Reddit mentions of The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God

The following works are pretty nerdy, I would say. They were assigned throughout the course of my undergraduate studies in theology and think that they serve as excellent primers to the intellectual side of Catholicism.

Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ. Highly recommended as a beautiful exposition of the Catholic concept of God.

Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity.

Ratzinger, In the Beginning...: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall.

Ratzinger, God and the World. A fantastic survey of essential Catholic doctrines and beliefs.

Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation. A genius work that reminds us that God is on the side of the poor, that he casts down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Life Out of Death. A short but beautiful meditation on what it means to die and rise with Christ.

And then, of course, there are the classics. Augustine's Confessions, Aqunas' Summa, Athanasius' On the Incarnation, Benedict's Rule, Anselm's Proslogion, Bonaventure's Mind's Road to God, etc.

Alright guys, let me finally get to questions one and six.

>How do you rationalize the concept that "god is love" (your words) with the suffering which exists in the world?

I have two answers for this, one philosophical, one theological.

Philosophical (disclaimer: the following is not Catholic doctrine, but neither does it contradict Catholic doctrine):

I assume that you are familiar with the theodicy with which Alvin Plantinga essentially solved the logical problem of evil; therefore I will consider this issue settled.

Next, I'd like to make the claim that suffering is inherently undesirable, but not inherently evil. We can all think of examples in which suffering is imposed upon a person in a manner that is not evil: chemotherapy, for instance, is painful. Many types of burn therapy cause much suffering for the patient. Even working out involves suffering and pain (e.g. "no pain, no gain"). Therefore, having found examples of instances in which suffering imposed upon someone is not evil, I therefore make the claim that to impose suffering upon a person is not necessarily evil (it oftentimes is, but evil is not an essential property of suffering).

This in mind, I turn to Eleonore Stump's theodical individualism, which, in its most basic form, goes like this: the best way for human beings to conform their will to God's, and to thereby enter heaven, is to suffer, and therefore God allows suffering for the purposes of enabling people to conform their will to his.

There is much more to be said about this particular argument, but suffice to say the gist is that the undesirability of the enabling of or even imposition of suffering is outweighed by the good that suffering produces for individual human beings, and that good is (perhaps) the attainment of union with God in heaven.

Theological:

This answer is mostly taken from The God of Jesus Christ, a highly enlightening book by Joseph Ratzinger, and from a class that I recently took. Since it's been a couple of months I'm not presenting this as coherently as I once did, but I'll give it a shot.

As Pope Francis writes in Lumen Fidei, Christianity is an attempt to illumine all aspects of reality, which must therefore necessarily involve penetrating "to the shadow of death." Faith must open this horizon; it must illumine all aspects of the human experience, of which suffering is one of the most important parts. Thus, for Christianity to legitimately claim to being the light that illumines all reality, it must be able to give a coherent and persuasive answer to the question of why people suffer, for if it cannot it is not what it claims to be.

God, in Ratzinger's view, has not given a "conclusive answer" to the question of why people suffer (i.e. this is why the previous response, as I mentioned, was not formal Catholic doctrine but rather was merely compatible with Catholic belief), but the former pope emphasizes forcefully that neither has God been silent; God has provided a substantial answer in the form of his Son, in whose suffering there has been a transformation of suffering itself. God suffered, which means that God "dwells in the innermost sphere" of suffering, of what it means to be human.

If God has entered into suffering then suffering must therefore be sanctified; it cannot be what it once was, because God's very participation in it has transfigured it. What this means is that because God suffered, suffering is no longer meaningless nor in vain, but rather means something; because God died, death is not what it once was. They point to a new reality now, they point to something more.

The Christian story, after all, makes no sense without the Resurrection: because God entered into suffering, at the end of it all there is now also necessarily a final hope. As such, God is particularly with those who suffer, and those who suffer unjustly are assured that their suffering is of value and that there will be an ultimate justice. Because God sanctified suffering, unwarranted suffering now brings us closer to a completed form of life—there is, to put it one way, a life out of death.

>Why does the catholic church teach that masturbation is a sin when the one scripture they use is not about masturbation, but about a man's unwillingness to let his brother's wife have a child through him for his brother?

Let's again draw it back to the Catholic conception of God: Catholicism insists that ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν, that God is love. However the word used for love in this statement is ἀγάπη, "agape," which refers to self-giving, self-sacrificial love, love that cares not so much about the good of the self but rather concerns itself with the good of the other.

Catholics believe that ἀγάπη is the nature of God and the foundation of all that there is, and, since we are created by God, Catholicism also holds ἀγάπη is also our telos and our end as human beings (i.e. we ought to be Godlike, which means being ἀγάπη). Human beings are created for self-giving love, and thus our moral systems must be founded upon the expression of self-giving love: Our lives are to become self-giving love, and a key point is that this type of love is virtually always relational.

Erotic love (in the Greek, eros) is a particular type of love that is seen in Christianity as being extremely good if it leads to the bodily and spiritual union of two persons, if it enables two people to draw so near to each other and to be so completely overtaken by love that their very selves become subsumed into one, so to speak. Indeed, this type of expression of eros is seen as a conduit to and a participation in the life of God. This, then, is the relational end of the sexual faculty; eros, erotic love, is itself ordered toward ἀγάπη, which is the type of self-giving love explained earlier. Therefore we would say that the purpose of sex itself is to express self-giving love such that two people become one entity, and that therefore our sexual faculties are ordered toward the expression of self-giving love; our sexual faculties are ordered necessarily outward.

The Church, then, logically concludes that masturbation is necessarily an inversion of the purpose of sex because it takes the sexual faculty, which is meant to express love outward toward another human being, and instead redirects it inward toward the self, toward the ego. Instead of being relational, sex becomes self-contained; instead of being primarily love-giving, it becomes primarily pleasure-giving and becomes concerned first and foremost with the attainment of higher and higher levels of physical pleasure (though to clarify, Catholicism views physical pleasure as extremely good, but nevertheless insists that it must always be subordinated to self-giving love; it must never become the first priority).

Seen in this light, masturbation is an inversion of what authentic love could be. However I'm not saying that this is the most important aspect of Catholic sexual ethics. Nor am I saying that it is not "normal" to masturbate, nor that one is evil for masturbating, nor that God would condemn a teenager (or anyone, really) whose passions are too strong to be contained. I am simply saying that there is an ideal, that Catholicism strives for that ideal, and that masturbation falls short of that ideal. That is all.

By the way I hope you see that this is why I initially refused to answer your questions. I answer in very lengthy answers, and if I'd attempted to answer them all, I'd have no time for the other questions on the AMA.