Archive for October, 2008
What a Lot of Theological Arguments Seem to Come Down To…
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
“It’s all about theology,” said the Bible professor.
“No, it’s all about relationships,” said the excitable youth minister.
“No, it’s all about spiritual disciplines,” said the contemplative pastor.
“No, no, it’s all about what you actually do,” said the volunteer.
“No, it’s all mission, about having a purpose,” said the goal-directed Type A personality.
“No, it’s all about what God did for us,” said the struggling sinner.
I would suggest God isn’t interested in having us all have identical personalities, gifts, talents, and struggles – that one person’s way of looking at things is the most important. God separated these things into different people, the same way he separated sky and sea, light and dark, land and ocean. That separation was an act of creation, and its result was good. Before, everything was the same – “formless and void.” God breathed difference into the world – contrast, separation – and things suddenly got more interesting.
The fight for unity should be not become a fight for sameness, that is, entropy, eradicating what God created. The same way he made people male and female, he made people have different kinds of personalities and gifts — and not equally proportioned either. (Is it unfair? A useless question.) We should join together as parts of a body, not as bricks in a wall, or drops in an ocean.
Said the cynical intellectual-type person.
General disclaimer – These thoughts are not fully formed. Please let me know if something seems off or not right, and I’ll do what I can to correct. Wisdom from God is “open to reason,” says James.
“I Thought We All Were Children of God”
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
“I thought we all were children of God.”
- Esmerelda, as sung by Demi Moore in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame
I find myself, lately, doubting Esmerelda’s point here. What if she’s wrong? What if we really aren’t all children of God? What then?
It would certainly make the Bible make 70 jillion times more sense if it weren’t true. It would make LIFE make 70 jillion times more sense. I believe a lot of well-meaning Christians have a tendency to box God in to the idea of an earthly parent – tremendously loving in a self-sacrificial way, willing to discipline if necessary, but not a whole lot else. There’s no place in this view of God for hell, weeping and gnashing of teeth, plagues, wars, justice, or for that matter… anything really awful happening to anyone at any time ever.
You only have to look at the world for 2 seconds to realize that a lot of awful things happen, with nary an apparent reason for the vast majority of them. The God of the Bible never ignores this, never pretends like it doesn’t happen. We can repeat Romans 8:28a (very a) to ourselves over and over, but it doesn’t make the image of God so vividly portrayed in books like Job and Revelation any less there.
Reading Revelation for the first time without bothering about the “meaning” of the images was a, well, revelatory experience for me. The God pictured in this book looks very little like the love-and-love-alone God often depicted in the world of evangelical Christianity or its offshoots – this is a God of absolute power, majesty, and authority (and transcribed by the “apostle of love” no less!), whose will is perfect and just, while at the same time being terrible and fearful to behold.
Consider Revelation 16:4-7. God’s angels are pouring out bowls of wrath in the world, the third of which turns rivers to blood. I’m pretty sure some level of unpleasantness was intended to ensue from this. And how do the angels and saints at the altar reply? “Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments.” How would we have responded? I’m pretty sure I, being as squeamish as I am, would have thought something like “Aw, gee, God, are you sure that was necessary?”
It seems to me “God-as-parent” is not a big enough picture to hold this kind of revelation. We need God as supreme sovereign and creator, absolute in power and holiness. We need God as lawgiver and law-enforcer, the God of the whirlwind – God as warrior, even – for any of this not to jar our brains when we read it.
Dr. Fortner, a professor at Harding University, used to say “God is not your buddy. God will eat your face,” which is a rather over-provocative and blunt way of expressing what I believe to be a profound truth that we often miss.
What’s more, I don’t believe we understand the magnitude and amazingness of God’s grace and love until we first understand God’s authority and justice. After all, apart from justice, mercy is completely meaningless. If we don’t deserve God’s love, if God is under no obligation whatsoever to love and care for us, and yet he does – and profoundly, deeply, self-sacrificially so, to the point of death on a cross – how much more astonishing is that? How much more grateful would we be? The one who has been forgiven much, loves much, after all.
The important passage here, I believe is, Romans 8, particularly verses 14-17. There are a couple of points to make here. First, clearly humanity does not start as “sons of God,” and not everyone gets to claim that title. That relationship is not a natural result of God’s having created us that we are owed somehow – it is a product of grace, a gift from God that we don’t deserve at all. Yet, he gives to those who are led by the Spirit. The Spirit testifies for us that we are God’s children. So, for those of us in the Spirit, we CAN look to God as our father, and praise God that we can! We surely don’t deserve it.
And this also helps us not let the metaphor of God-as-parent allow subtle lies to leech into our understanding. An earthly parent’s love for his or her child is a beautiful thing. But if a parent does NOT love his child, the parent is a pariah. Earthly parents have an obligation to love their children. God is under no obligation to anything or anyone at all. The very idea of “obliging” God is complete nonsense.
God is supreme, sovereign, holy, and just. I would suggest that if we understand this first, then God’s love and mercy become all the more amazing, all the more powerful.
General disclaimer – These thoughts are not fully formed. Please let me know if something seems off or not right, and I’ll do what I can to correct. Wisdom from God is “open to reason,” says James.
On Sharing Thoughts
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
I haven’t been posting much here, but it hasn’t been because I haven’t had thoughts to share. I’ve just become less convinced that my theological and political reasonings, combative as they are, are of any use to anyone. I don’t enjoy getting into arguments, but nor do I enjoy letting things that seem terribly wrong slide by uncontested. Nor do I want to give the impression that I am not “open to reason,” as James describes true wisdom.
Therefore, I think it would be healthy for me and possibly useful to others to express, once again, my thoughts here, with the understanding that these things are still being worked out. This is a blog, after all, not a compendium of finalized conclusions (even if I write as though they are sometimes).
At a recent Bible study I shared some thoughts that I had been keeping bottled up for a while, and folks seemed to appreciate them – even jotting a note down or two. So expect some reasonings – unfinished, tentative, “open to reason,” but at the very least, there.