God as a moral being, considered as such in the absence of the notion of him possessing describable qualities such as appearance, location, or duration of existence, is essentially the God that humanity has arrived at over the course of civilization. The universal primitive human attachment to deities, which persons might or might not take as "evidence" of God's existence, has been considered most typically as an effectual coalescing of conceptualized tribal or local deities into the idea of a universal God.
This is, of course, not necessarily so. A universality of religion could be represented conceivably by any number of constellations, interlocking or not, of particular "gods," and the multiplicity of such "gods" themselves might be taken as "evidence" of their existence, but the inevitable intruding notion that there must be some matrix upon which those deities could exist seems almost to dictate the presence of some larger principle emblematic of a universal deity. Whether any of the World's Great Religions might in particular be called "polytheistic" or not, it is undeniable that an overarching concept of a singular universal deity is intimately familiar to all of them.
However, a single One God need not be understood or represented in the moral sense alone. Christianity can paint ceilings with God as an old man in the clouds, and God can be fixated upon as the God of History, and God can be reduced to any this-or-that figure of some preacher's conceit--and meanwhile someone else can opine upon the resulting representation as being unsuitable or morally objectionable. This sort of representation--and this sort of virtually inevitable tut-tutting--is, however, the type of occasion in which the element of morality is injected (or not) by the wills of persons, while yet the idea of God as a moral being is merely one element of his considered nature.
But there is still to be considered the rub of God's existence as understood by humans in the experiential sense--or, that is to say, in the sense of our understanding God as a reality pressing upon us. A universal God does not exist if he exists merely in the realm of conjecture, or even in the realm of adoration. In the Gospels, the idea is presented of God incarnate in the person of Jesus. Jesus is presented as sharing in our humanity and as knowing our experiences. That Jesus is a "moral" person is of course presumed in the texts, and we are to understand that he comprehends our feelings--including most acutely our sufferings. It might be postulated, however, that Jesus' experiential existence as a human being would be hampered in the most crucial fashion--that is, Jesus presumably could not, as a function of his becoming human, "experience" the remorse, the regret, or the shame of having sinned.
It is extremely important that Jesus is represented as having been tempted. We are tempted (though rarely in such stark fashion as The Temptations in the Desert)--and none of us can pretend that the feeling of temptation to sin is a feeling that is un-occasioned by at least the fleeting sin of momentary hesitation. Saying that in some instances we remain sinless because we do not commit any overt act that tempts us is futile for us to say, in that Jesus is most careful to tell us that the thought is at least a minor version of the deed. But did not Jesus then commit sin in being tempted? Can a sinless person be tempted? As if to grind in this latter question most distinctly, we are confronted with Jesus not merely throwing off Peter's tempting prospect of avoiding the Crucifixion, but also with Jesus casting it back onto Peter in the most virulent fashion.
Again, did not Jesus commit sin in being tempted? In such a consideration we come face-to-face with the sort of mental exercise that has always confounded humans. Think of the age-old jibe--can God make a stone so large that even he could not lift it? This question can be called silly or cynical, but that sort of retort sells God short. Of course God can make a stone so large that even he could not lift it--and then he could lift it. God could make and lift an infinite progression of larger and larger stones in a timeless instant. For all we know, an infinitude of physical (as well as every other type of) phenomena might be the stable-state of the changeless God--what of it? Do we not commit moral slights (at the very least) against God in conjecturing anything else?
And so we can draw ourselves up--even if only momentarily--against the question of how a sinless Jesus might be tempted. For all we know, the "sin" quality of Jesus' temptations might have fled to infinite nothingness even as Jesus opened himself with infinite haste to the experience of that quality. We don't know how a sinless Jesus could be tempted, and most importantly, we don't know how a sinless Jesus could be tempted. (I intended that repetition.) The really crucial aspect of this consideration is the realization that nothing but the moral aspect of the Incarnate God applies here--all else is foolishness. And this is what we need to remember, if our faith is to be something other than foolishness--God is not good because he exists, God exists because he is good. Fools yet we are, but in this realization we are at least honest.
If we understand God and his son Jesus as moral beings, and reckon that we cannot hope to understand them otherwise, then we can address ourselves to the lessons of the Gospels in straightforward fashion. Commentators want to describe Jesus as having some sort of ineffable magnetism (since many of his instantaneous connections with persons seem inexplicable otherwise), but there is no reason to dally with a sloppy notion of that "ineffable." The observers of his death are represented on balance as exclaiming either that Jesus was the Son of God, or that he was a righteous man--what was "ineffable" then seems to be rather obvious. The Good Thief asserts that Jesus was undeserving of his punishment. Judas--the only disciple described particularly as placing himself overtly in the clutches of the authorities--laments thereupon that he has betrayed innocent blood. Jesus' existence as a moral being is the portrayed vitality of his ministry.
When we understand the import of God as a moral being, then we can begin to understand our proper response. By "moral being," however, we must understand that even our most focused attentions upon God as a moral being--such that this attention would seem to annihilate any other conception we might entertain--is an insufficient attention. Our concern for God, demanded in the ministry and the teachings of Jesus, cannot hope to comprehend the moral perfection of the deity as part of some scheme of salvation. We cannot postulate some satisfaction for guilt other than that which is beyond our understanding, and we cannot display such humility as to overcome our intrinsic attachment to the aims of that display. All we can do is be ashamed.
In short, the only way for us to be unashamed of Jesus and unashamed of the Gospel is for us to be ashamed of ourselves.
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