faithfulness of history and the fact that history will be vindicated. This is one of the reasons why the Resurrection is seen as of such importance in the New Testament.

Christ shows that the underlying basis of creation is love and this means a personal basis for all that there is. Moreover, the reason for creation lies not in necessity but in God's will. If God were to cease to love the universe, the universe would cease to be. Since God creates through His will and since Christ is the supreme expression of God's will in that he does what God wills, then we can say that all is made through Christ. For Christianity, truth is not merely an intellectual concept. Truth is a visitation; truth is the formation of a new relationship between man and God. The fall, therefore, is not some transgression of a law but a break between being and communion and being then suffers death. Sin cannot introduce anything genuinely new. What sin does is distort and break up what is. Sin, in a very clear manner, reveals the limits of creation left to itself. The essence of idolatry is man's turning away from God and trying to find the ultimate basis for existence in man himself. The fall, in its essence, consists of refusing to make being dependent on communion but transforms being into separation. A dying being is a contradiction in terms; it is a falsification of truth.

I want to talk about the principle of relationship as it applies to creation in general. I am going to talk about science and it is important to make something very clear. We should not use science to prove the existence of God. The importance of science lies in the fact that science studies the universe. If the universe is created by God, then we should see consistency between the created universe and the theology and teachings that we hold to be true. What twentieth century science has shown is that relationships are central to the laws of physics. Thus, if we were to talk about velocity or position, two important concepts in physics, we would quickly see that these are relational concepts. If you want to speak about the velocity of a particle, you have to relate this to some reference. If you want to speak about the location of something you have to specify the co-ordinates. Thus, we see that relations are at the heart of physical reality. There has been an interesting development in quantum mechanics, which is a modern branch of physics which blurs the distinction between the observer and what is being observed. This can be easily illustrated with reference to a simple measurement. Suppose that we wanted to locate a very small particle such as a molecule. In order to "see" this particle we have to send a beam of light. But, the molecule is so light, that when it interacts with the beam of light, the light would move the molecule and thus make it difficult to define the position of the molecule accurately. We, the observer have changed what we are observing and this makes objective knowledge hard to attain.

We see that relation is fundamental to science, as well. I need not remind you about one of the most famous discoveries of the twentieth century - the Theory of Relativity. Interesting as this discovery may be, the relations talked about in physics fall short of what we are referring to. The relational concept talked about in science is not fundamental because it does not affect the "isness" of things, that is, their ontology is unchanged. Nothing fundamentally changes in the molecule when we talk about its relational existence with the observer. The relations or better, communion, talked about in Christianity is quite different because it changes man in a very fundamental manner. Man is saved in that he now is given a gift of eternal life, life that exists in eternity and is based on communion with God. There is something else that I want to raise at this point. A statement is sometimes made that there is no salvation outside the Church. This sounds like a very exclusivist and intolerant view. How can we say that those outside the Church are not saved? How can we consign those of other faiths to suffering and exclusion from eternal happiness? The statement that there is no salvation outside the Church does not make this statement. What it says is that salvation can not be an individual, separate matter. You are saved in community. Who is in the Church and who is not is not that easy to judge although history has some sad examples in this area. In the Church, we transcend exclusiveness and ontological necessity. At the heart of the Church is communion and this again implies, persons.

The point of communion has something important to teach us about truth. It is always important to be clear about the words that we use. We often hear arguments between atheists and believers about the existence of God and yet, when we look more closely, we see that these discussions usually end in an impasse because both sides are arguing the same thing. The atheist says that God does not exist; the theist would agree with this position. God does not exist because He is the basis of all that exists. The atheist reminds us of something important: God is not like everything else in the universe and when we start to talk about Him as if He were, we are talking about an idol and it is important for us to become aware of this. We cannot 'prove' the existence of God because in order to do that, we must use logic and the basis of logic is God. We are in a quandary here and this is the importance of the term faith. Faith does not mean believing what all the evidence contradicts; faith means trusting. This is the essential part of the meaning of faith. It means to live in trust of the promises of God. An atheist may know the teachings of the Church better than many believers, but this does not help him. It is only when he puts these teachings into practise, when he starts to trust, that the situation changes. Remember what was said many years ago. Each argument has a counterargument and the matter goes on and on without resolution. But what is there to challenge a life well lived?

There is much to chew on here, Theophilus, and I will leave off until the next letter.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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