I’ve become convinced that its important for the Church to inoculate our young people with a healthy dose of catechesis before we ship them off to college, just enough so that when they first hear about Nietzsche or really study Darwin they won’t freak out and presume that what the Church taught them in 6th grade confirmation is the only wisdom the Church has to offer.
Knowing most folks won’t read long boring books, I’ve been working on writing a catechism, a distillation of the faith into concise questions and answers with brief supporting scriptures that could be the starting point for a conversation.
I’ve used the catechism of the Catholic Church as a basic skeleton of categories. I’ve phrased the questions in the approximate wording of the questions I’ve received from doubters and believers over the past couple years while the answers are an incestuous amalgamation of Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas, David Bentley Hart, Stanley Hauerwas and all my other theological crushes.
Here are Q’s 4-6
I. The Father
4. What do we mean by calling God Creator?
We call God ‘Creator’ not because God at some point long ago created the world.
If the world ceased to exist, God would still be ‘Creator,’ for all the atomic laws and mathematical principles which comprise the world- and which God created- would still exist.
We call God ‘Creator’ because God is the Cause of all that exists in the universe and holds it all, at all moments, in existence and apart from God, at any moment, all would cease to exist.
By ‘Creator’ we mean God is our answer to the question ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?
“For in God we live and move and have our being.” – Acts 17.28
5. Can God be proven?
No.
God cannot be proven because God is not a god. God is beyond the limits of science, the powers of reason or the perceptions of sensory experience because God is not a being within the material, observable universe.
God is Being itself, distinct from and encompassing all universes.
“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closet relationship with the Father, has made him known.” – 1 John 1.18
“…God’s greatness is unsearchable.” – Psalm 145.3
6. Can God be disproven?
No.
God cannot be disproven because God is not a god. God is beyond the limits of science, the powers of reason or the perceptions of sensory experience because God is not a being within the material, observable universe.
God is Being itself, distinct from and encompassing all universes.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
– Isaiah 55.8
