In recent years, I have been on a non-stop journey to grow more in communion with God, to live out my Catholic faith as Christ has instructed, and to keep God’s grace and my salvation at the forefront of how I navigate all areas of my life.
At the core of my navigating this amazingly rich, yet often tragic, yet abundantly rewarding, yet limited life span, I have strived to grow in goodness. That is, God’s goodness. And that’s because God IS goodness.
Sure, we have all heard the saying “God is good” – but isn’t that now just a cliché? Isn’t it just an empty platitude that sounds nice in the moment, while the world continues to tear itself apart over senseless divisions and identity politics?
Or what about atheists, agnostics, and spiritual-but-not religious folks who claim they are good people? How many times have you heard someone say, “I’m a good person”? Or more specifically, “I don’t need to believe in God to be a good person”? And what exactly does that mean now?
After all, as with other words used to describe personality qualities, “goodness” tends to open up a wide array of subjective meanings. I mean, how exactly do you test anyone’s standard for goodness if we try to factor all subjective definitions, lifestyles, and morally based decisions attached to it? Moreover, just because some people out there claim they are good, does not mean that, well, they are truly good.
On top of that, when Christians explain God’s goodness, and then call out the world for allowing corrupted goodness, it sometimes gets reduced to “Christians are self-righteous twits riding on their moral high horses, as they judge everyone else around them. Meanwhile, Jesus must be beating his head against a wall because of their hypocrisies.”
Yes, some Christians are blatant hypocrites. But nowhere in Scripture, nowhere in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nowhere in the writings of the early Church Fathers, does it say that once people accept salvation through Christ, that they get to power-level-up to hypocrite-free status.
Instead, we Christians recognize that we will for sure be hypocrites at times — because we continually grapple with humanity’s first falling away from God’s goodness. Original sin is that which binds all other sins. It is our supplanting God’s goodness for what we think is our own goodness. And when we replace God’s goodness with our own goodness, let the games begin with the utterly confounding number of views on what it means to be good.
Then, this week, as I was contemplating the next topic for my channel, I came across a short video clip featuring a debate between an atheist and an evangelical Protestant Christian. Normally, I post links to resourceful videos I find online—but that’s not really the point for my video today: What popped out at me about the debate video was how the Christian explained goodness. And while he acknowledged that the Oxford dictionary has various, yet closely similar definitions for goodness, a root definition is how we Christians define God: “Moral perfection in thought, word, and deed.”
Therefore, if goodness is, in fact, moral perfection in thought, word, and deed – then how many of us can genuinely proclaim that we are good? That doesn’t mean we don’t do good deeds, nor that we do not sometimes reflect goodness during a special moment with family, friends, or co-workers. Rather, it means this: Do we accept our own humility? Do we strive everyday to match God’s goodness?
Here in Western society, and echoed throughout the world, we have shifted our humility, our understanding of goodness, to mean being good with ourselves. Self-love is all the rage right now. Self-help books preach self-love. Spiritual-but-not-religious gurus have re-dressed goodness into moral relativism.
Further, this brand of goodness has instituted sweeping advice to the secular world: “Do whatever makes you happy.” Or “If it doesn’t hurt anyone else around you, then it’s most likely ok.” Or “everyone has their own truth.” Or “all religions lead to the same God.” (See my video, “Short Response to ‘All Religions are True / Equally valid’, and my dialogue with Tim Staples, to find out why, well, all religions are *not* equally true).
Meaning that if everyone has their own truth, then we supposedly can have our individual versions of goodness. Except that goodness is fundamentally an objective idea. Hence why God IS goodness, and thereby why the definition of goodness is moral perfection in thought, word, and deed.
And from that same, goodness, we humans were created. As stated in the Catechism #51: “It pleased God, in his goodness and wisdom, to reveal himself and to make known the mystery of his will. His will was men should have access to the Father, through Christ, the Word made flesh, in the Holy Spirit, and this become sharers in the divine nature.” And in CCC #2500: “The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral beauty.”
This means that we humans, created in God’s goodness, also have the spiritual means to reflect God’s goodness. He even gave us a clear path to embrace goodness and rid us from sin. However, as we all know that none of us is perfect (not counting funny banter about being perfect!), that means our reflection of God’s goodness often falls short. Which is why we need God’s goodness – through grace, through Christ’s ultimate sacrifice for this grace – to establish true goodness in this fallen world.