The God of the philosophers lives in the mind that knows him, receives life by the fact that he is known, lives as long as he is known, and dies when he is denied. But the true God (whom the philosophers can truly find through their abstractions if they remember their vocation to pass beyond abstractions) gives life to the mind that is known by him…
Therefore Jesus said: “The God of Abraham, the God Isaac, and the God of Jacob…is God not of the dead, but of the living.” So true is it that the Lord is the “living God” that all those whose God he is will live forever, because he is their God.
Such was the argument that Jesus gave to the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. If God was the “God of Abraham” then Abraham must rise from the dead: no one who has the living God for his Lord can stay dead. He is our God only if we belong entirely to him. To belong entirely to life is to have passed from death to life.
THOMAS MERTON No Man is an Island
