Six Questions Toward Emmanuel - for doubters...no problem with a creator but it's this Jesus thing?

I posted most of the answer to each the six questions to keep it brief.

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Even if there's cosmological evidence for a creator, how do you make the leap from that to Christianity?


When I was teaching at Georgetown University, I was privileged to direct a physics and philosophy student on an Ignatian retreat. He was exceptionally bright and good-willed, and had the capacity to express what was on his mind in a very straightforward way. At the beginning of our first conference he said, “Could I ask you something very elementary which has been bothering me for several years? I don’t have any real problem with the idea of a Creator, because I believe that finitude is intrinsic to time and the origin of the universe will ultimately have to have a cause beyond a universal singularity. God is not a question for me. But it’s this Jesus thing. I’m not sure I see the need for Jesus and I’m not sure I really get it. Can’t we just stick with a ‘Creator outside of space-time asymmetry’?”
I thought about it for a couple of minutes and said to him, “The ‘Jesus thing’ is about the unconditional Love of God. It is about God wanting to be with us in a perfect act of empathy; about God wanting to save us unconditionally and to bring us to His own life of unconditional Love. A Creator alone, indeed, even a Creator with infinite power, could be tantamount to Aristotle’s God. Once he has fulfilled His purpose of ultimate, efficient, and final causation, He is detached from the affairs of rather base and uninteresting human beings. The God of Jesus Christ is about the desire to be intimately involved in the affairs of human beings made in His image and destined for His eternity – and that makes all the difference.”
He said in reply, “This all seems a bit too good to be true. I would like the Creator to be the God of Jesus Christ, but do you have any evidence that this is not just wishful thinking – evidence showing that this is really the way God is? Is there any reason why we would think that God is loving instead of indifferent?” I responded by noting that it would be better for him to answer six questions rather than have me give an extended discourse, because the six questions could reveal not only what was in his fine mind, but more importantly, what was in his heart – what he thought about love, life’s purpose, others, and His highest imaginable state of existence. If he answered these six questions (from his heart) in a manner commensurate with “the logic of love,” then the unconditional Love and divinity of Christ (i.e., Jesus being Emmanuel – God with us) would be self-evident.

1) What is the most positive and creative power or capacity within me?

Love by its very nature unifies, seeks the positive, orders things to their proper end, finds a harmony amidst diversity, and gives of itself in order to initiate and actualize this unifying purpose. This implies that love is naturally oriented toward perfect positivity and perfect fulfillment.
Furthermore, love would seem to be the one virtue that can be an end in itself. Other virtues do not necessarily culminate in a unity with others whereby doing the good for the other is just as easy if not easier than doing the good for oneself.


2) If love is the one power that seeks the positive in itself, and we are made to find our purpose in life through love, could God (perfect Being), who created us with this loving nature, be devoid of love?

If the Creator were devoid of love, why would that Creator create human beings not only with the capacity for love, but to be fulfilled only when they are loving? If the Creator is devoid of love, why make love the actualization of all human powers and desires, and therefore of human nature? If the Creator is not loving, then the creation of “beings meant for love” seems absurd. However, if the Creator is love, then creating a loving creature (i.e., sharing His loving nature) would seem to be both intrinsically and extrinsically consistent with what (or perhaps better, “who”) He is


3) Is my desire to love and to be loved conditional or unconditional?

The evidence of this desire for perfect and unconditional Love manifests itself in our frustrated expectations within relationships. Have you ever had this experience – where you thought a relationship (or friendship) with another was going quite well until little imperfections began to manifest themselves? In situations like these, there might be slight irritation, but one has hopes that the ideal will soon be recaptured. But as the fallibility of the beloved begins to be more acutely manifest (the other is not perfectly humble, gentle, kind, forgiving, self-giving, and concerned with me) the irritation becomes frustration, which, in turn, becomes dashed expectation: “I can’t believe I thought she was really the One.” Of course, she wasn’t theOne, because she is not perfect and unconditioned.
This gives rise to the question, “Why do we all too frequently expect our beloveds to be perfect and expect ourselves to be perfect to our beloveds if we did not have a desire for perfect and unconditional Love in the first place?” The reader must now apply this question to him or herself. If you did not have a desire for perfect and unconditional Love, why would you be so dissatisfied with imperfect and conditioned manifestations of love in others (even from the time of childhood)? If you sense within yourself an incapacity to be ultimately satisfied by any form of conditioned or finite love, then you will have also affirmed within yourself the intrinsic desire for unconditional Love, which leads to the next question.


4) If my desire for love can only be ultimately satisfied by unconditional Love, then could the Creator of this desire be anything less than Unconditional Love?

A simple response to this question might run as follows: if we assume that the Creator does not intend to frustrate this desire for unconditional Love within all of us, it would seem that His creation of the desire would imply an intention to fulfill it, which would, in turn, imply the very presence of this quality within Him. This would mean that the Creator of the desire for unconditional Love is (as the only possible fulfillment of that desire) Himself Unconditional Love. The reader here is only affirming the inconsistency of a “Creator incapable of unconditional Love” creating a being with the desire for perfect and unconditional Love. This is sufficient for affirming the presence of unconditional Love in the Creator.


5) If the Creator is Unconditional Love, would He want to enter into a relationship with us of intense empathy, that is, would He want to be Emmanuel (“God with us”)?

If God is truly Unconditional Love, then it would not be unreasonable to suspect that He would be unconditional empathy; and if He were unconditional empathy, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that He would want to enter into an empathetic relationship with us “face-to-face” (“peer-to-peer”) where the Lover and beloved would have a parallel access to the uniquely good and lovable personhood and mystery of the other (through empathy). A truly unconditionally loving Being would want to give complete empathetic access to His heart and interior life in a way which was proportionate to the receiving apparatus of the weaker (creaturely) being. It would seem reasonable (according to the reasonings of the heart), then, that an unconditionally loving Creator would want to be Emmanuel in order to give us complete empathetic access to that unconditional Love through voice, face, touch, action, concrete relationship, and in every other way that love, care, affection, home, and felt response can be concretely manifest and appropriated by us. If God really is Unconditional Love, then we might be presumptuous enough to expect that He might be Emmanuel; and if Emmanuel, then concretely manifest in history. If this resonates with the reader’s thoughts and feelings, you will want to proceed to the next question


6) If it would be typical of the unconditionally loving God to want to be fully with us, then is Jesus the One?

As reasonable and responsible as the answers to the above questions might be, they can be considerably strengthened through historical corroboration, that is, through experienceable data which concretizes the reasoning given immediately above. What kind of experienceable data could accomplish this corroboration? Data which at once manifests (1) God in our midst (Emmanuel) and (2) God as Unconditional Love. It so happens that a remarkably powerful experienceable event did at once manifest and synthesize these two corroborating data, and showed the above reasoning about the unconditional Love of God to be both reasonable and experienceable, and to be mutually corroboratable through concrete experience and the logic of love. This remarkable experienceable event is Jesus Christ.


search Father Robert Spitzer, he has more than one website.