First Meditation: Who Is God? 73
everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel;
and, until the end of all things, no answer has been given. Pre-
cisely because creation is not a theogony, all of it is theophany.
It would be impious, I suppose, to suggest that, in his final
divine judgment on his creatures, God will judge himself; but
one must hold that by that judgment God will truly disclose
himself (which, of course, is to say the same thing, in a more
hushed and reverential voice). Even Paul dared to ask, in the
tortured, conditional voice of the ninth chapter of Romans,
whether there might be vessels of wrath stored up solely for
destruction only because he trusted that there are not: because
he believed instead that all are bound in disobedience, but only
so that God might finally show mercy to all (Romans 11:32). If
not for this radiant negative to the question Paul poses him-
self-this absolute rejection of the very idea that some souls
exist only as exemplary objects of divine anger-he would not
have been able at the last to affirm the perfect goodness of God
in his saving works. Only by insisting upon the universality
of God's mercy could Paul liberate himself from the fear that
the particularity of that mercy would prove to be an ultimate
injustice, and that in judging his creatures God would reveal
himself not as the good God of faithfulness and love, but as an
inconstant god who can shatter his own covenants at will. (To
this I shall return in my Third Meditation.)
II
I have to note, however, that all of this creates a small prob-
lem of theological coherence, and for a rather obvious reason.
To wit- and this should be an uncontroversial statement- the
God in whom the majority of Christians throughout history
have professed belief appears to be evil ( at least, judging by the