Theological discussion on Christian belief in God's presence and social isolation

in accord with what is believed to be God’s intentions for one. Beliefs like this about God’s presence as a constituent feature of human operations are at times incorporated by Christians within an account of creation: God’s presence to or within them is then believed to be an element of what God as the creator of the world gives to every human being; and is in that sense part of the natural or ordinary constitution of human life that God intends in creating the world.“ But more often than not the gift of God’s presence as an effective influence on human life is specifically associated by Christians with salvation. Human beings, Christians typically believe, have either lost altogether, or at a minimum, habitually fail to attend properly to a presence of God always theirs, in ways that corrupt human well-being. The Christian claim is that God saves human beings by giving them the presence of God as an effective force for human transformation in virtue of something that Jesus suffers or accomplishes. God acts as an invisible force in human lives here because God influences humans through God’s very presence. Christians, if they follow the common teaching of theologians in this regard, believe God is invisible or unapparent because God is not capable of being delimited or circumscribed by the usual boundary drawing and sorting mechanisms used to cordon off and pin down other things.“ God is not, in short, a kind of thing, set off by clear boundaries that distinguish God from what God is not. But there is also here the kind of invisibility discussed earlier: the invisibility of apparent absence in human terms. 126 Page Christian claims about salvation often have an eschatological edge. They frequently point, that is, to an end time, indefinitely deferred from the perspective of anything achievable in this life. What God gives to remedy the sin of human life through Christ is, accordingly, not commonly thought to be fully effective in any visible way in this life. Christians typically think that their connection to Jesus brings with it a new availability of the presence of God as a force for change in their lives, but what they expect to achieve by way of that constantly available relationship remains invisible in the form of an always deferred hope. Once again it is invisibility—here the invisibility of the revolutionary changes in one’s life for which one continues to hope--that permits Christians to believe the presence of God, made available to them in a new way in Christ for the very purpose of bringing about those changes, is nevertheless always with them. Conclusion The main intention of this chapter was to make the case that basic Christian beliefs are likely to have a bearing on perceived social isolation. After suggesting that Christianity is not all of a piece on that score, I developed a particular construal of basic Christian beliefs that would seem to have great potential to alleviate perceived social isolation through attention to connection with God. While that argument was merely a logical or prima facie one, it forms a testable—though as yet untested—hypothesis: Does the particular construal of the beliefs commended here for their encouragement of a focal sense of constant connection with God really have those consequences? Do people actually feel less lonely, in other words, HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021372