The God of Optimism

After Chesterton

Christianity is not optimism. That is the last thing it is, dear friend. If we believe it, then we’ll end up in cynicism, a lack of belief in anything, because the God of the Optimists cannot deliver. He’s vague, even though he is upbeat. His upbeatness requires that he be vague. Better not make specific promises. Real Christianity takes life with a deadly seriousness, knowing that all things in Adam must die. It never shirks from that; it offers a way to prepare and, paradoxically, a way to bring that death from the end of life into the middle and sometimes the beginning of it. When you are baptized, you die. Not as an unpleasant metaphor, but truly. Baptism is more real of a death than your eventual biological cessation. If it only looks like a pious bath, it is because our eyes are not open and we don’t see the world as it is. Christ sees it as it is. He sees the conflict between “all was created good” and sin, death, demons, corruption, and Satan. He does not fall away in horror, either. Any conception of God where He shrinks away from sin, either passively in horror or actively in rage, is not the God of Jesus Christ. It is an idol meant to bolster up our passions and deliver us straight into Hell, for it breaks all communion with God and with man, both neighbor and enemy. Jesus Christ does not falter or lose his temper with sin, he confronts it with unyielding love, a love that voluntarily accepts death to then defeat death. Jesus Christ doesn’t reform death, or make it palatable, he destroys it. There is no optimism in this, for optimism says “she’s in a better place now.” Maybe, maybe not. Jesus says, instead, that she has passed through the crucible, and woe to her if she was not carrying his cross!