Here is a version of the Judaeo-Christian vision or story, told with certain emphases from Ignatius of Loyola.*The great and mysterious Reality of personal love and self-giving that many call God is the origin and destiny of all creation, the whole universe. God is present and at work in everything, leading it to fulfillment. All things are originally good and potentially means for those creatures called human beings to find the God who made and works in them. Still, none of these things are God, and therefore they are all radically limited.Indeed, in the case of human beings (who somehow image God in a special way), their relative freedom results in a new dimension of being whereby not just good but also evil exists in the world: selfishness, war, domination-racial, sexual, economic, and environmental-of some over others. Human history, then, is marked by a struggle between the forces of good or “life” and evil or “death.”God has freely chosen to side with struggling, flawed humanity by participating more definitively in human life and living it “from the inside” in the historical person of Jesus* of Nazareth. This irrevocable commitment of God to the human enterprise grounds and invites people’s response of working with God toward building a community of justice, love, and peace–the “kingdom” or “reign” of God that Jesus preached and lived.As with Jesus, so for his followers, it takes discernment*–a finely tuned reading of oneself and one’s culture in the Spirit of God–to recognize in any given situation what helps the coming of God’s reign and what hinders it. In the face of human selfishness and evil, the way ultimately entails self-giving, going through suffering and death in order to gain life–indeed, life everlasting. And along the way,because the followers of Jesus are wary of idolizing anyone or anything (that is, making a god of them), they are less likely to become disillusioned with themselves or others or human history for all its weight of personal and social evil. Rather do they continue to care about people and the human enterprise, for their hope is in God, the supreme Reality of personal love and self-giving.
