On the way home from work today I chanced upon the rear bumper of a faded yellow Ford Futura with a bright yellow bumper sticker proclaiming in bold red exclamations:

"God is a Good God"

What a fine cap to a fine day. To chance upon a sentiment of such deep philosophical subtlety so casually displayed along the Boulevard.

God is a good God you say. A discovery which apparently needs asserting as a contingent truth. As if God could be otherwise, and we should rejoice at the good news that the God of our universe has turned out, pretty much against all the evidence, to be a good God. Possibly there are some other universes somewhere with Gods who are not good. Given the state of ours, this is surely a thought to curdle the blood.

Be all that as it may, our God is good. And this is news worth reporting, in the standard American way, on your car bumper. That too, boggles my mind. A deep principle of the most profound philosophical view expressed so tersely it can fit on a bumper sticker. I think Thomas Aquinas needed dozens of pages of dense reasoning to assert the contrary view--that God's goodness is necessary and in no way contingent. In fact, the main lineage of Christian theology runs from Plato through Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and all three of these philosophers viewed God's goodness as axiomatic, and thought this truth, although self-evident, needed lots of discursive support. But my lady of the Boulevard is a haiku-philosopher of the highest order--for her, the matter can be summed up in five words.

The dear lady ferrying this thought here and there was also certainly trying to express her piety. Little did she know that St. Thomas and generations of subsequent theologians would have seen such a sentiment as the highest possible impiety. To assert that God's goodness is a contingent truth, is to blaspheme, in their view. Such a sentiment could get you drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake, or drowned, or any one of a dozen other condign punishments, depending upon the epoch in history in which you impiously chose to express such a heresy. Except, I guess, in the current age. Probably not, I fear, because of our liberal tolerance. No, rather more because we don't get all that worked-up anymore about philosophical subtleties. Whether God's goodness is contingent or necessary, is just not the kind of thing that fevers our sleep. For most of Christian history, such questions were virtual obsessions. And the view that God's goodness is a necessary attribute and not a contingent one, has been the standard view throughout this history.

In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas made the necessary goodness of God the basis for one of his main proofs of God's existence. His argument was that God is necessarily that which is perfect in every way, including goodness, and that the existence of the imperfect (us) implies the existence of the perfect (God). So for Saint Thomas and most of the Christian tradition from his day onward, the goodness of God is a necessary truth. The way Saint Thomas put it was:

"Some things are found to be more good, more true, more noble, and so on, and other things less. But comparative terms describe varying degrees of approximation to a superlative. . . Something therefore is the truest and best and most noble of things. . .There is something therefore which causes in all other things their being, their goodness, and whatever other perfections they have. And this we call God."

Now if I could just figure out a way to get this on a bumper sticker......