My lovely wife has befriended a mom over their shared status as New Mothers with Sub-One-Year-Olds. It is an elite clique I will never infiltrate. I have come to terms with this fact, however, and I am not bitter. As the author of The Communist Manifesto once quipped: I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.
I’m told my wife’s gal pal recently prodded her husband after midnight with the question, “What do I tell our boy when he asks if God created everything, who created God?”
It’s great that we are rational animals. Wouldn't it be awful to be a raccoon or a deer? Even a lion. Even those gigantic lions in the floodplains of Botswana. Imagine looking around the world and not being able to ask why. The dear reader is just jumping hither and thither, looking for his next meal. What a lot.
We exist so that we can contemplate the highest things; we are made for inquiry; we are here with wonder.
But we are animals; rational animals, but animals, nonetheless. Because we are animals, though, we are born into this world.
We all learned at some point that we were generated by our parents in the strange hugging ritual that men and women inevitably undertake after receiving the sacrament of holy matrimony. Something with birds and bees occurs, and after some period of name contemplation, we burst onto the scene with a social security card. This is how things have always been.
That we are generated by our parents is no small matter. The dear reader’s life is contingent upon the fact that his parents chose to create him. His parents chose this when they hugged. Man is the kind of animal that needs generating by hugs.
In other words, the dear reader did not bootstrap himself into existence. He was hugged and thereby loved into the world. Love is the antecedent to hug—we do not hug whom we do not love.
This too is no small matter. What do we make of the fact that man is generated out of love? If the dear reader was conceived in love, who conceived him? His two loving parents, of course, with a love hug. Yet parents are also people, teenage angst notwithstanding. Parents, then, need generation as well. So, the dear reader was created from a love hug, but his mother and father were also created by love hugs.
We arrive at an important question: is it love hugs all the way down? In other words, could all mankind be explained by love hugs?
Imagine that the nearest railroad has a train rolling by. But suppose this train has been rolling by as long as the reader has lived by the railroad. Moreover, every one of the reader’s neighbors says the train has always been rolling by. The eldest neighbor takes great pride in the train; says his daddy watched this train and his daddy before him, and so on, he reckons.
But, of course, the dear reader must question the elder:
So... When, how, why did this train start?
The eldest of neighbors, chewing on hayseed, looks up from his porch rocker with great weight:
It just is.
Now we are even more curious; we have only introduced a greater mystery: whence cometh the train? Is there a locomotive? Well, it can’t be without a locomotive, that would be absurd: how would the boxcars ever have begun to move? So, is this engine at the front or back? Who is the engineer operating it?
Who started the love hugs? We can’t have love hugs going back ad infinitum.
We briefly discussed the paramount ingredient of love hugs: love. This is the cornerstone of the love hug; without it, the love hug is a fantastical husk of what could be. Indeed, love precedes hugs such that hugs do not occur without love, and love acts as the foundation of hugs.
But then we arrive at the same question: is it love all the way down? In other words, does an infinitely long chain of loving parents explain why any of us were love hugged into existence?
There must be a source of love that started it all; an originator of love who first endowed a set of parents with love; who generated a man and woman out of love. Yet this originator of love must be more than just the love at the beginning; we can say more.
The love from which all love flows must abide. This wellspring of love cannot be the kind of thing that was itself loved into existence by another source of love, as then that other source would need explaining. This loving originator must just be love, and must be the kind of love that does not itself need love to be, but already is—always is; eternally is love.
This love explains all love, gives all love, and takes all love back up into its own love. This is the origin of the dear reader’s loving parents’ power to love hug the dear reader into existence. And although this fountainhead of love does not need love, being the origin of love itself, it is fitting that we love this Grand Lover. It is silly not to love the Lover who is responsible for all love, who is Love itself.
So, it is indeed love all the way down.
Yet love is not a one-way street. Love requires being sandwiched between a lover and the beloved. It is only in this trifecta of love that we can make sense of the fountainhead of Love at the center of reality. It is only in the lover-love-beloved paradigm that any of this works.
All the above rules out any possibility of Greek, Roman, or Norse mythology. These myths give us beings that do not resemble the Grand Lover. Moreover, polytheistic descriptions of reality such as Hinduism are also inadequate. We are left with the God of Abraham, spoken about in only three traditions: the Hebrews, then Christians, then Muslims.
God tells Moses that His name is I AM WHO I AM, which we can find in Exodus 3:14. This is the text in which we see God tell His prophet who, but also what He is. God told Moses that He is; He abides; He is eternal, outside of time and space. The Latin translation of this passage, which was the most widely read translation for most of the last two millennia, reads EGO SUM QUI SUM, or I AM WHO AM. God is the one who is, simply and totally.
A poor carpenter from Nazareth appropriated “I am” throughout his ministry; most importantly, he used it to answer the high priest who asked if he is the Son of God (Lk 22:70-71). This Jesus of Nazareth also claims to be the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last (Rev 22:13). The name Jesus in Hebrew is the unutterable name of God (YHWH) with added radicals “to save”, so Jesus’ name means “God saves.”
[Jhn 1:1 RSV] 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Greek term “Logos” is translated to Word. When John wrote this, Logos had a millennium of history behind it. Greek philosophers used Logos to describe a sort of rational discourse and force that orders, especially through language. So, Jesus, whose name is “God saves”, appropriates “I am”, and tells us that He is the first and last, and He was there in the beginning, with God, and was God.
The God who is, who abides in eternity, begot a Son in eternity so that the perfection of love could be shared between them. This Son was sent to us in love, gave up his life in love, and was raised back up to his Father in love, so that we too would be restored to God in love.
[1 Jo 4:7-9,19 RSV] 7 Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
19 We love, because he first loved us.
This conspiracy of love goes all the way to the top.
Floating belly-up in this infinitely expansive love pool, we can now return to the question “Who created God?”
Because we rational animals are love hugged into existence, we are the sort of thing that cries out for an explanation. Things that exist but do not have to exist lead us to ask, “so why do they exist?”
Thinking deeply about these contingent things leads us to some knowledge of a being that is beyond the beings of this world, beyond the realm of space and time, beyond the limits of contingency. There must be an ultimate reality from which all being flows, a being that simply is. Scripture clearly attests to this, but elevates it far beyond what we could know by reason.
As we float in this horizonless love pool, we can rest assured—without even wearing sunscreen. We can let “Who created God?” sink to the bottom, far out of sight, where it belongs. We don’t have time for this pesky question, there is too much loving to be done.