DOES GOD CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO ME?
Romans 8:31
William E. Hull
Introduction:
1 . Many suppose life’s ultimate question to be, “Does God exist?” But a deeper issue
concerns what God is really like. In the last resort, it really does not matter whether
or not God exists if he is aloof and indifferent to our plight. In Sartor Resartus,
Thomas Carlyle pictured a philosopher gazing out from his high attic at midnight
across a crowded city “heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little
carpentry and masonry between them.” “But I,” he concluded, “I sit above it all; I
am alone with the stars” (J. Stewart, Strong Name, 125).
2. What if God is like that, remote and aloof among the stars? Or, as in Greek
mythology, utterly indifferent to human cries in self-centered frolic? Or, as in
Gnostic thought, so contemptuous of human darkness that he is utterly transcendent
in the heavens? The Greek Stoics, in particular, rooted their concept of God in a-
patheia, which meant that God is incapable of being swayed by outside influences,
such self-determination being the price of his freedom. God, by definition, caimot
be vulnerable, the Stoics reasoned, he must be imperturbable, dispassionate, self-
sufficient, unchangeable.
3. Honesty compels the admission that these ancient notions have profoundly
influenced our conception of God. What feeling is conveyed by the various
philosophical proofs for God? What emotion, other than fear, is aroused by the
judgmental preaching of God? And, beyond all of this, what conclusion other than
doubt, scepticism, or disgust can be generated by the presence of so much suffering
