Sermon thoughts and other musings

I remember as a young math student being taught the difference between an axiom and a theorem. A theorem was something that you tested or proved. An axiom was a given, a presumption.

In your faith, what is an axiom, and what is a theorem? What are our real axioms - our truly first principles - and what are things that are derivative from them?

Paul, in this famous passage from Romans, appears to me to be making a distinction that is analogous to the axiom/theorem distinction when he talks about the love of God. For most people, especially of that time, God's love was, at best, a theorem. They wondered, does God love us? How can we make God love us? And maybe some of them even deduced that God loves us.

But for Paul, God's love is an axiom. It comes before everything else. We can only interpret the universe after we have first understood that God loves us. We don't look at creation and deduce that God loves us because creation is so beautiful; we first understand that God loves us, and then understand that God created the universe because God loves us.

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." - Romans 8:38-39

Paul understood this first. That allowed him to understand the rest.