S'il n' existait pas Dieu, il faudrait l'inventer.

I've been reading the Brothers Karamazov again and this section of text keeps coming back to me. It brings to mind Jurgen Moltmann's Christology and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life when I read this. The essence of Christianity is hope. But hope and doubt go hand in hand. One cannot be human without doubt. I feel alot like Ivan lately. Doubtful, but full of Hope.

One cannot help but notice this trend in the church today of leaning a little too much on the everlasting arms--we see evangelicals ignoring the world around them and focusing on the end. But, one thing that doubt enables us to do is to make this statement: "I don't understand God." And with this the ability to exist in the present--live a life of Hope and change.

Ivan to Alyosha-- "And I advise you never to think about it either, my dearAlyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea ofonly three dimensions. And so I accept God and am glad to, andwhat's more, I accept His wisdom, His purpose which are utterly beyond our ken; I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life;I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was 'with God,' and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity. There are all sorts of phrases for it. I seem to be on the right path, don't I'? Yet would you believe it, in the final result I don't accept this world of God's, and, although I know it exists, I don't accept it at all. It's not that I don't accept God, you must understand, it's the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept. Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men- but thought all that may come to pass, I don't accept it. I won't accept it. Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see it and say that they've met, but still I won't accept it. That's what's at the root of me, Alyosha; that's my creed. I am in earnest in what I say."