Monday 13 October 2014

The synod on the family discovers a new law

The synod on the family has produced its first momentous result, the discover of the "law of graduality". In what is surely the theological equivalent of the discovery Higgs Bosun, a new era of doctrinal discovery and innovation dawns upon us.

The thing that strikes me about an appeal to graduality in Old Testament is yes, God stoops to conquer but he does so in ways which ensured that His people never lost sight of what was expected of them and the glory to which they had been called. God never lowered His expectations for His people, he simply used different means to raise them to the required standard, by carrot and stick. For their transgressions, the Israelites were required to sojourn in the desert for 40 years whilst Moses never got to see the promised land over what some lawyers might claim was a technicality and yet both chastisements were a lesson which brought His people into a more loving relationship with their creator.

God's graduality is not a watering down of his requirements for His people - it is rather an intimate knowledge of the gap between between His expectations for His people (both collectively and as individuals) and their capacity for responding to these expectations. God uses this knowledge to formulate his blueprint for our Salvation at the heart of which is His Son. Yes, God will never tire of going back to the drawing board whenever we fail to follow his blueprints (and they all begin with repentance, confession and penance) but human nature suggests that the longer we fail to follow his them, the more likely we are to give up reading them altogether.

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