Michael Roden's Blog

The ancient Christian doctrine of deification has been a major topic of research for the past hundred years or so, and the subject is rapidly increasing in popularity, with many books and articles rediscovering its prevalence in ancient Christian theology, medieval theology, and even Western Reformed theology. Every major Christian theologian wrote about how the intended purpose of God to make us gods, from Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen in the Second Century CE to Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and even St. Augustine.

It was a fundamental teaching around which all other Christian doctrine was based. In subsequent centuries, deification continued to be a major Christian teaching through the influential Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, the Western scholastics Anselm and Aquinas, Gregory Palamas, and even into the Reformers Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s.

For most of these patristics, deification stood at the end of our human journey as the culmination of Christian salvation. It was the entire reason for many Christian rituals (such as baptism and the Eucharist) and it stood behind many of the most hotly debated council decrees, even though deification itself was always presupposed as God’s true purpose for human existence: to make humans gods.

Being Gods argues that humankind received its godhood before it ever became human. That is, our godhood preexists our current temporary embodiment. It was fully given at the point of our creation in the divine image and likeness of God, but our likeness to God was lost in the fall from our original grace. This is Origen’s argument, that human beings were created first as spiritual beings, minds or logika, before they ever came to earth, which was a result of their fall from original godhood, but now their earthly existence becomes a benefit to return this original knowledge so that they can learn about and remember their original divine state of being.

Other subjects addressed in Being Gods include how deification was essential to Christian salvation as its culminating experience, how the Bible suggests that human beings have preexistent souls and how these souls are united with God forever, and how a realized eschatology was another ancient mediating image for a restoration of the perfect creation. It accounts for soteriology (or salvation), Christology, cosmology (or creation), morality and valuation, eschatology (or apocalypticism), and when and how human beings realize immortality and sonship to God.

Being Gods presents a complete Christian scriptural theology based on a full restoration of the divine nature, whereby human beings are saved by returning to the godhood they were graced with at creation. A full restoration of the divine nature does, as modern commentators stress, render humans more human (i.e., more humane, more compassionate, tolerant, and understanding), but Roden reminds that all of this is on the way toward increasing transcendence so that human beings can learn personally what it means to relate truly and intimately with God. Our advancement and evolution toward godhood is at the same time a return to an original, permanent, and irrevocable state of being that we were graced with from "before the foundation (or creation) of the world."

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Copyright © 2024 by Michael Roden.

What It Means Not to Judge


I'll be the first to tell you I have a problem with hyper-criticalness. It seems to be my default position, even though I know it leads literally nowhere.

"To judge" is "to form a critical opinion of." The problem with judgment is that it is an all-or-nothing proposition. That is, once we begin to form critical opinions, it becomes harder and harder to see around them. Also, once we begin to judge at all, we judge all the time, and we do so incorrectly.

One cannot sum up a person in one glance. Yet we do this all the time. We hear that someone is a "liberal" or a "conservative," for instance, and we make snap judgments about them all the time. Note that we tend to do this most when it is applied to someone we deem to represent the opposite of ourselves, and so there is an element of condemnation in such an act of judgment.

Worse yet, when we make such snap judgments, we tend to think and speak in talking points--not really thinking much at all, only regurgitating the pablum we've already been fed.

And so, we spend our time doing something that is impossible to do. And then we wonder why we live in a distorted world, or why we ourselves are perceived incorrectly by others. (This is not exclusive to one side of the political aisle, by the way. It happens on both sides and it happens all the time. And it helps to explain why the world is screwed up.)

We would do well to wonder whether the world we see is not as incorrect as our judgments. Of course it is, because we see only through our judgments, which are self-made products of our own faulty interpretation. We cannot see beyond them to what is really there at all. We can no longer see the innocent world that God created, nor the happy reality God creates for us.

Philosophically speaking, this happy world must exist. If God is loving, and if God is forgiving, then God has both created for us a loving reality and has made a way for us to return there.

"To judge" also means "to condemn." It is to lay an irredeemable condemnation upon another, a fault etched in stone, a skewed reality one cannot escape. It is to sentence both another and ourselves to hell--different chambers, perhaps, but the same hell nonetheless.

Yet, think about it, we cannot affect reality in any way by doing so. We can affect only ourselves, and badly or negatively, by doing so. God's reality is still God's reality; only our own sense of reality has changed. Nothing has really changed, therefore, except in our minds.

To remedy this situation, we need to stop making snap judgments and learn to observe the world as it really is. We need to stop interjecting our own tired ideas between our eyes and God's Mind. We need to learn to see a greatness and a grandeur we have rarely seen in this world.

This involves not being too quick to take a side because doing so is only accepting the world's judgments without due consideration nor observation. It involves reeling in the snap judgments we have already made and waiting a second until the reality of the world returns to us. Because of Who God Is, we can rest assured it will be beautiful.

This is why Jesus teaches both to "Forgive, and be forgiven" and not to judge lest we be judged. What we project outward, as our way of seeing, determines who we think we are. And so our judgment of others really does judge (in the sense of "define") ourselves, while our lifting of those judgments ("forgiveness") really does set us free.

We will find through this process that the world is not what we thought it was, and furthermore, that reality is not what we thought it was. All of this is ours if we only realize that neither we nor others are what we think they are. They (and we) are so much more.


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Copyright 2015 by Michael Roden. All rights reserved.

It sounds implausible at first. But what if we got Christianity wrong?

By "we," of course, I mean in the general public perception. In the public perception, Christianity is a religion of rules and laws: "Don't do this; don't do that." Legalism is primarily concerned with what not to do, rather than what to do.

Christianity is about neither. There is much evidence in the New Testament that Jesus was presenting an entirely new thing--a new way of doing religion, a new way of thinking about religion, a new way of experiencing one's religion.

Jesus spends a lot of time in the Bible reinterpreting the older Mosaic Law (the commandments that come from the books attributed to Moses in what is now called the Old Testament). Many, many times he uses the formula: "Moses said to you ..., but I say to you ...". He is basically saying that Moses' very early conception of religious legalism is being superseded by Jesus' new way of viewing religion.

Back then, of course, religion was everything. It was integrated into daily life, and so Jesus was presenting a new way of interpreting, seeing, even thinking about literally everything.

For instance, Jesus says: "You have heard that it was said, `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil" (Matt. 5:38-39). He's basically saying here that vengeance is the wrong attitude. We should instead instill in ourselves an attitude that everyone is worthy, no matter what they think.

Jesus is here chopping away at the root of the problem. The problem, he is saying, is in our usual way of thinking and perceiving, but this can be changed as simply as changing our minds.

Elsewhere Jesus makes the point even more clear. When his disciples (or students) were seen to be plucking grain on the Sabbath, which was thought to be against the Mosaic Law, Jesus said to the accusers: "The Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). Here he re-prioritizes everything, laying the emphasis on the person rather than the law seeking to regulate the person.

Paul does basically the same thing, speaking for instance of an inward circumcision rather than a legalistic understanding: "But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is of the heart" (Romans 2:29).

So, how did we get it so wrong? Here's my view: Basically, our default way of thinking and perceiving is a legalistic one. We tend to think in terms of the law. We think in legalisms. We think of what we "should" or "should not" do. It is difficult to train oneself to think any differently than this.

Yet this was Jesus' and Paul's primary emphasis: to help us to think differently than this, so that we might see a new world. And this new way of thinking and seeing included religion, or at least the legalistic interpretation of religion which was prevalent back then.

This non-legalistic interpretation of the message is actually more literal and true to Jesus' and Paul's words than the popular opinion of Christianity. And so, if we are going to be literalists, let us be non-legalistic literalists. Let us take the main points of Jesus and Paul (and John) seriously, and interpret all the rest according to these main and essential points.

The pressure if off! It's not about what you do! It's about what you think, which is closer to who you really are. It's about thinking--and being--more like God. How can such right thinking not result in right action as well?

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Copyright 2015 by  Michael Roden.

Michael Roden is the author of the brand new book, The Enlightened Christian. Its publication is set for August 2015, but you can obtain it earlier through Amazon. 

Anger: Not a Godly Emotion


by Michael Roden


We all get angry at times. It’s only human nature. But I will attempt to show evidence in this essay that anger plays no part in the Divine nature.

It is a general principle of cognitive therapy that anger is a secondary emotion. Some other emotion or mood (such as depression) lurks behind it as its true cause. The anger is a result of this underlying emotion; it depends on this underlying emotion. Without this underlying emotion, anger would not exist.

Anger is a means of hiding a deeper vulnerability. We can see this clearly in children who, rather than wallow in or even acknowledge the feeling of sadness, tend immediately to become angry instead. Anger protects them (temporarily) from the more vulnerable feeling of sadness or weakness which is the real underlying problem.

Vulnerability might be termed by the biblical concept of fear, said to be the opposite of love in the First Letter of John:


There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love. (1 John 4:18)


Fear as the opposite of love in John’s philosophy would be the problem behind depression, anger, guilt, and even the existential frustration that accompanies living in the world. It is the sense of vulnerability that underlies all those feelings. And it is this vulnerable fear that we drive into the darkness of unconsciousness when we choose to become angry instead.

Love, on the other hand, is the emotion of God. It is accompanied by such positive and expansive feelings as appreciation, gratitude, joy and peace. God cannot fear; He can only love. In John’s philosophy, therefore, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16, my italics).

We see in the First Letter of John a clear binary opposition between these two major emotions: love and fear. All our thoughts and all our feelings boil down to one of these two emotions as their real basis. This binary opposition stands behind the imagery of the duality of light and darkness which is characteristic of John’s theology:


This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)


God, having no vulnerability and no fear, cannot possibly have anger. It is tempting to think that He would, so that He might smite our enemies but, then again, Jesus taught us to have no enemies (Matt. 5:44). There is really no place for anger in the new thought system Jesus brings, which inspired John to this revelation of God as total love without any corresponding darkness.

This is also the message behind Jesus’ teaching on anger in Matt. 5:21-22, when he speaks of any trace of anger as being akin to murder. At the very least, we can glean from this that anger is not a mood that God inspires. We can imagine from this that God is always in complete control and that we might think of Him as being utterly reasonable, calm, and loving at all times and for all eternity.

In the Book of Isaiah (27:4), God is depicted as saying: “I have no wrath.” This would mean of course that He has no rage, no anger. Such a statement dovetails perfectly with John’s argument that God does not think in terms of punishment because God, being perfect love, can have no fear. Having no fear, God has no use for either punishment or anger. Therefore neither anger nor fear nor punishment exist for God.

Because neither fear nor anger can coexist with love, the two can only alternate in our minds, which gives humankind its seemingly natural and characteristic ambivalence. (First we are one way, and then the other.) God does not share our ambivalence, and so it is our own problem, and our own responsibility.

When we are reasonable, we can think of anger differently, more objectively. But we cannot be reasonable when we are angry. Anger is associated with irrationality as well as vulnerability. There is an apocryphal passage which makes this point beautifully, telling how Moses used reason to quell his own anger:


When Moses was angry with Dathan and Abiram he did nothing against them in anger, but controlled his anger by reason. For, as I have said, the temperate mind is able to get the better of the emotions, to correct some, and to render others powerless. Why else did Jacob, our most wise father, censure the households of Simeon and Levi for their irrational slaughter of the entire tribe of the Shechemites, saying,’Cursed be their anger’? For if reason could not control anger, he would not have spoken thus. (4 Macc. 2:17-20)


This reads much like modern therapeutic advice. The key is to gain some rational control over those moods, feelings, and thoughts that tend to make us most irrational, and then to use this measure of control to prevent anger from rearing its ugly head. Such an interpretation is suggested by Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness as well.

Ultimately one learns to trust one’s inner guidance, the still small voice left unheard by our anger, whether one calls this the the higher Self, the Holy Spirit, the inner Christ, or the Voice of God Himself. Until then we have the good advice: “do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26), which reminds us not to carry anger as a burden from one day into the next. We might reason from this that it would be better not to carry this burden even into the next moment. The very next moment could be a transformative one, if we were not locked into irrational habitual behaviors born from an unconscious sense of vulnerability.

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Copyright 2015 by Michael Roden.

This blog was part of synchroblog on anger. The other articles:

Mark Votava – Becoming Dreamers Again Carol Kuniholm –  God’s Economy: Managing Anger Assets Clara Ogwuazor Mbamalu – The Easiest Way to Control and Manage Anger  K.W. Leslie – Anger Glenn Hager –  The Many Faces of Anger Paul Meier –  The Value of Anger  Pastor Fedex – Chain Reaction  Jeremy Myers – You Sound Angry, Bitter, and Critical Michael Roden – Anger is Not a Godly Emotion Kathy Escobar – underneath anger.

My new book, The Enlightened Christian: A Psychological Interpretation of the Bible, is the product of years of study of the Bible itself. I studied it from a literary perspective, from an historical perspective, and from a theological perspective, in addition to simply reading it on my own. The more I read it, the more psychological it seemed to me. That is, it seemed to refer increasingly to inner states of mind and being.

How strange, I thought, that the Biblical writers, who wrote thousands of years ago, would know so much about internal states of mind and being that we today, with our sophisticated psychologies, know so little about. They must have learned about these things simply by living them, by experiencing them in their daily lives, rather than through a conceptualized understanding such as we tend to emphasize.

The New Testament in particular, with its main figures Jesus, Paul, and John, seemed to be a psychologization or internalization of what had come before in the pages of the Old Testament. The New Testament presented a way of seeing the Old that tried to capture its essence in a few words (as for instance in the Golden Rule or the Greatest Commandment) while at the same time transcending its former legalistic interpretation.

Jesus in particular seems to have initiated this process, this new way of understanding. He took elements of the old and made them new. He did this by placing them in the human mind, so that the entire cosmic drama seems to play out there. In this he was more than a theologian; he was a psychologist extraordinaire.

I then thought: What if we focused on this teaching of Jesus, and what Jesus himself said was most important, rather than on what his interpreters said about him? After all, we learn in our theology courses that Jesus was theologized right away, and that the Gospels as well as the entire New Testament contain much theologization--so much that it is difficult to know the man himself and what he really said and did.

I noticed in the course of my studies that there is a tendency among both theologians and other scholars to make Paul primary, and to relegate Jesus to a position of secondary importance. This has the effect of making the theology about Jesus more important than what Jesus himself said and did. In other words, Jesus taught about us, but the theologians who followed Jesus taught primarily about Jesus.

Paul himself is better understood as a frequent confirmer of Jesus' teaching because his own best teaching is that which follows Jesus' core message of total love and forgiveness, of sonship or the identification of believers as spiritual beings and children of God, and of universal salvation. John fits into a similar category. It is best to remember that Jesus is the ultimate authority about spiritual reality, and Paul and John, though great in themselves, take their lead from him and from the Holy Spirit he left in his wake.

All these things become clear as we study them. They are actually quite transparent in the Bible, but the problem is that they are very rarely emphasized. I have seen theologians say that Jesus' Sermon on the Mount should be seen as having been directed towards only the most advanced of his followers, as if they did not apply to everyone, suggesting that most people could not possibly follow them. I disagree. I've seen many people follow them perfectly, at least sometimes, which means to me that consistency is the key and this will come with practice along with study.

To me, this also means that what Jesus came to teach is something quite natural to us, even if we do not always act upon it and even if we do not allow ourselves to realize it. Therefore the kingdom of God is not something that comes from outside us, but rather from within. And this means that we ourselves are the reality of God, and this is how Jesus taught us to think of ourselves.

We need to begin to see the great, transcendent value of the people around us. All the glory of God rests in them. They themselves are more important than even the religious law (another woefully overlooked tenet of Jesus' teaching). They are the light of the world, seen correctly. An entirely new world opens to us when we start to think in this way. Ah, so this is what is meant as the end of one world and the beginning (or resumption) of another, I thought. This is what is meant by the state of Heaven, and how its light is reflected on earth.

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copyright 2015 by Michael Roden. All rights reserved. Michael is the author of the new book of theology: The Enlightened Christian: A Psychological Interpretation of Christianity.

What is the difference between spirituality and religion? Is there any difference at all, or, on the other hand, are there too many to list?

The major difference, it seems to me, is that one is personal, or individualized, and the other is institutionalized. Spirituality belongs to the heart and mind of the individual; it is our own personal way of "doing" religion, if you will. Religion takes on a more corporate and impersonal image, so to speak, at least in some respects.

The spiritual person is his or her own church. He is his own theologian, she is her own priest and she is also her own congregation as well.

It's not so simple, however, to say that all spirituality is individual while all religion is corporate. There is more to it than that, and besides, the categories between them sometimes overlap. Sometimes as individuals we join up with others, we work together or get a sense of working together (even with those who seem distant to us in time and space). Sometimes religion produces greatly spiritual individuals, or at least provides the tools they need to become more spiritual.

Spirituality focuses less on beliefs set in stone than on the process of believing. Religion needs a code of beliefs or laws to hold itself together. Therefore religion has a dangerous tendency to grow legalistic--that is, to hold the law as being more important than the individual. Religion often has customs associated with it and some of these can be individualized or at least regionalized to some extent. These would correspond to habits in the individual.

Spirituality coincides with the rise of the individual, that is, with people beginning to think of themselves as being individuals with their own mind and heart, and with their own rich inner life. This rise of the individual has been a relatively recent phenomenon, which most trace back only as far as the Western Enlightenment (in around the 1600s and 1700s). Before this time, most people did not tend to think of themselves as individuals at all. Rather, they conformed to certain social and psychological norms. They knew their place and it must have seemed that their life had already mapped been out for them by the time they were born.

The individual is free to question all of this, and I think it is important to do so. Each of us as individuals holds full responsibility for our own individualized religion. As our own church and theologian, we have serious responsibilities.

We are not, as individuals, entirely cut off from others. There is a delicate balance between individuality and being a member of the human race. One must ultimately be both. The individual must have relationships, and real relationships must exist between individuals. Only individuals can enter into real relationships where there is a real give and take, and where one does not try to lord it over others.

Religion goes wrong, in my opinion, when it attempts to enforce conformity of belief. This is tantamount to not seeing people as individuals, but instead as interchangeable cogs or even automatons. Religion at its best respects the individual and allows each to develop his or her own individualized belief system in such a way that seems right and proper for them, in line with their own developed sense of individual responsibility.

Spirituality in my opinion is what religion was meant to be. It was meant for the individual heart and mind and for the individual's capacity for spiritual experience. The problem was that when the major world religions began, centuries and millennia ago, there was little sense of the individual. Individuals existed, of course, but most often they did not think of themselves as individuals. And so tendencies toward individual spirituality are greatly de-emphasized. Yet they do exist in the scriptures of every major world religion, including the Bible. There are strong hints and clues that this was the way it was all going. I intend to show in the coming weeks some of these strong traces of individuality that existed centuries ago, which may help inform us of the situation in which we find ourselves today.

(For more, visit http://www.michaelroden.com)

A Church Not Made with Hands: Christianity as Spiritual Experience



Jesus and Ourselves: An Alternative Understanding of Christianity

What is the difference between spirituality and religion? Is there any difference at all, or, on the other hand, are there too many to list?

The major difference, it seems to me, is that one is personal, or individualized, and the other is institutionalized. Spirituality belongs to the heart and mind of the individual; it is our own personal way of "doing" religion, if you will. Religion takes on a more corporate and impersonal image, so to speak, at least in some respects.

The spiritual person is his or her own church. He is his own theologian, she is her own priest and she is also her own congregation as well. If one is doing it right, in my opinion, she or he will appeal to other individuals as well, not through force but through the power of reason.

It's not so simple, however, to say that all spirituality is individual while all religion is corporate. There is more to it than that, and besides, the categories between them sometimes overlap. Sometimes as individuals we join up with others, we work together or get a sense of working together (even with those who seem distant to us in time and space). Sometimes religion produces greatly spiritual individuals, or at least provides the tools they need to become more spiritual.

Spirituality focuses less on beliefs set in stone than on the process of believing. Religion needs a code of beliefs or laws to hold itself together. Therefore religion has a dangerous tendency to grow legalistic--that is, to hold the law as being more important than the individual. Religion often has customs associated with it and some of these can be individualized or at least regionalized to some extent. These would correspond to habits in the individual.

Spirituality coincides with the rise of the individual, that is, with people beginning to think of themselves as being individuals with their own mind and heart, and with their own rich inner life. This rise of the individual has been a relatively recent phenomenon, which most trace back only as far as the Western Enlightenment (in around the 1600s and 1700s). Before this time, most people did not tend to think of themselves as individuals at all. Rather, they conformed to certain social and psychological norms. They knew their place and it must have seemed that their life had already mapped been out for them by the time they were born.

The individual is free to question all of this, and I think it is important to do so. Each of us as individuals holds full responsibility for our own individualized religion. As our own church and theologian, we have serious responsibilities.

We are not, as individuals, entirely cut off from others. There is a delicate balance between individuality and being a member of the human race. One must ultimately be both. The individual must have relationships, and real relationships must exist between individuals. Only individuals can enter into real relationships where there is a real give and take, and where one does not try to lord it over others.

Religion goes wrong, in my opinion, when it attempts to enforce conformity of belief. This is tantamount to not seeing people as individuals, but instead as interchangeable cogs or even automatons. Religion at its best respects the individual and allows each to develop his or her own individualized belief system in such a way that seems right and proper for them, in line with their own developed sense of individual responsibility.


Spirituality in my opinion is what religion was meant to be. It was meant for the individual heart and mind and for the individual's capacity for spiritual experience. The problem was that when the major world religions began, centuries and millennia ago, there was little sense of the individual. And so tendencies toward individual spirituality are greatly de-emphasized. Yet they do exist in the scriptures of every major world religion, including the Bible. There are strong hints and clues that this was the way it was all going. I intend to show in the coming weeks some of these strong traces of individuality that existed centuries ago, which may have hinted at the situation in which we find ourselves today.

(copyright 2015 by Michael Roden. All rights reserved.)

“God is love,” according to 1 John 4:8 and 16. It is repeated twice in this First Letter of John and emphasized as the theme of that letter around which all the rest of it revolves. To me and to many like me, this simple sentence of only three words is also the key to all Christian, and indeed, all religious teaching. It is a summing up of the New Testament and, as Jesus himself says (Matt. 6:36-40), a summing up of the Old Testament as well. And though it may not be expressed so clearly and directly in all religions, it can be found there as well with a little scratching under the surface.

There is no question that love cannot answer, no concern it cannot address, no problem it cannot resolve. Love is the standard for morality and, indeed, for all religious thought. In other words, love must hold at the center of any religious argument, any spiritual truth. Just as love is primary in Jesus’ teaching, it should be upheld as primary in all ethical and moral questions, theological questions, religio-philosophical questions, social and political questions. All else flows from these three simple words, “God is love.”

It is easy to say these words, but it is difficult at times for us to apply them to every question and every situation. I will argue that this is the case because we are not accustomed to such consistency or to such logic. And this is a large part of the problem, isn’t it―that we are not as thoroughly consistent as God? It is in this sense that our will has been known to have fallen away from God’s, that we have lost sight God’s utter reliability and also the validity of seeing, knowing, indeed being love in all things.

The fact that love is everything to God places God in another reality altogether from ours. God lives in a different reality because love is everything to God. There is nothing else, if you want to know the truth in its most clear and direct form.

Well, there is something else; there is us. God’s existence, after all, has everything to do with our own existence. The mere fact that we exist is testament to God. God must have wanted it that way, or else we would not exist. (I will lay this argument out in a later essay.) Therefore our mere existence says something about God.

The real religious question of our time is not “Does God exist?” so much as it is: “Why do we exist?” That is, we might leave the question of whether God exists alone for a while, while in the meantime we examine what it might say about God that we ourselves exist. That is, we might begin our search for truth with what we know. And what we know, before we know anything conceptually, before we allow any externally-derived knowledge into our mind, is that in a primary sense, a real subjective and existential sense, we know ourselves to exist.

Before we know anything, we know this. We are. We exist in some sense (at least). Now I believe this presupposes something, and that something is God. It presupposes an origin, a source, for the kind of life we both have and are. The mere facticity of our existence, then, is in itself an argument for God’s existence.

After all, the universe could well have been made up of only inanimate objects. It could have been made up of only dust and the solids and shapes into which dust might be compacted. If the universe were this way, of course, it would be unknowable. There would be nothing within it that is able to know it. And so, such an inanimate universe would exist, but no one would know about it.

God breathed into this inanimate universe (Gen. 2:7) and gave it not only life but also the possibility (at least) of self-knowledge. In doing so, God gave to the universe the possibility of knowing itself as God knows Godself. And it is here that we return to the idea that God, knowing Godself as love, wanted the universe to know itself also as love. And this is why we, as human beings, exist.

From a Christian perspective, we can say that Jesus came to remind human beings of this truth. He entered the world in order to teach the world not only that God is love, but that because of this fact, we, too, must be love. Insofar as we know ourselves to be love (like God), then, we know ourselves. We are able to peer into the secret and sacred idea behind the universe, if we know ourselves to be love.

And it is by knowing ourselves thusly that we come to know God. This was the argument in the First Letter of John, after all, the meaning behind his saying, “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8). Expressed positively, the person who loves knows God, for God is love. It is by loving that we know God and, by extension, everything else. And thus does love become the center of our every concern, the primary force behind our every moral question, as John states: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11), and again: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God” (4:7).

The person who loves “is born of God and knows God.” Insofar as such love is everything to us, our primary and ultimate concern, we are thereby in a position to know all things, ourselves and God included, along with all others.

by Michael Roden

We know that the Christian God is generally seen as loving. We may have heard the Biblical statement, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and we may even believe that love is what characterizes God best. But do we realize the implications of this in regard to our own identity, who we are and who we think we are?


It is consistency that is God’s major difference from ourselves. And the problem is not any lack we have, constitutionally, but rather the fault lies in how we let our minds wander. We allow our energy (specifically our loving energy) to disperse by directing it at things that are not worthy of us.


For, you see, one of the implications of God being love is that we, too, must be love. At least that is how we must have been created, if God is consistently love. For all God’s thoughts must be loving, if God is love. And so, all the thought behind our own creation must also have been loving thought ― imbued, if not suffused, with pure love.


That is, we don’t take the idea that “God is love” literally enough. Now, I am no fundamentalist. I know that the Bible consists of inspired poetry as well as prose, of symbolism as well as direct statement. It consists of inspiration as filtered through human minds. But I know revelation when I see it. And “God is love” is a revelation. It was revealed knowledge at the time it was written, and it still is.


To me, “God is love” stands at the center of the entire Christian revelation. Jesus, asked his opinion of what the greatest commandment was, answered that love (of God, neighbor, and implicitly also oneself) fulfilled the entire Bible (Matt. 22:36-40). The phrase he used, “This is the law and the prophets,” is akin to saying, “This is the Bible in a capsule. If you know this, you know everything.”


And so, the revelation of love came originally from Jesus, and was picked up by both Paul and John. John is inspired to say directly, “God is love.” He elaborates on the revelation and, doing so, comes up with his own revelation. Paul waxes most eloquent and soars into transcendence when he speaks of love. Several times he states directly that he knows that the law that came down to him from Jesus was basically “to love.”


And so, love, to me, is the one great foundation upon which Christianity was built. It is the standard by which all inspiration and all revelation should be measured. If any teaching has this love at its center, it is Christian. Lacking this love at its core, it is not up to the one great standard.


In this regard, the basic difference between God and ourselves is consistency. God is consistently loving; this is the true meaning of the repetition in the Hebrew Bible that God’s love is “steadfast.” Every one of God’s thoughts is imbued, if not suffused, with love. We ourselves must be also, if we are to know everything.