is not God the creator of all natural things? So in both cases, God - for them - is the real cause of death.Īnd this is true not only for the death of the body. Some Protestants consider death not as a punishment but as something natural. Augustine interprets the passage in Genesis “If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will die the death” as “If you eat of the fruit of this tree, I will kill you”. God considered all men guilty of Adam’s sin and punished them by death, that is by cutting them away from Himself depriving them of His live giving energy, and so killing them spiritually at first and later bodily, by some sort of spiritual starvation. What is evil? Is it not the estrangement from God Who is Life? 1 Is it not death? What does Western theology teach about death? All Roman Catholics and most Protestants consider death as a punishment from God. This is what we call “Western theology”.ĭid you ever try to pinpoint what is the principal characteristic of Western theology? Well, its principal characteristic is that it considers God as the real cause of all evil. He first introduced a slight alteration in theology which, once it was accepted, he managed to increase more and more to the degree that Christianity became completely unrecognizable. They love only themselves, trying to escape God’s vengeance and to achieve eternal bliss by managing to please this fearsome and extremely dangerous Creator.ĭo you perceive the devil’s slander of our all loving, all kind, and absolutely good God? That is why in Greek the devil was given the name DIABOLOS, “the slanderer”.īut what was the instrument of the devil’s slandering of God? What means did he use in order to convince humanity, in order to pervert human thought? Who can love a torturer? Even those who try hard to save themselves from the wrath of God cannot really love Him.
You see, the devil managed to make men believe that God does not really love us, that He really only loves Himself, and that He accepts us only if we behave as He wants us to behave that He hates us if we do not behave as He ordered us to behave, and is offended by our insubordination to such a degree that we must pay for it by eternal tortures, created by Him for that purpose. To them, God is no more the almighty physician who came to save them from illness and death, but rather a cruel judge and a vengeful inquisitor. Our negation is our vengeance, our atheism is our revenge.īut why do men hate God? They hate Him not only because their deeds are dark while God is light, but also because they consider Him as a menace, as an imminent and eternal danger, as an adversary in court, as an opponent at law, as a public prosecutor and an eternal persecutor. In reality we consider Him our enemy par excellence. We hate God, that is why we ignore Him, overlooking Him as if we did not see Him, and pretending to be atheists. It is rather an aversion toward somebody we know very well but whom we hate with all our heart, exactly as the demons do. They have a profound consciousness of His existence. Men know the gospel, the teaching of the Church, and God’s creation better than at any other time. I have the suspicion that men today believe in God more than at any other time in human history.
But nobody hates anything that does not exist. If you examine men carefully you will notice that their ignorance or indifference is tainted by a deep hate. So how did we arrive at the point of not simply ignoring God, but of actually hating Him? Man’s attitude toward God today is not really ignorance, or really indifference. Sin is the dark cloud which does not permit God’s light to reach our eyes.īut sin always did exist. What is the cause of this waning of men’s love for God? The answer, certainly, is sin. Love for God no more burns in human hearts, and in consequence, love between us is dead, too. Indifference and the spirit of this world prevail everywhere. In practice, most people are atheists, although many of them theoretically still believe. There is no doubt that we are living in the age of apostasy predicted for the last days. Reverend fathers, dear brothers and sisters: + In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Nectarios American Orthodox ChurchĪ reply to the questions: (1) Is God really good? (2) Did God create hell?