On God and Our Obligations: Five Theses

How Do Our Obligations and God Relate?

This is the fourth in an ongoing series on obligations—what we owe, and what our duties are—as Christians. God does not owe the world anything, and yet.

Thus far, we’ve been sketching out obligations in fairly inductive way: that we begin in the middle, a middle which involves both those we care for and those we don’t, and that churches frequently find themselves pressed into obligations in ways which run askance to their nature as churches. But this has, thus far, all focused on the social nature of obligations, leaving out the questions of what God has to do with all of this.

This was, in a very real part, an intentional move. There are a great number of analytical studies which tease out what counts as a duty and what doesn’t, and why, or how we might think better about how to carry out a task. But for the Christian, all of our moral obligations—our lives in the world as creatures before God—depend in first part on the relation of ourselves to God. We always approach God through the world, and offer our lives to God as an act of worship—and in that, the world which we offer to God.

But God is not the world, and so, how we think about obligations turns first not to the way that humans fit within the world, but “fits” with God. What follows is going to disappoint you, dear reader, in that it’s going to offer the bones of a skeleton, and not the flesh, but only bones can be made to live.

Or the debts of love tether us endlessly to one another, like Paul said.

Thesis 1: God is not obligated to us.

In starting here, we confess that obligation is not the heart of our relation to God, for obligation does not constitute the relation between God and creatures. God does not create the world out of need, or lack, or the desire to become more God than God was before. God creates the world out of nothing, and out of what we might call gratuity. God, the one in whom there is no lack, does not (strictly speaking) need anything, much less creatures. And so, the relation between God and creatures is not one established by God’s obligation to us.

THAT BEING SAID: