God
“Why Doesn’t God Prevent Genuine Evil In The World?”
The more I read Tom Oord’s work, the more I appreciate his perspective, specifically as it relates to his understanding of God, love and evil.
Death and evil are siblings who share more than the same heritage. Often, we cannot talk about the one without considering the other; we can’t be touched by one without also being touched by the other. Even if evil spares us of physical death, it takes of our life, lessening life’s quality. Death, somehow or another, is evil’s product; and, yet, seems to be able to reproduce it’s progenitor, begging the question, “What comes first … evil or death?”
When you bring God into the conversation of evil and death, the whole thing get’s even more messy.
Here’s a small clip by Oord called, “Why Doesn’t God Prevent Genuine Evil in the World?”.
(from The Work Of The People)
Aside from Tom wearing some of the coolest nuclear holocaust proof glasses I’ve ever seen, he also drops some powerful thoughts.
For instance, he says,
I think it’s time for Christians to take seriously the idea that God’s love makes it the case that God can’t do some things.
And …
… we need to think more seriously about what kind of power God has.
Finally, what do you think about Oord’s conclusion that because of our freedom God can’t prevent evil?
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A House Keeping Note: About two months ago I promised a six part series on the problem of evil that only had enough gas to make it to part five (1. “Discarding God”; 2. “My Problem with ‘God'”; 3. “Is It All God’s Will?”; 4.“Open Theism and the Problem of Evil” and 5. “So You Think You Have Free Will?”.
I have the gas for part six. Look for it on Monday.
Turtles, Trees, and the Spiral of Time
Today’s guest post is from bereaved parent Joy Bennett.
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Joy Bennett
I’ve always pictured time as a line, with me an unchanging dot moving from moment to moment from birth on one end to death at the other. I have an almost visceral reaction to thinking of time, and myself within it, like this. In this model, I am static. The dot that is me remains unchanged as it moves through each moment. And at points of loss, the vision of me moving relentlessly farther and farther away from the person lost aches to my core.
I read something recently that describes time as a spiral. The spiral illustrates how then is very much a part of now and it all influences what’s next. It describes how dynamic and alive we are as we move through life.
I think time-as-spiral is a better model. It recognizes that we are more than a static pile of cells. We are constantly being shaped by the interaction of our individual characteristics and choices, our past (the full spectrum of joys and pains we’ve experienced), and our future (our goals and plans and dreams).
I am the person I am today because of my past experiences, my joys and pains, and the quirks that make me me. You are the person you are today because of what makes you you, what you’ve experienced already, and what you hope to do in the future.
I am fascinated by the ways each person’s experiences shapes them, and how much they control that shaping. A lack of depth of experience renders a person less developed but less scarred. A wide and deep range of emotional experience can ripen a person into a rooted maturity, or it can singe them into a scarred, cynical shell.
My own life experience was relatively unremarkable before the birth of our first child. I overcame a handful of hurdles growing up: a few small heart-breaks, the deaths of two grandfathers, a cross-country move, the crucible of working as a resident assistant in a conservative Baptist college’s dormitory. (Two words: not fun.) Engagement, wedding planning, and the first year of marriage were mostly euphoric, with a few requisite lows, some tears, and a lot of talking things out. I remember sensing that life had been too calm and that something big was coming.
Then Elli arrived. We were catapulted into what seemed like an alternate universe. Hearing words like, “I wish I could say, ‘but the good news is ___,’ but I can’t” fires depth charges into your soul.Kissing your infant goodbye before surgery, knowing that the odds are 1 in 5 that she’ll survive for you to kiss her again, is one of the darkest paths one can tread. The sleepless nights caring for a child too sick to catch a breath or stop coughing or who just can’t sleep confronts you with darkness that you never dreamed lurked inside yourself.
That alternate universe wasn’t all dark desperation, though. We uncovered the pure delight of watching a child learn how to laugh, discovering how to make her smile, and celebrating each hard-won milestone. She redefined what was important and what was worth our energy.
Elli carved the raw material of us and left a distinct contour on everyone who met her. She’s been gone nearly three years, but the mark she made on each of us is permanent. We are now faced with what we do with it — how to move forward. What we choose each day is shaping us.
We all leave marks on the people with whom we interact. Whether those interactions provoke dark valleys or euphoric highs is often out of our control, but we can determine how it shapes us.
But how? How can the things which wound and scar us so deeply become the very things that strengthen us and equip us to help others?
Jesus.
This is one of the many beautiful themes we find the Bible. Terrible things happen. I will not say that God causes tragedy, but I will declare that God is not thwarted by it. God can take natural disasters and the evil schemes of people and make those things produce good, in spite of themselves. This is what happened when Jesus was killed — people murdered God’s Son and yet, that very thing that was meant for evil became the greatest good ever accomplished on earth. In the worst betrayal ever recorded, Jesus defeated death and made peace with God for us. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him and meant to do him harm when they sold him as a slave. But God used it to save Joseph’s family and preserve the nation of Israel through them. We see it in nature, in the rejuvenation of a forest ravaged by fire. Over and over, we see God redeeming tragedy.
When I remember this, when I trust God to bring something beautiful out of my pain (even if takes years), I grow stronger. When I forget it, when I’m overcome by the circumstances and see only myself and what was lost or damaged, the pain burns and scars and my heart withdraws into a cynical bitter shell. (And as one who has hidden in my turtle shell and licked my wounds many times, hope is never lost. God can redeem even that, and he can transform the most recalcitrant turtle.)
How do you think about time and yourself in it? Who and what has shaped you? How are you responding to it?
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Here’s Joy’s bio: “I am a writer, thinker, asker of questions, mother, wife, bereaved parent, walking by faith, still in process. I’ve blogged since 2005, writing on faith and doubt, family life (which is always humorous even with the medical spin), grief, and the depression that I only recognized a year after our oldest died at the age of 8. Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of me yesterday.”
Send your love and likes her way on Facebook, add yourself to her Twitter tribe and check out Joy’s incredible blog!
The Broken-Open Heart Vs. the Broken Apart Heart
It seems there’s two poles in the livings reaction to death:
the one pole is where people almost think death is unreal … that when we die we simply “go to a better place” where all is not only okay, but it’s better.
And then there’s another pole. It’s the pole of darkness. Where death is
real
and heavy
and monstrous.
The thick cloud of paralyzing despair … the broken apart heart.
When we experience death — especially of the traumatic and tragic kind — we will often go back and forth, from one pole to the next, yet drawn, pulled to the pole of the real where all is dark. And we fight it. Often changing poles day by day … at times, hour by hour. From despair to hope and back again.
What we should seek to find in our grief is what Parker Palmer calls the creative tension between the two poles … the middle ground where our hearts are neither
totally mended
nor
broken apart,
but
broken open.
That last line encapsulates the creative tension I strive for in my life:
“We’re called to live in this world with broken, open hearts. Not denying the suffering and grief, but neither striving for perfection that takes us out of the action and into a fantasy world.”
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Special thanks to Monika Allen — manager of all things awesome at YWAM Madison’s blog — who sent me the link to this video.
A Tiny Casket, A Hole in the Ground, and Heaven
Bill Stauffer is a pastor in rural NJ, where he mostly chases around his eight-year-old twins. He likes to chase his wife, too.
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It was a terrible tragedy – unspeakable – and it was making the rounds on Facebook: a local two-year-old boy killed in a house fire. As the details came out, there were a number of families in town sharing in the grief of this boy’s death. A little boy, lost to his father, his stepfather, his mother (sedated and in the hospital still days later), and all types of extended and blended families and relationships. A number of them in the church where I am an associate pastor.
The weird thing about death for me is that it was so present in my early life, that even the worst of tragedies now require me to step way outside of myself to feel them for others. It’s like a scar with no nerve endings. By the time I was ten, I had lost all of my grandparents, two uncles, a number of family friends, and my father. Death shaped me. I knew it was shaping these people, too. It was carving out new chasms of pain. They were becoming more human.
Because one of the boy’s cousins was in my youth group, I was asked to lead the graveside service, as the Catholic priest who was presiding at the funeral mass could not be there because of a prior commitment. Whenever you get asked to preside over death, something happens. You sense a seriousness come over you. It’s involuntary. You will have the final say in people’s interaction with their loved one. Perhaps more than that, you will have the outrageous privilege and responsibility of helping them bridge this world and the next. In this case, it was connecting the infinite with a little boy in a tiny casket suspended over a gaping hole in the ground.
I was raised Catholic. When I step inside a Catholic Church building, unlike most other ex-Catholics I know who went over to the protestant dark side, I have a sense of coming home. My uncle, a priest himself, was one of the finest men I ever knew. He was the constant in my family when death reigned during my early years. The smells, the sounds, the liturgy, the bad music – it’s like putting on your favorite pair of comfortable, but woefully out of fashion shoes. You would never wear them in public, but in private, you miss them and occasionally slip them on to knock around the house in.
What struck me this day as I entered the narthex of the church was the open grieving already taking place. That was familiar, too. I can clearly hear my Aunt Peggy crying and screaming over the open casket of my uncle, her brother, Billy, dead in his early 40’s. I was five. It was surreal, but very emotionally honest. We button down Protestants need some of that in our emotional mix – honesty. This little boy’s family was grieving like that, and strangely, it gave me a sense of hope for them. It certainly gave me love for them.
During the funeral mass, from my vantage point in the back row, I viewed a room full of people full of sorrow, hopelessness, pain, and anger, with no outlet but flowing tears. My friend Sue was next to me in the pew. When she saw the tiny casket, she wept. “That’s not right!” The father and the stepfather carried their little boy up to the front of the church. Impossible to fathom.
At the graveside we stood at that intersection, the visible and invisible, and tried to make sense of what we could. I told them that little Zack was safe in Jesus’ arms. I told them that Jesus hated death; that it frustrated and angered him. I told them Jesus knows. He knows. He knows.
About their anger. I told them to take it to God in full force, that he was big enough to handle it from them, that is was real and needed to be voiced. God is such a pragmatist. He uses what’s at hand to grab hold of us. He uses pain and suffering to draw us to him. He uses joy and pleasure. Anything, really – whatever is in the emotional cupboard at the time. And that’s when it struck me.
Death is a spiritual ear opener. It unplugs the hard, waxy buildup of mundane, self-consumed life and lets us hear eternity calling. And in that moment, standing by that tiny casket over a gaping hole in the ground, it happened. There, in the cold, listening to the weeping and sniffling and occasional outbursts of tears, heaven spoke. It was Jesus saying, “Come to me, and bring your suffering. Bring your sorrow – I know. Bring your anger – I know. Bring your hopelessness – I know that, too. I’ve got what you need. Me”
Jesus was there, in Zach’s most frightening hour. He was there to comfort and take Zach home.
And I pray that Jesus — as Zach’s family grieves in the months and years to comes — takes this broken and beautiful family in His arms and ravages them the only way a good God can. They, and we, can live in the love of a God who wants nothing more than for us to simply “Come.”
Open Theism and the Problem of Evil
The past couple posts have been on the problem of evil. Today is the fifth piece in the series.
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How you handle the philosophical side of the problem of evil boils down to how you answer these two questions:
1.) Does logic apply to God?
2.) Does morality apply to God?
If you answer “yes” to both, the problem of evil is going to change / has already changed your whole view of God.
If you answer, “mostly yes and sometimes no”, you should probably be writing this post instead of me.
If you answer “no”, you’ll have a lot of trouble with questions like “Can God create a rock so big you can’t lift it?” or, “Can God do absolutely anything he wants, like kill children, and still be considered a loving God?”
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Once you answer, “Can we apply logic to God?”, the following question needs to be asked about God’s knowledge of the future:
if God is limited by the possible (ex. he can’t exist and not exist at the same time), than how can he know with absolute certainty the future actions of a free person? How can He know exactly what you’ll do if you’re free to do otherwise?
Most Arminians believe that God has both absolute foreknowledge AND that man has free will. And while John Calvin and Open Theists would probably disagree on almost everything, they both agree that Arminians are flat out wrong … that God cannot know with certainty the future actions of free persons.
Calvin writes,
“But seeing He (God) therefore foreknows all things that will come to pass, because he has decreed they shall come to pass, it is vain to contend about foreknowledge, since it is plain all things come to pass by God’s positive decree”
God knows the future because God decrees the future.
While agreeing with Arminians on most points, Open Theists depart from the compatibalism. Gordon Olson, one of the seminal thinkers in Open Theism, writes:
that if God foreknows every future event, then every future event must come to pass according to God’s foreknowledge, for if one should ever choose differently, God’s foreknowledge would be in error. If man must so choose, then only a single course of action is possible to him in every given instance. This means the will is not free to choose between two or more possibilities, and therefore is not free at all.
At this point, compatibalist Arminians (who believe God knows the future actions of humanity with absolute certainty and that humanity is totally free) would play the mystery card.
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Or they play the “God is outside time” card. And the “outside time” card is a very difficult one to play. I agree that God experiences time differently than we do, but — at least from a Christians perspective — as soon as we start playing that card we have to claim that every time the Bible speaks about God’s actions in the past tense, or present tense, it’s anthropomorphizing His actions … because there never is past tense, a present or a future with God … it’s all now for Him (since he’s outside of time).
This position is historically called the “Eternal Now.”
“Can’t God move in and out of time?” you might ask. And here we have to define time. Suffice it to say that time isn’t a “thing” that can be traveled, or warped or removed, but it’s simply the process of relationships … that as long as God is connected to us in actual relationship, he experiences time.
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Open theists don’t believe that God’s view of the future is as limited as ours; rather, that it’s not seen in certainties, but in possibilities, with varying degrees of probabilities. Farther, open theists would argue that God’s omniscience stays intact as he still knows everything that’s possible to know (assuming it’s impossible to know with certainty the future actions of a free being). Instead of knowing everything as a certainty — he knows all possibilities in the future as actual possibilities and all certainties as certainties.
But, why even argue against absolute foreknowledge? And how does it apply to the problem of evil?
Not only do open theists believe their position is biblical, and free from Hellenistic influence, they also believe that if God absolutely foreknew all the evil in the world, he also — to one degree or another — planned all the evil. They agree with Calvin. That the reason God foreknows all is because He (to one degree or another) decrees all.
But all this talk about an open future rests on a very huge assumption: that humanity possess free will … an assumption I’ll question on Friday.
