61. Brief Analysis

Surely everyone knows that God is compassion and mercy itself. He is absolute love and absolute goodness. These qualities constitute his underlying reality or essence. Surely, then, everyone sees the contradiction in saying that compassion itself or absolute goodness could look at the human race with anger, become our enemy, turn away from us, and lock us all into damnation and nevertheless continue to be his own divine essence, to be God. Attitudes and actions of that kind belong to a wicked person, not a virtuous one. They belong to an angel of hell, not an angel of heaven. It is horrendous to attribute them to God.

The fact that things like this have been taught is clear from direct statements made by many of the founders, the councils, and the churches as a whole, from the first centuries of Christianity right up to the present day.

It is also clear from indirect evidence. There are derivative teachings that must have come from thoughts like these as their source, the way effects come from a cause or bodily actions from a brain. For instance, the notion that God needed to be reconciled to us; that he was in fact reconciled through his love for his Son and through the Son’s intercession and mediation; that God needed to be appeased by seeing his Son’s final wretched suffering, and that this brought him back and more or less forced him to adopt a merciful attitude; that God went from being our enemy to being our friend and adopted us (children of wrath that we are) as children of grace.

(For the point that it would be merely human behavior for God to assign the justice and rewards of his Son to unjust people who begged him for it on the basis on their faith alone, see the last analytical section in this little work [§112].)

42. Brief Analysis

When our former faith (a faith in three gods) disappears, then we acknowledge and accept this faith (a faith in one God) as a faith that is truly able to save us. The reason for this is that the face of faith in one God was not previously visible to us. Preachers claim that the modern-day faith is the only faith that can save us, because it is a faith in one God and because it is a faith in the Savior. Yet that faith is two-faced. One face is internal; the other is external. The internal face of that faith takes the form of picturing that there are three gods. (Who has a different picture or thought than this? All should examine themselves and see.) The external face of that faith, however, takes the form of confessing one God. (Who confesses or speaks of anything other than this? All should examine themselves and see.)

These two faces disagree with each other so completely that the external face is not acknowledged by the internal face and the internal face is not recognized by the external face. This disagreement and this disappearance of the one from the sight of the other has generated mental confusion on the part of the church regarding the means of being saved.

Something very different occurs, however, when the internal face and the external face are in agreement, recognize each other, and see each other as being of the same mind. As should be intrinsically obvious, this takes place when we not only see with our mind’s eye but also acknowledge with our mouth that there is one God and that the divine trinity exists within him.

Once we accept this faith, any notion that the Father was at one time alienated from the human race and was later reconciled to it is completely abolished. Instead there comes forth an entirely new view of the assignment of credit or blame, the forgiving of sins, and the process of being regenerated and therefore being saved. In the work itself, all this will become very clear in a rational light made brighter by divine truths from Sacred Scripture.

The reason why the proposition says that this faith is united to good works is that it is not even possible to have faith in the one God if that faith is not united to good works.