One final point: I identify this God-the-ground of my/our compassion, mercy, love for beauty, and love for people (as well as the source of all the beauty and balance in nature and physics) with the God of the Bible. Conceivably, one might philosophically ‘back into’ a God-the-moral-ground, who is understood to be supra-human in love, forgiveness, patience, wisdom, social law design, commitment to community and the poor, etc—as I argued above that He is—yet do so in explicit rejection of the identification of this ‘theoretically wonderful God’ with the God of the Bible. They might object that the God of the Bible does too much punishment, does it too quickly, and/or uses warnings that are ‘too harsh’ instead of more coddling, etc. To me, there is a huge theological problem here: the implied silence of this philosophically-derived wonderful, “outgoing”, extroverted, redemption-oriented, community-loving God. If this God really, really cares this much for us, it would be hugely dissonant for Him/Her/It/They to not reveal that love, forgiveness, social law, etc and their beautiful Heart to us who would appreciate such a Companion. This is almost at the contradictory level: “I want the best for you, but I will NOT tell you what that is, how to reach it, how to deal with challenges, how to recover from failure and/or treachery, or even THAT I WANT the best for you”. Love beyond some certain level MUST disclose itself (at least at THIS god-level) and teach the creatures how to achieve good/happiness. Without getting into ‘comparative religion’ territory, I want to point out that the closest ‘match’ between the content of revealed religious literature and this philosophically-derived wonderful God occurs in the Bible. Only the monotheistic religious even HAVE a furthest-back God who can ‘feel’ mercy and offer personal forgiveness. [The traditional Eastern religions’ personal deities are NOT ultimates, and the Ultimate in those systems is not ‘personal’ in the sense we are talking about here, capable of love and forgiveness.] Among the monotheistic religions—all of which claim God is compassionate, merciful, forgiving (yet fair, patient, and consistent in eventual punishment), Christianity stands out as having the absolutely most vivid expression/demonstration of this love, compassion, eagerness-to-redeem, and pursuit-of-forgiveness in the incarnation and self-sacrifice of Jesus the Son of God on the Cross for the sin of the world, as God’s aggressive movement toward reconciliation and restoration of fallen mortals. Nothing else comes close to the incandescence, historical concreteness and immersion, and revelatory explicitness of this act. There are many amazing acts of beauty in the OT/Tanaach—Exodus, Return from Exile, and God’s long-running appeals to Judah through the prophets come foremost to my mind (beauty shared between Biblical Judaism and New Testament Christianity)—but the gift/incarnation of the Son is on another order altogether: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His absolutely unique Son…Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world…God made His love evident to us, in that while we were yet sinners and enemies, Christ died for us…”. If there WERE such a philosophically-plausible God and if He/she/it WERE as good-hearted as He would need to be to ground the many brilliantly beautiful and tender hearts I personally know, then there is every reason to believe that His love has been communicated to us in history in SOME sacred literature, and the best ‘candidate’ for that is the Judeo-Christian Bible. The match is too close. So, it won’t do any good to say “I’ll take the Wonderful God of my philosophical construct, but reject the punitive God of the Bible”. You are stuck with this: (a) such a Wonderful God is essentially propelled to communicate its intentions and relate warmly to its moral creatures; (b) such a Community-Loving God is going to reveal laws for community development/healing in a more ‘explicit’ manner than the vagueness of ‘conscience’ and ‘intuition’; (c) such a Redemptive/Good-seeking God is going to communicate what reality, the future, and the human condition are like [and it might not be ‘pretty’, but it will absolutely be helpful and constructive to know where the ‘potholes’ are in the dark]; and (d) such a Universal-Loving God would have to protect this love-letter to us from radical distortion [some, even a lot, of distortion could theoretically be allowed, of course, but not the parts that communicated His goodness of heart—implying that IF the many punishment passages were INCONSISTENT with His love, compassion, mercy, etc, THEN those could NOT have been ‘allowed in’ at that magnitude, NOR be so interwoven with the love message of the Cross. Errors of ‘weights, measures, distance, and headcount’ could conceivably be allowed to be corrupted, but He/she/it could NOT let His message of aggressive love be twisted into something about ‘punishment’, if rescue-from-punishment were NOT a central expression of His redeeming love. Bet on it.
