5 - The Son of God

Summary

Moral progress is understood religiously as the hope that despite our having begun from evil, we can make ourselves well-pleasing to God. This hope rests on the hope that we have undergone the change of heart, which is symbolized in rational religion as faith in the Son of God or the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. Understanding this requires further investigation of the role of symbols and analogy in religion, which was discussed in Chapter 1. The hope to become well-pleasing to God is threatened by three difficulties, two of them based on doubts that we have undergone the change of heart or can sustain it in our lives, and the third (and greatest) based on the fact that we began from evil and have incurred a guilt we cannot wipe out. The hope to become well-pleasing to God therefore depends on God’s decree of grace. We can understand this in terms of God’s forgiveness – not the forgiveness of a debt but God’s willingness to accept our change of heart as an atonement making us morally receptive to his freely given mercy.