On 12 Feb the Holy Father recently addressed seminarians of Rome. Sandro Magister relates that he commented on a passage from John 15 and referred to a letter to him by a professor at the University of Regensburg, contesting the Christian view of God.
Benedict XVI said that he had recognized in the professor’s objections "the eternal temptation of dualism, meaning that there is not only a good principle, but also a bad principle, a principle of evil, and that the good God is only a part of reality."
And he added:
"Even in theology, including Catholic theology, this idea is currently being spread: that God is not omnipotent. This is an attempt to find a justification for God, who in this way would not be responsible for the evil that we find so widely throughout the world. But what a poor justification! A God who is not omnipotent! Evil does not lie in his hands! And how could we trust ourselves to this God? How could we be sure of his love if this love ends where the power of evil begins?"
There are challenges also in Christology today, deep challenges even within the Church.
We drilled into a challenge inhering in a bad translation of consubstantialis.
Think of the challenge presented by the habitual way in which Holy Mass is handled in many places.
Food for thought.
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It’s Ecclesiology, too, whenever it’s Christology. A God who isn’t omnipotent and is helpless to fight evil; and a Church that keeps to safe subjects inside church walls and doesn’t bother anybody evil
Fr. Z.;
Our God is the God who never was not. If you can accept that and we must, to me all else pales by comparison. In the forties & fifties, fortunately for us, the good nuns used the Baltimore Catechism to hone our faith. We learned of Almighty God and what His church. My faith in Him and the our church has never waned. How do those involved in Catholic theology come up with these things, is there something in the water at these Universities?
Tom Lanter
Tom-
There IS a lot of estrogen in Steubenville’s water…
FWIW
To deny that God is omnipotent absolutely boggles my mind in more ways than one.
As far as I can remember, I was always taught that God is omniscient (knows all things) and omnipotent (can do all things). This topic smacks of serious theological error to me. If God is not omnipotent then what is He? Chopped liver?
As to the problem of evil, God allows evil to occur in this world for whatever reasons He has. I know that there are some people who cannot handle this idea. They believe that a good God would not allow such things as the tsunami or the earthquake in Haiti to occur. However, He has.
As Job said in the Bible, “If we accept good things from the Lord, should we also not accept evil? The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”