What is good, asks Christopher Holmes.
One of the great joys of teaching Christian theology is helping students to understand Christian faith on its own terms.
Christian faith speaks happily of God and of all things in relationship to God.
This is its business.
Christian faith teaches truths that while inaccessible to reason are not contrary to reason.
Unfortunately, caricatures of Christian faith abound.
Perhaps the greatest has to do with God.
The God of the Bible is good, indeed goodness itself.
''You are good and do good'' (Psalm 119:68).
Theology's business is a matter of unfolding this great goodness.
Theology describes God as not only the Creator of good but also the cause of good.
Theology unfolds the mysteries of God's goodness.
Goodness is in God, is proper to God, and is God himself.
But how do we come to speak of this goodness?
The goodness of God comes to us in God's great acts of creation, reconciliation, and redemption.
We read of these acts in the Bible.
As we meditate on what God actually does, we come to know what God is, goodness itself.
But knowledge of God is not like the knowledge of, let's say, how to cast a fly to a hungry trout (something that I love to do).
Similarly, to know God is neither a matter of mastering a set of instructions nor a technique.
To know the God we meet in the Bible is a matter of love.
Christian faith does not isolate knowledge from love.
The greatest commandment, Jesus teaches, is to ''love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind''.
See Matthew 22: 37, which is taken from Deuteronomy 6:5, a verse central to Israel's liturgy and life.
God's goodness, moreover, is understood in relation to God's ''statutes'' or laws.
''Teach me your statutes,'' says Psalm 119:68.
Far from being a burden, the law of God, encapsulated for us in the Ten Commandments, is life giving.
Among other things, it reminds us that we are not God.
Rather, we are the sheep of God's pasture.
We live in the care of a God who is creating a people who love him rather than worshipping gods of their own making.
The Bible has lots to say about ''idols''.
Most of the Old Testament teaches us of a God who keeps faith with a people who would rather have things their own way.
Our desire to push God out of the way is called sin.
Thankfully, God's goodness is always a step ahead of our efforts to control it or to think that we have a monopoly on it.
Christian faith speaks confidently of sin's destruction through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Many of us, however, do not love God very well.
Some of us hate God.
Truth be told, some of the deepest resistance to God and God's purposes comes from within the Christian community.
Mercifully, God's desire to rid the world of sin and death is not taken hostage by the indifference of many in the church and outside the church to God's good purposes.
As a theologian in the university and an Anglican priest, I consider it a privilege to talk as the Bible talks.
Teaching love of God and love of the neighbour as yourself, on which ''hang all the law and the prophets,'' involves having our distorted desires re-ordered.
We are created for the beauty and happiness of God.
Indeed, to see God and all things in relation to God is what the Christian tradition calls the ''beatific vision''.
Many Roman Catholics will be familiar with this language.
It speaks of how the human heart is restless, profoundly restless, until it finds its rest in the infinite bliss of God.
Theology asks the primal question, ''What is good?''
It also asks the question of ''How are we made good?''
The answer it gives to both questions has to do with God.
But what is God? Is God goodness itself?
Christians and Jews say yes, and the Christian also says yes in relationship to Jesus Christ.
This is a severe generosity, of course, for it has no patience with our futile attempts to worship things we have made rather than the One who has made us.
This distorted desire of ours is at the heart of the environmental crisis, encouraged by the destructive narrative that encourages consumption without regard to costs.
God did not make the world because God was lonely or needed to work out issues.
Rather, God make the world to share his goodness with what is not God, human beings like you and me. So the great cry of Psalm 118:1: ''Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever.''
• The Rev Dr Christopher Holmes is a senior lecturer in the department of theology and religion at the University of Otago. He specialises in the theology of Karl Barth.
