First Meditation
Who Is God?
The Moral Meaning of Creatio ex NihiloILet me start again, in a more purely reflective vein. And let
me start also by admitting that I have always - or, at least, for
as long as I can remember thinking about such things-been
an instinctive universalist as regards the question of the ulti-
mate destiny of souls. Part of the reason for this, I confess,
is purely affective: I have always found what became the tra-
ditional majority Christian view of hell-that is, a conscious
state of perpetual torment- a genuinely odious idea, both
morally and emotionally, and still think it the single best argu-
ment for doubting the plausibility of the Christian faith as a
coherent body of doctrine or as a morally worthy system of
devotion. But my inclinations in this direction have also - at
least, as long as I have had any formal interest in theology-
been encouraged by a number of considerations regarding cer-
tain traditional Christian beliefs about the nature of God's act
in Christ, the moral character of God, the proper interpreta-
tion of the eschatological language of scripture, the nature of
spiritual personality, and so on. And, I should note, I fell early