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Written by Dan
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Monday, 02 October 2006 |
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An understanding of the concept of "good" can be helped by taking a look at the way we use the word "goods" in our english language. "Sporting goods", "goods and services", and the like help us to understand a once universal concept of good. Goods were simply things that were useful or pleasurable - excluding people or livestock. The Church talks the benefits of marriage like sex, companionship and financial assistance as the goods of marriage. As I pointed out in the first of this series, good simply implies pleasure or benefit (the root of the term "benefit" is "bene" meaning "good"). Evil is the misuse or distortion of the good. A baseball bat from the sporting goods store is good even after you use it to maliciously smash your neighbors mailbox - but the act is evil. Some would say the bat is neither good nor evil, but I would disagree. Creation is for us, for our pleasure - not in a hedonistic way but in a Garden of Eden way - and so is the humanly modified or recreated tree branch which we now call a baseball bat. The human touch on an object does not by necessity remove the good from the item and sometimes it increases it like the baseball bat or penicillin. In this way we see that God created many things in an intermediate form of good, waiting for human action to tranform it to its completed good. This very act disproves the Calvinistic concept of total depravity - which is the doctrine that says humans lack any internal or moral goodness prior to Christian regeneration. I doubt that every item that humans have taken from an intermediate good to a completed good was done so by a Christian. So in this way, even those who have not been regenerated in Christ, cooperate in his creative process adding there own good to God's creation. Now this is not to say that humans don't need regeneration because they clearly do - not because there is no good in them, but because the good in them cannot save them - that is, they cannot save themselves. We will begin to take a look at what we need to be saved from in the next few entries.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 17 October 2006 )
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