“ If man exists, God is no longer free.

To the atheistic formula, “If God exists, then man is not free,” the Bible responds, “If man exists, God is no longer free.” We are able to say no to God, but God is no longer able to say no to us, for according to St Paul, “there is only yes in God” (2 Cor 1:19), the yes of his Covenant which Christ has given on the Cross. Then, “I am free” means “God exists.” It is God himself who guarantees the freedom of doubt, so as to not violate human conscience.

God has created the “second freedom,” and he takes the supreme risk of a freedom which is capable of stopping him, of obliging him to descend into death and into hell. He freely allows himself to be assassinated in order to offer pardon and resurrection to the assassins. His omnipotence is to make room for human freedom, to veil his presence in order to be in dialogue with “the other,” to love with an infinite patience which waits for the free response, a free creation of a common life of God and his child. A patristic saying states it this way: “God can do everything, except constrain us to love him.” The omnipotence of God is to become the life-giving Cross, the unique response to the case of atheism on freedom and evil. …

It is of the greatest urgency to correct the “terrorist” and “penitentiary” ideas of God. It is no longer possible to believe in a heartless God incapable of suffering. The only message which could reach atheism today is that of Christ descending into hell. As deep as the hell in which we find ourselves, it is even more profound to find Christ already there waiting for us. God does not ask of us virtue, moralism, blind obedience but a cry of assurance and of love from the depth of our hell. We ought never to fall into despair. We can only fall into God and it is God who never despairs. St Anthony the Great said that hell surely exists, but only for himself, which is to say that hell is never “for the others,” that it is never the object of our discourse.

Paul Evdokimov