Bad Theology

Text for today: Acts of the Apostles 17 xxv-xxxi

Preaching to the Athenians, St Paul states that God is not served by human hands, since He is Himself the source of all life and everything in the universe. Paul then states that God has ordered all people everywhere to repent, as He has fixed a day of judgement and appointed a man to carry out His vengeance on the disobedient.

To support his claim that human beings are God's offspring, Paul disingenuously quotes the Greek poets Epimenides and Aratus, both of whom were speaking of Zeus: a somewhat less sexually inhibited deity than Christ's Father in heaven, though almost equally violent. One might with equal honesty claim that the self-harm of the priests of Baal is a blood-sacrifice that validates the cult of Jesus.

Paul argues that God has no needs. This being true, His love of blood and His obsession with control and punishment must be considered matters of choice rather than involuntary personal crotchets. In virtually the next breath, Paul states that God requires repentance and has marked out a day of judgement. Rather than specifying the day and providing an unequivocal sign to every individual in the world, God has appointed a henchman whom He has raised from the dead as proof of His intentions. God has allowed this resurrection to be directly witnessed only by a handful of barbarian peasants; everyone else must take it on trust. Again, according to Paul's statement not a single one of these little inconveniences results from necessity: each is imposed through the Father's free choice, undertaken in the light of full and absolute knowledge. What this might indicate about God's famously supreme moral status may perhaps be expounded by more charitable theologians than myself.