Gabe, for the love of God…

On March 4, 1933 Gabriel Marcel sat down to his desk in his Paris flat and wrote: “My deepest and most unshakable conviction—and if it is heretical, so much the worse for orthodoxy—is, that whatever the thinkers and doctors have said, it is not God’s will at all to be loved by us against the Creation, but rather glorified through the Creation and with the Creation as our starting point. That is why I find so many devotional books intolerable…It is a relief for me to have written this.”

      Dear Monsieur Marcel, Please re-examine the relief you feel for it would seem to me to be cavalier.

As it is, I find your attachment to the earth, the things of the world, what you formally call Creation, more than disconcerting. Moreover, your repudiation of foundational orthodoxy and your dismissal of the great theologians and the great Idealist Christian philosophers, of the past century, is odious. Since what you are really saying is that we have no direct access to God and moreover that it is impossible for us to put ourselves in God’s celestial slippers, and therefore, by your apostate reasoning, all analogies of God are lies. Dear sir! Imagine, for a moment—for I scarcely can—the number of sermons your craven conviction would blow out through stained glass windows. And have you any idea of the massive recall Zondervan, Moody, Eerdmans etc., would have to undertake? By comparison, the recent Fischer Price recall would be considered but a trifle.  

Finally Gabriel, I really must ask you to get a grip. For your deep and unshakable conviction has come to you through the vagaries of your existential earthly experience. You must understand that only by starting with God, I repeat, God As Starting Point, can you have certainty. And should you ask me how I know this, I will ask you to examine the evidence, most of which rests within the covers of those books you find intolerable.

Conclusively, therefore, I will call your certainty an egregious form of God doubting–and your conviction heretical. It is as though you would want poets, instead of doctors of systematic theology, to be the acknowledged legislators and guides of religion, of the numinous—of that which is really too deep for you to effectively render.

Please Gabe—be convinced—go back to our accepted theological tomes, back to the promise you once showed as a philosopher, and stop your dabbling in drama and music composition. It really is beneath you; I say this as a concession.

Yours, with conditions.