Around a month ago, my friend Frank Rees (Principal and Professor of Systematic Theology at Whitley College in Melbourne) presented a paper at a conference in South Korea in which he offered a theological reflection on his own experience of disaster. Frank kindly sent me a copy of the paper before he headed off to Korea. I was deeply moved in reading it. And given the events in Christchurch this week, Frank’s clear and accessible words came readily to mind. I asked Frank if I might share his paper with others. I do so with his permission, and in some fear and trembling. For many of those most affected by recent earthquakes in Concepcion or Christchurch, or bushfires and floods across Australia, for example, it will be too soon to engage in the kind of conversation that Frank is inviting us to partake in. For others, such a conversation is already – and always – happening at a number of levels, and to disregard its incessant demands for whatever reason may not only deepen the pain, but also perpetuate the lie that the promise of Emmanuel – God with us – is an empty myth at best. So I share Frank’s paper in hope that these words might contribute to the healing of grieving communities, and to the Church’s witness to the crucified God.
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The story
In September 2009, I went with my wife Merilyn and our daughter Felicity for a holiday in Samoa. On the morning of Tuesday 29th September, we were woken by an earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale.
Very soon after, a tsunami warning siren sounded. We ran outside and could already see the tsunami wave coming onto the land about 30 metres away. We were all swept by the wave in different direction. Felicity and I were carried along by the wave till we were trapped in a courtyard area and smashed into buildings, which were themselves being broken up by the wave. Merilyn was taken past these buildings and carried several hundred metres inland and ended up on a corrugated iron roof. The wave was moving at about 50–60 km per hour, and was about 3 to 4 metres high so we did not stand a chance of escaping it. Fortunately we have all survived.
Under the wave, I tried to swim as best I could, hoping to come to the surface, trying to get some breath. At the time I did not know that at least 5 of my ribs had been broken and one kidney damaged, plus numerous cuts from head to feet. I had little chance of normal breathing even if I could get my breath. Soon I realized I was about to drown. I thought to myself: ‘So this is the end.’ Merilyn had an almost identical realization, ‘So this is what it is like to drown.’
But we did not drown. After some time, I came to the surface and was able to stand up on a remaining piece of building structure. Amazingly, I could see Felicity in the distance, also standing on a part of a building. It took an excruciating and terrifying effort, but eventually we made our way up a hill to a safer place. All the while there were waves swirling around us, laden with debris of every kind.
Merilyn was eventually washed up onto the roof of a building. Most likely she was unconscious for some of the time under the water. It was about an hour before we eventually found each other. She has had a number of long term lung problems.
After some time, a local man took us and some others in a minivan across the island to a hospital. Merilyn is an anaesthetist and helped identify the worst injured. The hospital was very good to us but they were overwhelmed and the care was basic. Locals from the community came to the hospital to try to help. They were extraordinarily kind, even though many of them also had lost relatives amongst the 163 people who died that morning.
We were left with nothing: no money, no documents and no clothes.
Eventually, we were evacuated back to Australia by a medical recovery team. Then began many weeks of medical treatment and psychological support as we recovered from this experience.
The effect on Samoa was and is devastating. The south coast was ruined; many villages no longer exist and there was been much loss of life, especially of children who did not stand a chance in the water. The people have also lost much of their employment as tourism is the major industry, and the small friendly resorts along the coast are gone.
The wave was a dramatic shock: just to think about it causes me a sense of outrage. It was violence unannounced. At 3 to 4 metres high, no one had a hope in the face of that wave. Children and adults were swept away, buildings just smashed apart. Some villages were inundated and the bodies needed to be dug out from the sand. Death and destruction was so quick, so indiscriminate, so undeserved. There is no rationale about who lived and who died, who suffered and who escaped.
My initial reflections on this experience were provoked in part by a Catholic priest who visited us in hospital, prayed for us and offered us encouragement. He said to us, very directly, that God did not send this tsunami, or cause it to happen. Rather, God is with us in our pain and will strengthen us in the journey ahead. His prayer for us was beautiful. He spoke to God about the situation and need of ‘this, your family’. I liked what he had to say, theologically; but frankly I was not concentrating on that at the time.
Since then, we have recovered from our physical injuries, though Merilyn has some permanent lung damage. I have continued to reflect upon this experience, theologically and pastorally, and that is what I hope to share with you now.
God and the world: Four ways of relating
There are four ways in which we might think of God in relation to the world in general, but specifically in relation to natural disasters. But before we proceed to those, let me begin with something I am not saying.
It is crucial that we do not pretend that disaster is anything other than disaster. When an earthquake, typhoon or tsunami strikes, it is devastating. There is nothing to be gained by asserting that really, in some mysterious way, it is a good thing. When people die by violent and tragic means, or are injured and their lives become an emotional wreck, when property is destroyed on a grand scale, and when peoples’ livelihoods are shattered, they have no jobs and no means of supporting themselves and their families, that is a disaster.
It is a critical task of theology here to deal in the truth. It is crucial for pastors and relief workers to accept this truth and to help people to find meaning in this truth. That is why it is crucial to ask how God is related to the reality of natural disasters.
I am a Bible believing Christian, and a pastor, and a theologian. It is my job to teach people about God the creator. I tell people that God made everything that is and that God said it is good. What sense, then, do I make of a world in which within minutes a tsunami destroys lives and communities and the whole environment around us?
I wish to propose four ways in which we might conceive of God in relation to natural disasters: God as cause, God as in control, God as companion and God as consummator. With regard to each of these theological constructs, we need to ask a series of critical questions. Where is God, according to this view, and how is God related to the world and us to God? And we need to ask whether this conception of God is consistent with the biblical, Christian understanding of God, especially as made known in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
My argument will be that we need all of these conceptions of God, to arrive at an appropriate Christian understanding of God in relation to natural disasters. Only with this fully nuanced conception of God can we arrive at some proposals for a constructive pastoral response to communities and individuals caught up in such traumas.
God as cause. The basic idea here is that God is the cause of all that is. What happens in the world is the result of cause and effect, but if we go back far enough we come to an uncaused cause, which is God. This conception of God is especially to be associated with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas posited God as the first cause or the uncaused cause.[1]
God, in this conception, is the ultimate perfect being, in that God did not need any other being, impetus or pre-condition in order to exist. God simply is, from all eternity. Furthermore, God exists independent of all physical and changing phenomena. Here we see the very powerful influence of Hellenistic thought, which conceived of perfection as unchanging and complete self-sufficiency. God, the first cause, is then a pure ‘substance’ or essence.
Much has been written in criticism of this way of thinking of God. Clark Pinnock wrote of ‘the influence of the pagan dogma of the absolute unchangeableness of God’ which comes from ‘the syncretism of biblical and Greek thought’.[2] Broadly speaking, this conception of God emphasizes the difference and distance between God and the world.
It is vital, though, to note Aquinas’ theological intention in his proofs of the existence of God. His purpose as a theologian was to assert the dependence of all things upon God, in the sense that existence is not without ground, meaning and purpose. There is something, indeed Someone, from whom all life derives and this is God. Furthermore, Thomas’ intention was to argue that this foundation is reliable, indeed unchanging.
This theological assertion, immensely important as it is, runs into difficulties when we turn it into a quasi-scientific statement about why specific things happen in the world, as if God is the cause of such events.
Here there is a complex of different issues. On the one hand, if God is the ultimate cause of all subsequent causes, then God is responsible for everything that happens, having initiated it all. God is not only the cause of the flowers but also the thorns, the rivers but also the floods, the cool breezes and the cyclones. Yet according to this idea, God is infinitely distant and uninvolved in the universe. God as first cause or creator is on this view unrelated to us, even though responsible for what happens to us. This conception of God, taken in this way, is alienating and inconsistent with the biblical ideas of a God of compassion, whose loving-kindness endures forever.
The alienation inherent in this idea is complete. Either God as first cause is indeed responsible for all that happens – in which case our own lives, choices, capacities and relationships are not really our own but are somehow cosmically predetermined – or in reality this first cause is uninvolved and distant from us, so that we are essentially left to it, to live as best we can but without the assistance and support of the one who set it all up this way.
In either case, God as first cause is back there, back then. This leaves God absent from the world. It may be of some significance to name God as the originating cause, but such a God has no effective presence or power. It is not sufficient to think of God as cause only. This leaves us in an impossible, and deeply alienated situation, which I suggest is the ground of much modern atheism.
God as in control. This way of speaking of God has much in common with the previous idea, except that it asserts positively that God is in fact responsible for what is happening in the present. This conception of God asserts God’s active agency in the present and God’s sovereignty over all that happens.
The strongest advocate for this idea is John Calvin, in his teaching on providence. He offers to the faithful in adversity the solace ‘that everything which they endure is by the ordination and command of God, that they are under his hand.’[3] In the following sections, he goes on to argue that all events happen by ‘the ordination’ of God and contribute to the advantage of the godly, because ‘the world is governed by the secret counsel of God’, who is faithful to the promises throughout Scripture that God’s providence reigns over the entire creation.[4]
This conception of God again needs to be carefully understood. It can very easily be taken to mean that God is the cosmic puppeteer or the one who pulls all the levers, positively controlling everything that happens. This would make God the cause of disasters and responsible for crimes such as murder and rape. This is an absurdity and clearly not Calvin’s intention.
It is also based on an impossible view of the world. The universe is not a mechanical world where everything happens by predictable order, from the smallest movement of an atomic particle to the shifting of tectonic plates. While Calvin did not have the benefit of modern physics and chaos theory, for example, he was aware that calamities happen to people, even if he seems always to have attributed them to evil deeds by sinful men. Nonetheless his emphasis on providence as the secret counsel of God should warn us against any simplistic notion that God is literally causing every event to happen. Rather, Calvin’s purpose is to point us beyond such ideas towards another view of God, whose purpose is infinitely good, but as yet not clear to us. His intention is to call us to trust in God and to journey towards our heavenly home with God, in spite of the sufferings and privations of this world.
This defence of Calvin’s view, however, seems to reduce the meaning and effect of the concept of God’s being in control. The major difficulty I find with this way of thinking of God is its tendency to distance God from believers and from the world. God’s sovereignty is a secret, which we nonetheless have to believe. This seems to give little substance to the promise of Jesus, ‘I will be with you always’ (Matt. 28.20). Either this presence is an entirely interior experience, with no real impact upon the world itself, or we need to find some other way of thinking of God in relation to the world. God may have ordained some ultimate benefit for believers, but in the meantime we are all subject to the unpredictable events of nature and the nasty deeds of fallen humans all around us.
God as companion. Here I wish to draw upon the thought of Jürgen Moltmann, whose work on God as creator has addressed the alienation that contemporary humans experience in many forms. Are we in fact abandoned in the universe, alienated from both God and nature? The following paragraph presents both an important critique of much theological discussion about creation and indicates a vital way forward:
[T]he Christian doctrine of creation came to be narrowed down to creation in the beginning (creatio originalis); and this was further contracted still to the aspect of God’s creative activity. The doctrine of the divine ‘making’, the doctrine of continuous creation (creatio continua) and the doctrine of the new creation still to be consummated (creation nova) all receded into the background and were forgotten.[5]
It is vital that our understanding of God and the world is not focused upon the origins alone, but sees God as continuously engaged with the entire life of the world. One way in which Moltmann develops this is through the idea of God as companion.
Moltmann writes of ‘the accompanying activity of God’, who suffers the contradictions of history, as so many events and movements work against God’s creative and loving purposes. Nonetheless God does not give up on the creation but is continuously creative, even in and through the free activities of humans and other creatures. Moltmann notes here the necessity for a Trinitarian doctrine of creation, in which it is the creative Spirit in particular who is ‘present in the world and in every part of it’, wooing the world towards its eventual consummation in God.[6]
God as companion is with people. This companionship is not conditional upon our invitation, nor the result of our merit or our choice to ‘have faith’. Rather, it is God who chooses to be with us, rather than leave us or forsake us (Heb. 13.5).
The testimony of countless Christians supports this idea. People find that through the most difficult times in their lives, God is very close to them and they are sustained, encouraged and given a fresh sense of the value and meaning of their lives because God is with them.
Nonetheless, the idea of God as companion has also to be developed, lest it be taken to mean that God is reduced to the proportions of our own experience. When we say that God accompanies us in our suffering, we do not mean that God is equally powerless as we may be, in the face of disease, disaster and destruction. Rather, when God accompanies us in our suffering God continues to be God. This is the astonishing truth of the Gospel: that God is able to appear amongst us, incarnate as one of us, and yet remains God. To say that God accompanies us without ceasing to be God can only lead, then, to the fourth way of thinking about God in relation to the world.
God as consummator. Here, we draw upon the preceding concepts, to assert that God is at work in the world, even through the medium of accompanying us. God’s purpose in the world is to bring the entire world to the eschatological banquet of peace and joy, to know the grace and love of God, revealed in Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus foreshadows the resurrection of all creation, in that ultimate hope. In the meantime, even in our present sufferings, we are not without hope (1 Peter 1.6–9). Rather, God is lifting us up, so that we are able to rejoice in hope.
Thus Paul is able to write in Romans 8.37 that we are ‘more than conquerors’. He does not deny that dangers, persecution, impoverishment and suffering are part of our situation; rather, in mentioning these things he is recognizing that these things may threaten to separate us from the love of God. But he confidently asserts that they do not, for even as Christ intercedes for us we are able to live into the victory God gives.
My contention, then, is that these four ways of thinking about God need to be held together, in an appropriate balance, for a constructive and meaningful way of speaking of God in relation to natural disasters.
To pursue this further, I would like to comment upon a short and often-quoted statement found in one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison: ‘Only the suffering God can help.’[7]
There are three crucial elements in this short statement. First is the assertion that only the suffering God can help us. I take this to mean that we should not look to any other way of thinking of God, for these are delusions. In this section of his writing, Bonhoeffer was urging that people should abandon the ideas of a God who manipulates the world as the ‘deus ex machina’, the God who is in control but who remains outside the world, unsurpassed and unable to engage with the suffering of the world. Bonhoeffer was proposing a different way of seeing God, a suffering God. For him, God is a full participant in the life of the world. To suffer, here, means to be subject to the choices of others. To suffer means to be able to receive and to accept what others decide, as well as to have one’s own capacity and wishes and purposes. Australian theologian Denis Edwards has recently expressed this concept very beautifully, proposing a theology in which God is understood as lovingly accepting the limits of creatures and actively waiting upon finite creaturely processes, living with the constraints of these processes, accompanying each creature in love, rejoicing in every emergence, suffering with every suffering creature, and promising to bring all to healing and fullness of life.’[8] The suffering God is not just an active agent but is also a companion agent, one who responds to what others are doing. But it is the third element in this sentence that is critical here. Bonhoeffer says that the suffering God can help. The word ‘can’ means to be able, to have the capacity to help. What is crucial here is that in undergoing suffering, God is not disabled. God does not lose the capacity to respond constructively and creatively. As companion to us, in the midst of our suffering, God is still able. God is still God.
It is the resurrection of Jesus that is crucial to this theological idea. Even death cannot defeat God’s redemptive purpose. Jesus is raised from death and lives as the first-born of the new creation.
Implications for people in disaster situations
What, in the lived experience of women and men undergoing suffering and distress, does all this actually mean? I would like to suggest seven elements, which may be a sequence of experiences or may be a number of things that occur in various combinations. My suggestion is that the Spirit of God, as active companion in our journey, calls forth these elements in our experience.
First is the element of belonging. Many people who have undergone adversity experience a deep and new sense of belonging to each other. Having almost lost my life, I found a fresh and deeper love for life itself, and for my family and also experienced the astonishing care of so many people, some complete strangers to me. The prayer support of the Christian community was almost palpable. God gives to us a new sense of belonging, and if we are able to recognize it as such we realize we belong also, and eternally, to God.
This element expresses itself as hope. ‘We will get through this.’ Such statements are often made through gritted teeth, in the anguish of physical and emotional pain. Hope is an inexplicable gift. It has nothing to do with wishful thinking. Hope is the gift of openness to a future as yet undisclosed. It draws us forward, even when we have no capacity to walk.
A third and crucial element in God’s enabling is patience. It is hope that enables endurance, patient waiting for what is yet to be. Those of us who live active lives and who are accustomed to being generally competent in all our activities find this patient waiting very difficult. Pain is a great teacher. Patience is the slow but definite practice of hope. It is an active and loving holding on, perhaps without any other purpose than simply remaining, ‘being’ in the now.
With time, however, God also gives healing. It is remarkable how there is such a close relationship between time and healing. My doctors assured me that it would be six weeks till the bones healed and the pain would begin to ease. It is necessary to wait, but they were right. With time we discover that in fact all along healing has been taking place. There is healing in the very nature of things and there is also the active work of healers. I thank God every day for the medical care I received and indeed for our health services. They are agents of God.
In addition, experiences of suffering and distress are often times of learning. Many people report that it was at such times they learned the most valuable lessons of life. In particular, we learn the value of things. That is, we learn that the things for which we spend so much time, money and effort, are worth almost nothing. I lost all my clothes and possessions in the tsunami, but what remained was my life, my family, and my relationship with God. Nothing else matters to me, ultimately. In times of pain and patient waiting, I found myself able to reflect on my life, my work and my priorities.
Flowing from these elements, I found within myself a deep and very rich sense of caring for others. My pastoral life was renewed, with great acuity and depth. Many times, as a pastor, I have known people in deep grief or pain reach out in concern for others. They want to be assured that some other person is being cared for. We may marvel at that, but it seems to me a gift of God. Our pain does not destroy our better selves, but rather brings it to the surface. Even as he suffered, Jesus prayed for those who were crucifying him. From the cross, he urges John to care for his mother. These are examples of the loving care of God the companion in the midst of suffering.
Finally, then, the suffering God enables faith. I place this element last, in order to emphasize that it is not a precondition of the gifts that I have named already. Rather, faith may be implied in those other elements, but it may not be recognized or acknowledged. Many people in their anguish call out to God, sometimes in accusing ways. Sometimes people who say they do not believe in God call out to God, and many who have said they believed are unable to call out to God. They imagined that their faith in God would mean that nothing like this could ever happen to them. Not so!
Faith emerges as the quiet, sometimes unrecognized element that simply keeps us going. Faith is not the absence of struggle and doubt. Faith insists on dealing with the truth, with reality, with life and relationship: and through that keeping-on, faith emerges in new forms. It may be a new quality of prayer, or a new dimension of care, or a new commitment to reaching out to those less fortunate. And such faith will eventually find its voice, to speak the truth in the face of convenient or cheap piety. It will speak of God, the suffering God who can and does help.
The Church in response to disasters
In this final section, I want to offer just a few basic pointers that arise from the preceding reflections.
I begin with something we should not do. There is nothing at all to be gained when the church takes a high moral stand at the time of peoples’ suffering, even if we may believe that people have contributed to their own plight. In Australia, people do build their homes in areas that are seriously fire-prone. In Samoa, people build their villages close to the sea. Millions of people live on the sides of volcanoes and along fault-lines in earthquake zones. Even if we imagine that they could avoid doing so, it is not constructive or helpful to say this at the time of a disaster.
The first positive thing that the church can do, in response to natural disasters, is to believe that God is with us. This is why it is important to have an adequate theology of how God relates to the world. God is not only the originating cause of the world and its machinations, somehow outside the world, causing things to happen. God is with us, as companion, actively with us and working towards a healing and constructive outcome. When we know this, we can hold on, with patient hope.
It is essential that pastors and teachers work on developing this fundamental conviction amongst our people. The most helpful way to do this is through telling stories. This form of teaching, Jesus’ own preferred form of instruction, can address the false impressions people gain about God. We have to confront directly the idea that having faith in God means nothing bad can happen to Christians. We have to challenge the idea that God causes disasters to happen. Most people do not believe such things anyway, but they need positive teaching to replace such unchristian ideas. And that positive teaching can come from the stories of God’s sustaining and healing presence through the valley of the shadow, God’s presence as companion and healing Spirit. The stories of Jesus and the stories of ordinary people who have known God’s presence with them will actually unlock other stories. People will begin to recognize the truth and reality of their faith. God is with them. This will make their faith more real and their witness more authentic. And when the tough times come, they will be more able to endure and to support others in need.
From this positive assurance, the church must also develop ways to be actively caring for people. Some women from a local church came to the hospital in Samoa to do what they could to help. They brought clothing and simple things such as a toothbrush to help the victims of the tsunami. These were invaluable gifts in the situation.
Simple and practical help, offered but not imposed – Christians can learn to be helpful in these ways.
When I say that help must be offered but not imposed, I mean to suggest that there is a crucial strength necessary to be present, simply present with someone in need, in pain or grief, when there is nothing we can give them, perhaps nothing much we can say. The ministry of presence is the most important gift in many such situations. We do not always have to have the solution. Sometimes there is no solution. We need to be able simply to trust God and to be present, perhaps even in silence.
But for all that, we must also maintain an openness to God, who is present and able to do surprising things, in people and situations we may not have expected. A tsunami of water may be followed by a tsunami of care. An earthquake may tear down our home and God may give us a new home and a new community. We may discover, amongst the rubble of our lives, that faith is blossoming all over the place. God can do this.
Finally, then, there is a critical theological task for the church in the world today. As Charles Taylor has urged, we must learn to understand what it means to have faith in a world which has long since lost the pre-modern and even the modern conception of things.[9] The world is not a machine, controlled by a master manipulator of the levers. The earth is not like a watch, created by a master watchmaker long ago, who has set it up and just let it run. No, our task is to understand what it means to be with God and God with us, in a far less controlled, less predictable, but nonetheless created world.
In such a world, we must learn again the meaning of belonging. We must learn to respect the earth, as many indigenous cultures have done since time immemorial. We must learn also that the world is not ‘our environment’, but is rather the context in which we live with God. In so doing, we must learn see what God is doing in the world, and learn to live with and work with that, towards the consummation God seeks: the fulfillment of creation, in which all things come to their rest, in peace and harmony with God. Our task, then, is to learn to see what God is doing towards that redemption and to join with God in that. That is our theological and practical task – and what a privilege it is to be involved with God and God’s people in this way.
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a,2.3, London: Blackfriars, 1963 edition. At page 15 we read: ‘One is bound to arrive at some first cause of change not itself being caused by anything, and this is what everybody understands by God.’
[2] Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A theology of God’s openness, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2001, p. 71.
[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983, Book 1, Chapters XVI and XVII particularly p. 174.
[4] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Translated by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983, Book 1, Chapter XVII, pp. 182f, p. 189.
[5] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An ecological doctrine of creation. The Gifford Lectures , 1984–1985. London: SCM Press, 1985, p. 193.
[6] Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An ecological doctrine of creation. The Gifford Lectures , 1984–1985. London: SCM Press, 1985, pp. 211–213.
[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, Enlarged Edition, Edited by Eberhard Bethge, London: SCM Press, 1971. Letter to Bethge, July 16, 1944, p. 361.
[8] Denis Edwards, How God Acts: Creation, Redemption and Special Divine Action. Hindmarsh, South Australia: ATF Press, 2010, p. xviii.
[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007. In this large and incisive work, Taylor addresses the loss of the world-views inherent in the modern era, and argues for the need and possibility of ‘conversions’ to a religious response, the possibilities of belief within a secular world.
When C.S. Lewis lost his wife he wrote at one point in his anguish:
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll gladly listen. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
And yet the gift of consolation has always been a significant part – and that most difficult – of the work of a pastor. It is certainly among the most difficult work in which human beings engage, a work particularly difficult for people of faith. It is difficult because questions of suffering involve us in the very depths of our humanity. And it is difficult because mere human words have no answer to the mystery of suffering and the existential paralysis that it births. So Stanley Hauerwas:
To ask why we suffer makes the questioner appear either terribly foolish or extremely arrogant. It seems foolish to ask, since in fact we do suffer and no sufficient reason can be given to explain that fact. Indeed, if it were explained, suffering would be denied some of its power. The question seems arrogant because it seeks to put us in the position of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only God knows the answer to such questions.
Or consider the words of Simone Weil:
There is a question which is absolutely meaningless and therefore, of course, unanswerable, and which we normally never ask ourselves, but in affliction the soul is constrained to speak it incessantly like a sustained monotonous groan. The question is: Why? Why are things as they are? The afflicted man naively seeks an answer, from men, from things, from God, even if he disbelieves in him, from anything or everything… If one explained to him the causes which have produced his present situation, and this is in any case seldom possible because of the complex interaction of circumstances, it will not seem to him to be an answer. For his question ‘Why?’ does not mean ‘By what cause?’ but ‘For what purpose?’ … [S]o soon as a man falls into affliction the question takes hold and goes on repeating itself incessantly. Why? Why? Why? Christ himself asked it: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ There can be no answer to the ‘Why?’ of the afflicted, because the world is necessity and not purpose …
Here we could do much worse that simply listen to the experience of Nick Wolterstorff who, in grief after losing his 25-year-old son Eric in a mountain climbing accident, penned the wonderful book Lament for a Son:
What do you say to someone who is suffering? Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us. But not all are gifted in that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken. And if you can’t think of anything at all to say, just say, “I can’t think of anything to say. But I want you to know that we are with you in your grief.”
Or even, just embrace. Not even the best of words can take away the pain. What words can do is testify that there is more than pain in our journey on earth to a new day. Of those things that are more, the greatest is love. Express your love. How appallingly grim must be the death of a child in the absence of love.
But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.
I know: People do sometimes think things are more awful than they really are. Such people need to be corrected-gently, eventually. But no one thinks death is more awful than it is. It’s those who think it’s not so bad that need correcting.
Some say nothing because they find the topic too painful for themselves. They fear they will break down. So they put on a brave face and lid their feelings-never reflecting, I suppose, that this adds new pain to the sorrow of their suffering friends. Your tears are salve on our wound, your silence is salt.
And later, when you ask me how I am doing and I respond with a quick, thoughtless “Fine’’ or “OK,” stop me sometime and ask, “No, I mean really.”
It is imperative to the integrity of its witness that the Christian community takes suffering and grief with the utmost seriousness. And as for death – Death sucks! There is simply nothing positive we can say about it, nor should we seek to live in peace with it. So Wolterstorff, again:
Someone said to Claire, “I hope you’re learning to live at peace with Eric’s death.” Peace, shalom, salaam. Shalom is the fulness of life in all dimensions. Shalom is dwelling in justice and delight with God, with neighbor, with oneself, in nature. Death is shalom’s mortal enemy. Death is demonic. We cannot live at peace with death.
When the writer of Revelation spoke of the coming of the day of shalom, he did not say that on that day we would live at peace with death. He said that on that day “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
I shall try to keep the wound from healing, in recognition of our living still in the old order of things. I shall try to keep it from healing, in solidarity with those who sit beside me on humanity’s mourning bench.
In the face of death, suffering and grief, what the Jesus community is given to know and to hope in and to proclaim is the word of the cross and resurrection. We have no other word!
The cross of Christ is God’s final word to the problem of suffering, because the problem of suffering is the cross itself. So JürgenMoltmann:
The death of Jesus on the cross is the centre of all Christian theology … The nucleus of everything that Christian theology says about God is to be found in this Christ event. The Christ event on the cross is a God event. And conversely, the God event takes place on the cross of the risen Christ. Here God has not just acted externally, in his unattainable glory and eternity. Here he has acted in himself and has gone on to suffer in himself. Here he himself is love with all his being.
Most of those who have suffered devastating grief or dehumanising pain have, at some point, been confronted by near relatives of Job’s miserable comforters, who come with their clichés and tired, pious mouthings. These relatives engender guilt where they should be administering balm, and utter solemn truths where their lips ought to be conduits of compassion. They talk about being strong and courageous when they should just shut up and weep … and pray to the God ‘who comforts the downcast’ (2 Cor 7.6), who is the ‘God of all comfort’ (2 Cor 1.3), who intercedes for us both when we can articulate what we want to say and when all we have are groans, and to whom not even death represents the end.
Much of this groaning, of course, is articulated and graciously given to us in the Psalter, and particularly in the psalms of lament and of disorientation, a recovery of which in both corporate and ‘private’ worship would go a long way to re-marry and re-form faith’s truth claims with the ambiguities of human existence. Walter Brueggemann is characteristically helpful here:
It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented … It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the large number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about the incoherence that is experienced in the world. At least it is clear that a church that goes on singing ‘happy songs’ in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible itself does. I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgment of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s ‘loss of control.’ The point to be urged here is this: The use of these ‘psalms of darkness’ may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. To withhold parts of life from that conversation is in fact to withhold part of life from the sovereignty of God. Thus these psalms make the important connection: everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life.
Finally, for now, there is a further posture that we are invited, by God, to maintain. And that is the posture of protest prayer. I am reminded here of Karl Barth’s statement, that ‘to clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world’. A Christian response to suffering is not theodicy, but struggle – the struggle of taking God’s side against the world’s disorder, and of refusing to treat suffering and paralysing fear as an acceptable part of a larger harmonious vision that God intends for human flourishing.
Christchurch quaked again this afternoon. And even here in Dunedin, some 360 kms away, there were not a few who felt the earth rumbling, giving way, somewhere beneath us.
And this afternoon, many of us paused to pray again for those who have for many months lived with uncertainty and amidst regular aftershocks. Somewhat stuck for words, I turned to two prayers in Walter Brueggemann’s Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth to help me find a voice and to give me somewhere to start.
Even on such a day
We prattle about your sovereignty … especially we Calvinists;
all about all things working together for good,
all about your watchful care and your severe mercies.
And then we are drawn up short;
by terror that strikes us, in our privilege, as insane;
by violence that shatters our illusions of well-being;
by death that reminds us of our at-risk mortality;
by smoke and fire that have the recurring smell of ovens.
We are bewildered, undone, frightened,
and then intrude the cadences of these old poets:
the cadences of fidelity and righteousness;
the sounds of justice and judgment;
the images of Sodom and Gomorrah;
the imperatives of widows and orphans.
Even on such a day we are not minded to yield on your sovereignty,
We are, we confess, sobered, put off, placed in dread,
that you are lord as well as friend,
that you are hidden as well as visible,
that you are silent as well as reassuring.
You are our God. That is enough for us … but just barely.
We pray in the name of the wounded flesh of Jesus. Amen.
While reading Isaiah 1
◊◊◊
The terrible silencing we cannot master
Holy God who hovers daily round us in fidelity and compassion,
this day we are mindful of another, dread-filled hovering,
that of the power of death before which we stand
thin and needful.
All our days, we are mindful of the pieces of our lives
and the parts of your world
that are on the loose in destructive ways.
We notice that wildness midst our fear and our anger unresolved.
We mark it in a world of brutality and poverty and hunger
all around us.
We notice all our days.
But on this day of all days,
that great threat looms so large and powerful.
It is not for nothing
that we tremble at these three hours of darkness
and the raging earthquake.
It is not for nothing
that we have a sense of our helplessness
before the dread power of death that has broken loose
and that struts against our interest and even against our will.
Our whole life is not unlike the playground in the village,
lovely and delightful and filled with squeals unafraid,
and then we remember the silencing
of all those squeals in death,
and we remember the legions of Kristy’s
that are swept away in a riddle too deep for knowing.
Our whole life is like that playground
and on this dread-filled Friday we pause before
the terrible silencing we cannot master.
So we come in our helpless candor this day …
remembering, giving thanks, celebrating …
but not for one instant unmindful of dangers too ominous
and powers too sturdy and threats well beyond us.
We turn eventually from our hurt for children lost.
We turn finally from all our unresolved losses
to the cosmic grief at the loss of Jesus.
We recall and relive that wrenching Friday
when the hurt cut to your heart.
We see in that terrible hurt, our losses
and your fill embrace of loss and defeat.
We dare pray while the darkness descends
and the earthquake trembles,
we dare pray for eyes to see fully
and mouths to speak fully the power of death all around,
we dare pray for a capacity to notice unflinching
that in our happy playgrounds other children die,
and grow silent,
we pray more for your notice and your promise
and your healing.
Our only urging on Friday is that you live this as we must
impacted but not destroyed,
dimmed but not quenched.
For your great staying power
and your promise of newness we praise you.
It is in your power
and your promise that we take our stand this day.
We dare trust that Friday is never the last day,
so we watch for the new day of life.
Hear our prayer and be your full self toward us.
Amen.
Otago University’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies is hosting a public seminar by theologian and activist George Armstrong on the theme Auckland’s 1960s to Cairo’s 2011: A Half Century in the Struggle of Peoples for Peace with Justice.
When: Wednesday 23 February 2011, 12.00-1.30pm
Where: Commerce 2.20
According to the blurb, the Rev Dr George Armstrong (PhD, Princeton) came from Dunedin to Auckland in the 1960s and found himself shuttled between the Anglican Church and the New Zealand State, between Christianity and secularity. He came as lecturer in Systematic Theology to St John’s College and has been there – off and on – ever since. He has worked as a controversial and occasionally high-profile theologian in Maori, Pakeha, and Pacific sectors of Church and Society from the parochial to the global. He became briefly a public figure through the 1970s as a founder of the Auckland and New Zealand “Peace Squadrons”, flotillas of small boats who eventually made nuclear warship visits to New Zealand impossible. (The government – and eventually politicians of all stripes – outlawed them.)
'Rangi (sky father) and Papatūānuku (earth mother)', by Wilhelm Dittmer (1907).
One of my greatest joys is talking theology with my four-year-old daughter (who is nearly five). Here’s an excerpt from a conversation that we had last week:
‘There’s lots of Gods; well there’s two Gods – there’s the God who is everywhere, and then there’s Papatūānuku. God looks after everything, but Papatūānuku looks after the garden, and even the basil in the glasshouse’.
‘Do god and Papatūānuku talk to each other?’
‘Yeah, of course. They are best friends. They listen to each other, and care about each other. They tell each other stuff, everything there is to tell, and then they all go to bed in the same room, like me and Samuel do’.
‘So how can God be everywhere?’
‘God’s got lots of legs – 166,000 legs. God’s got legs everywhere. But only two hands – the Holy Spirit and Jesus are like God’s hands. God doesn’t need any more hands. Two is enough. But God needs lots of legs. Otherwise God couldn’t go to Australia’.
‘And do God’s legs look like our legs, or are they different’.
‘Don’t be silly daddy. God’s legs are square, and they are all different colours too’.
‘And does Papatūānuku have legs too?’
‘Yes. They are round. And they are colourful too. And Papatūānuku has hair, even when she’s in the sea, and in the garden, and in the glasshouse’.
Radio NZ, The New Zealand Herald and The Beehive report that Judith Binney (1940–2011), who only recently survived being hit by a truck, passed away last night in her Auckland home, aged 70. Binney, who was Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Auckland and one of the most passionate historians I had ever heard, authored some groundbreaking work, especially on the Māori Ringatū faith and its key figures Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and Rua Kenana, and on the Ngāi Tūhoe. Her last published book, Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820–1921, deservedly won the New Zealand Post Book of the Year and General Non-fiction Award last year. Encircled Lands (which she speaks about in this fascinating interview aired on 28 November 2009) powerfully recalls the ‘lost history’ of Te Urewera, the Ngāi Tūhoe people and members of neighbouring iwi such as Ngati Whare. It truly is a magnificent acheivement, even if her devotion to her subject at times distorts the telling.
It was not that long ago that I read Ruben Gallego’s 2003 Russian Booker Prize-winning book White on Black wherein the author makes the comment that ‘there are books that change the way you look at the world, books that make you feel like dying or living differently’. In many ways, Judith Binney’s Encircled Lands makes one do something just like this. Binney’s Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turukiand Philip Temple’s A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefieldstoo embody the power to make us radically reassess our past. Moreover, Encircled Lands invites an entire nation to first look and then to live differently as a result of what it sees. In many ways, this is Professor Binney’s public gift to the nation – the invitation to look, and to look again. What a gift!
The latest edition of First Things is now out, and includes a piece by Timothy George on ‘Reading the Bible with the Reformers’, and a provocative piece by Douglas Farrow on ‘Blurring Sexual Boundaries’, wherein Farrow (speaking to the Canadian context) argues that ‘Sex cannot serve as an effective legal marker for discrimination if its binary nature dissolves into fluid sexual subjectivities’.
On the subject of conferences, registrations for the ‘”Tikkun Olam” – to mend the world’ conference and exhibition are now open. This is shaping up to be a really exciting event.
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen.
‘What we hear during Lent is the power and possibility of the paschal mystery, and that the way of the cross, the way to Easter, is through death. To appropriate the new life that is beyond the power of death means we must die with Christ who was raised for us. To live for Christ, we must die with him. New life requires a daily surrendering of the old life, letting go of the present order, so that we may embrace the new humanity. “I die every day!” asserts Paul (1 Corinthians 15:31). Resurrection necessitates death as a preceding act. The church’s peculiar Lenten claim is that in dying we live, that all who are baptized into Christ are baptized into his death. To be raised with Christ means one must also die with Christ. In order to embrace the resurrection, we must experience the passion of Jesus. The way of the cross, the way to Easter, is through death of the “old self.” In dying, we live.
Therefore, at the beginning of Lent, we are reminded that our possessions, our rulers, our empires, our projects, our families, and even our lives do not last forever. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). The liturgies throughout Lent try to pry loose our fingers, one by one, from presumed securities and plunge us into unknown baptismal waters, waters that turn out to be not only our death tomb, but surprisingly our womb of life. Rather than falling back into nothingness, we fall back on everlasting arms. Death? How can we fear what we have already undergone in baptism?
It is the power of the resurrection on the horizon ahead that draws us into repentance toward the cross and tomb. Through the intervention of God’s gracious resurrection, lifelong changes in our values and behavior become possible. By turning from the end of the “old self” in us, Lenten repentance makes it possible for us to affirm joyfully, “Death is no more!” and to aim toward the landscape of the new age. Faithfully adhering to the Lenten journey of “prayer, fasting, and almsgiving” leads to the destination of Easter.
During the final week, Holy Week, we hear the fullness of Christ’s passion, his death, and resurrection. From Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and on to the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday), all of Holy Week focuses on the passion. As his followers, we travel Christ’s path of servanthood through the Lord’s Supper and the suffering of the cross toward the glory of Easter, all of which underscores the inseparable link between the death and resurrection of Jesus’. – Peter C. Bower, ed., Companion to the Book of Common Worship (Louisville: Geneva Press, 2003), 110–11.
I was glad to be up on Aotea (Great Barrier Island) last week to speak to a group of mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings at an event called Going Further. My brief: talk about (i) God’s goodness and trustworthiness, and (ii) God’s holiness. A number of people have asked me for a copy of the talks. They were not recorded, and, as per my usual practice, I departed often and widely from my notes. But for those who may be interested in the thrust of what I said, I thought it worth posting my notes here. The talk on God’s goodness and trustworthiness is available here, and below are my notes on the second talk, on God’s holiness.
God’s Holiness
I want to begin tonight by re-reading the passage that I shared the other night from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe where the Beaver’s are telling the Pevensie kids about Aslan:
‘Is – is he a man?’ asked Lucy. ‘Aslan a man!’ said Mr. Beaver sternly. ‘Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion, the Lion, the great Lion’. ‘Ooh’, said Susan, ‘I thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion’. ‘That you will, dearie, and make no mistake’, said Mrs. Beaver; ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly’. ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver; ‘don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king I tell you’.[1]
And later on in the series, in the book The Last Battle, Lewis writes of Aslan: ‘“Do you think I keep him in my wallet, fools?” … “Who am I that I could make Aslan appear at my bidding? He’s not a tame lion”’.[2]
These words go a long way in saying something important about what we mean by God’s holiness: that holiness is, in a sense, foreign to us. That holiness is, in a sense, other than us. That holiness is, in a sense, all about the fact that we can’t pin God down or control God or use God to serve our own ends. The language of holiness reminds us that God is God and that creatures are creatures, and that we ought not too hastily confuse the two.
We live in an age in which much has become trivialised and demeaned. And one place that that’s manifested is in our attitude toward the sacred, toward creation, toward life itself. And if we go to many churches, we are probably more likely to gain an impression that Jesus is a kind of celestial boyfriend who never embarrasses us than we are to learn of the great otherness of God and of the sacred mystery which is life. And in the circus that so often characterises the Church’s worship, and in our efforts to exalt human nature, God has been stripped of majesty, and awe-fulness, and transcendence. Of course, transcendence is something that used to be reinforced in the church’s architecture and in the community’s worship space. When we enter a cathedral and we look up at the majestically-high ceiling, we are reminded that God is big, that God is far away, and that we are small. But in our modern multi-purpose entertainment centres, the ceiling feels almost within reach, and God is not so big, and we are not so small. This reflects a change in theology – both in our thinking about God and about ourselves. God used to be bigger and we used to smaller. But now God is not so big, and we are not so small! Or so modernity’s narrative goes.
And in the flattening out of our worldview and of history (what we call secularisation), the holy God has been sanitised. And this has some profound implications, as one commentator noted:
The loss of the traditional vision of God as holy … is the key to understanding why sin and grace have become such empty terms. What depth or meaning … can these terms have except in relation to the holiness of God? Divorced from the holiness of God, sin is merely self-defeating behavior or a breach in etiquette. Divorced from the holiness of God, grace is merely empty rhetoric, pious window dressing for the modern technique by which sinners work out their own salvation. Divorced from the holiness of God, our gospel becomes indistinguishable from any of a host of alternative self-help doctrines. Divorced from the holiness of God, our public morality is reduced to little more than an accumulation of trade-offs between competing private interests. Divorced from the holiness of God, our worship becomes mere entertainment. The holiness of God is the very cornerstone of Christian faith, for it is the foundation of reality. Sin is defiance of God’s holiness, the Cross is the outworking and victory of God’s holiness, and faith is the recognition of God’s holiness. Knowing that God is holy is therefore the key to knowing life as it truly is, knowing Christ as he truly is, knowing why he came, and knowing how life will end.[3]
When I hear of God being addressed as ‘my mate’ and as ‘cool’ (as I did at a church service just last Sunday), and even word ‘Lord’ used with seemingly little thought of the implications of naming God as such, I think of the God that confronts Ezekiel and Isaiah and Adam and Mary, and I wonder what Bible people are reading! It’s certainly not the book in which the word ‘holy’ appears 779 times.[4] (For the record the word ‘love’ appears 586 times, ‘justice’ 165 times, ‘good’ 827 times.)
The theme of holiness is, of course, first introduced in the creation narrative in reference to the Sabbath – the day that God ‘sanctified’. But the first time that the actual word ‘holy’ is used in the Bible is in Exodus 3 which recounts Moses’ encounter with the burning bush:
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then God said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” 6 God said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. (Exod 3.1–6)
Here is God’s chosen servant being told ‘Come no closer’. This passage reminds me of one of the most famous and influential books ever written on the subject of holiness.[5] It’s called The Idea of Holy (first published in 1917) and it was written by a German theologian named Rudolf Otto.
Otto studied how people from different cultures and different religions ‘behave’ and ‘feel’ when they encounter something they regard as ‘holy’. And the first thing that he discovered was that people have a difficult time describing exactly what ‘the holy’ is. No matter what their description of the experience was, there was always an element that defied explanation. It wasn’t that this element was irrational. Rather, it was kind of ‘super-rational’; it was beyond words. And what Otto discovered was that when it comes to holiness, human language actually reaches its limit.
And I think that Otto is right here. And that’s why the grammar of God’s holiness is most clearly preserved in the church’s liturgy and in prayer and in song – in those arenas of human activity where God is spoken to rather than spoken about, where God is realised and praised rather than analysed and appraised, and where the burden of feeling like we need to nail down a tight definition and explanation is not only less pressing, but if pressed is likely to lead to distortion.
Otto believed that every religion deals with this sense of mystery, what he called ‘feelings of the non-rational and numinous’ or the ‘sheer absolute wondrousness that transcends thought’. And the universal human response to this overpowering experience, Otto said, was both dread (‘mysterium tremendum’) and fascination (‘mysterium fascinans’). He described it like this:
The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane’, non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost gristly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of – whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.[6]
If you’re a horror movie buff like me, you’ll know something of that feeling of both dread and fascination that Otto is talking about. I know that I’ll be frightened if I watch, but I can’t turn away either.
Remember Mrs. Beaver: ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly’. ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver; ‘don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king I tell you’.[7] And it goes on: Peter replies, ‘I’m longing to see him … even if I do feel frightened when it comes to the point’.[8]
And what strikes me about the Exodus 3 passage that we read earlier is that it tells me that holiness is both terror-inducing and intimate. The same Moses who hides his face because he is ‘afraid to look at God’ (v. 6) is the same Moses who hears God’s gracious promise to personally intervene in the liberation of his people from slavery in Egypt and makes a promise to Moses, ‘I will be with you’ (v. 12). So holiness is not just about separation from those things which are ordinary or profane, but it’s also about belonging and liberation and identity and vocation in God. No wonder that after they were delivered from the Egypt, the Israelites broke out in song:
‘Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in splendor, doing wonders?’ (Exod 15.11)
So what’s a good definition of God’s holiness? Here’s one that I like:
‘God’s holiness is the majestic incomparability, difference and purity which he is in himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which is manifest and operative in the economy of his works in love with which he elects, reconciles and perfects human partners for fellowship with himself’. (John Webster)[9]
In other words, God’s holiness refers to the fact that God cannot be compared to anything created. God is not only beyond created realities, but God is also other than creation. And God is majestically pure, not as a lonely monad but as a community of other-person-centred life. And we see God’s holiness in the way that God elects humanity to be his covenant partner, in the way that God reconciles humanity to himself in Christ, and in the way that God patiently goes on to bring humanity to full maturity in the perfection of the Spirit.
And the Bible talks not only about God as holy but also about other things and places and people that God sets apart or marks off or withdraws or consecrates for some special purpose.[10] Things we might call tapu.So the Bible talks about holy ground, the holy Sabbath, a holy nation, a holy place, holy linen, holy coat, a holy house, a holy tithe, holy censers, holy oil, holy bread, holy seed, a holy covenant, the holy of holies, a holy field, a holy jubilee, holy water, teh holy ark, the holy word, the holy city, holy ones (saints), etc.
Now none of these things is holy in itself. Only God is that. But these things have what we might call a borrowed holiness.
And what a list like this tells us is that holiness is not just concerned with itself but that God desires to see holiness – i.e., to see himself – reflected in creation. God desires to look at creation as if it is a mirror.
And so from within a creation existing under the bondage of its own decay, God chooses an unholy people – Israel – and sets them apart – sanctifies them, makes them a holy nation – in order that they might be – in their life together – a mirror and a copy of Yahweh’s holy love in the world. And in this act of election the people of God actually come to share in God’s holiness. And God speaks to them a command which is in a very real sense a command spoken over all creation and which gives us a clue into why creation exists in the first place:‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’ (Lev 11.45).[11]
In other words, not only is God holy, but we who are God’s image bearers are called to reflect, to be a mirror, of God’s holiness in the world. And the OT prophets, again and again, are trying to outline for us what this ‘You shall be holy’ actually looks like on the ground, as it were. And they identify Israel’s holiness with the care for the most vulnerable in their midst (for refugees, orphans, widows and the poor), with just practices in the courts, and with other activities like the denunciation of idolatry. There is no pietism here!
And as we were so beautifully reminded of this morning from Isaiah 6,[12] creaturely holiness cannot be reached apart from judgement. And we experience this judgement not only internally in the human conscience but also in being gathered up in the judgements that come upon creation itself – in famine and flood and earthquake – judgements which are experienced now in the devastation and rape and groaning of life itself.
And so to speak of God’s holiness is to recall that aspect of God’s love which is not satisfied with creation just existing on its own terms. The Creator is not prepared to let creation go its own way or to leave it to its own devices.[13] So there is (as we saw this morning in the Isaiah passage) what we might call the annihilating or ‘cauterising’[14] power of holiness which purifies all things. In other words, it’s the holiness which confronts us and which overcomes us in our sin. For, you see, creation’s holiness is not reached apart from judgement. In fact, God’s judgement is our great hope because judgement is the form that love takes, the action that love takes, in the face of evil. We are not saved by escaping God’s judgement. We are saved by going through the judgement in Christ. And what I trust that we will see tonight is that the final judgement is not something that is coming in the future but that the final judgement has already taken place in the Son of God’s love who is, as one writer put it, ‘God’s holiness in human form’.[15]
And Jesus unveils God’s holiness to us as the Son for whom nothing was dearer than his Holy Father and for whom nothing was more paramount than hallowing his Father’s name. In fact, I believe that the whole of history is an outworking and fulfilling of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.’ That’s what Jesus is doing all throughout his ministry – he’s answering that prayer, he’s hallowing the Father’s name. And that’s what the Spirit is calling the people of God to participate in – in Jesus’ work of hallowing the Father’s name.
So what does holiness look like when it comes among us, when it gets into our face? In order to answer that question, I want us to look together at a story recorded in chapter 5 of Mark’s Gospel:
21 When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. 22 Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet 23 and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” 24 So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. 25 Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26 She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. 27 She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” 29 Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30 Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” 32 He looked all around to see who had done it. 33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mark 5.21–34)
This woman dashes onto the stage for 10 verses. She’s got no name. She’s got no idea of who Jesus really is. He represents for her the last straw in a long line of doctors and miracle workers that she has spent all of her money on and over a decade seeing. And because of her medical condition, she has been treated like a leper in her community for 12 years. For 12 years, she has been tormented by guilt and anxiety. For 12 years, she has been untouched … and untouchable. She has been unable to hug her kids. She has been unable to make a cup of tea for a friend or to eat at the same table as her family. And for 12 years, no one has invited her to their home. Now she doesn’t want to know Jesus. She’s not seeking a relationship with him, but she wants to be healed. She wants to be restored to her community. She wants to be able to go to her kids’ birthday party and make love with her husband. She wants to be able to prepare a meal for her family and enjoy a day out with her friends. And she hears reports of this guy in town who heals people and so, at the end of her tether, she goes along to check it out, and she moves in on Jesus from behind … anonymously in a crowd.
This is the man who deliberately touched unclean lepers and corpses. This is the man who made a point of eating with prostitutes and calling ‘sinners’ his friends. This is the man who deliberately went out of his way to do almost everything that the OT prohibits us, and especially priests – who are meant to be the model of what it means to be ‘holy’ – from doing. But would he allow this woman to touch him, to pollute him, to make him ceremonially unclean? Would he allow this woman to place him under the wrath and judgement of God? Because that’s what she does when she touches him.
You see, God does not heal us by standing over against us, diagnosing our sickness, prescribing medicine for us to take, and then leaving us to get better by obeying his instructions – like an ordinary doctor might. No, God becomes the patient! God assumes the very humanity which is in need of healing, and by being anointed by the Spirit in our humanity, by a life of being completely given over to hallowing the Father’s name, our humanity is healed in him.[16]
C.S. Lewis once said, ‘Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger’.[17] What Lewis is saying is that if you can look at your life and see yourself as someone who is not only bleeding like this woman in Mark 5 but also dead, then you are going to find it very hard to know that God has touched you and healed you and made you alive in Christ. One of my favourite theologians, a guy by the name of Helmut Thielicke, once said, ‘There is no wilderness so desolate in our life that Jesus Christ will not and cannot encounter us there … There is no depth in which this Saviour will not become our brother … He comes for us wherever we are … For that is his majesty’.[18]
So do you know that he has come for you? Do you know that he has pursued you as a lover chasing his beloved? And do you know that he has caught up to you and made you holy by the only way you can be? Isaiah said ‘All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like menstrual cloths’ (Isa 64.6). Do you know that you have absolutely no righteousness, no holiness, of your own? But that the Lord in Zechariah 3 says to you tonight, ‘Take off (your) filthy clothes … See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put rich garments on you.’ Do you know that he bore all your sins, all your uncleanness, and all of love’s wrath in his own body on the tree? Do you believe that? Do you believe that from the moment you’re born right up until the moment of your death, that on that cross he entered into your history, into your mind, into your conscience, into your memory, into your acts, and he took into himself all the judgement, the pain, the shame, the loneliness, the burden, the confusion, the guilt, the fear, the darkness, the hypocrisy, the terror? Do you know that on that cross he actually experienced your life, and that he left nothing undealt with? And that as God’s High Priest he sanctifies (makes holy) everything that he touches … and that he has touched you? Do you know that? Do you know that if you are in Christ then you will never be more holy than you are today? And that as far as the east is from the west he has removed our sins from us, and he will remember them no more because there is nothing for him to remember? Paul said,
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? … But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor 6.9–11)
What relief! What joy! What grace!
Friends, in the history of Israel – which is a history which culminates in Jesus Christ – God has undertaken the responsibility to bring creation to its glorious goal in the kingdom of God. And we might say that God’s ability to complete this project[19] in the face of that sin which mocks his holiness is the ultimate question in life, because it’s a question that goes to the heart not only of why creation is here but also of where creation is going, why creation is moving in a particular direction, and who is taking it there. So the biggest questions of life – of why, and where and who – are all wrapped up with this matter of holiness, and with the bringing to fulfillment those ancient words that echo out across all history – ‘You shall be holy, as I am holy’.
Holiness is the key to knowing why life exists, and how life will end. And so the joyful word of hope that comes to us in the gospel is that, in the end, hell will be empty. In the end, every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will bow to Christ, and all creation joyfully reflect and participate in the holiness for which God created it, and redeemed it in his Son (Phil 2.10–11). In the end, all the kingdoms of this world will ‘become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever’ (Rev 11.15), and ‘the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea’ (Hab 2.14).
It is not enough that sin be quarantined in hell. Whatever sin is – and it is a mystery – it is unjustifiable, unredeemable and unconvertible. Strictly speaking, sin is unforgivable. It is extinguished in Christ. God never forgives sin. God only ever forgives sinners. Sin is what God leaves behind on the path to the sanctification of all things. And if God in his love is to be all in all (as St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 and Colossians 1), then there can be no place left for hell in the end. There can be no back room in the coming kingdom of God which will mar the glory and the joy of the new creation in all its purity, no dark cellar with locked door and inescapable passage, no black line across a world that God has made clean.
If God’s goal for creation is to see himself echoed, mirrored, reflected – to see the whole of creation as the theatre of his glorious holiness – then all that stands in the way must be overcome. And it is precisely this overcoming that is being enacted in the death and resurrection and ascension of the second person of the Trinity who takes into himself our broken and recalcitrant humanity and in his own humanity and in the Spirit cries out to the Father, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’. ‘God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor 5.21). Here is God going out into the limbo of our lostness, and he says, ‘I thirst’, as though it has expended every resource he has, and then he cries out, ‘It is finished’. As the writer of Hebrews said, ‘He tasted death for every one’ (Heb 2.9). He took all of the hellishness of the world – its white, hypocritical, religious wisdom – and he crucified it on the Cross. The Apostles’ Creed describes it like this: ‘He descended into hell’.
And so friends, in Christ, nothing is lost, every last soul from every last tribe, people and tongue is sought out, and gathered up into the life of one who makes space in his own life for us. This is the Son’s gift to the Father.[20]
Hell now belongs to Christ, and so the message about hell – which is a message that the Church must keep proclaiming – is that hell has become part of the good news.[21] Death has been swallowed up in the victory of the Second Adam. No wonder the Apostle Paul could break out in confession and say ‘May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world’ (Gal 6.14).
A final thought: So how do we live?
I hope that it is clear by now that to be holy is to be found in the neighbourhood of God’s cross. And that means that holiness takes us where Jesus goes; holiness takes us to those for whom Jesus died; it takes us into the neighbourhood of those who are forgotten, who have no voice, and who need healing and forgiveness. It takes us into very strange places. And the holy person is that person who will very often be found in very odd company. The holy person is to be found not among the righteous but among sinners, not among the healthy but among the sick. And a holy church is one that goes, with its proclamation and integrity and fidelity, among those who need healing, among those whose physical lives are wrecked by pain and disease and disaster. A holy church is one that stands alongside those who live with the scourge of HIV aids; a holy church is a church that labours alongside those who have been made homeless or bereaved by natural disaster. A holy church is a church which is completely uninterested in maintaining its own programs and status but which will go into the heart of the city and sit with addicts and the destitute and the shamed – with those who have no hope. A holy church, in other words, is a people who live under the cross, who give thanks for the cross, whose hope is in the cross, and who live in the crucified Christ and seek the crucified Christ where he is in the world – among his suffering people and a world waiting in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.[22]
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Fontana Lions, 1980), 75.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (London: Lions, 1980), 72.
[3] David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993), 300; cf. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (vol. 1; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1998), 279 : ‘A true love to God must begin with a delight in his holiness, and not with a delight in any other attribute; for no other attribute is truly lovely without this’.
[4] Holiness is a really central theme in the Bible. In many ways, it is actually the theme of the Bible. And so it’s somewhat surprising that Christian theologians have made so little of the idea in their thinking about God. While there’s heaps written about God’s righteousness and faithfulness and love, there’s comparatively little material outside of the Bible on God’s holiness. To be sure, there’s heaps of stuff written on the topic of holiness, but it’s mainly about human holiness rather than God’s. And even where we do find some stuff written about God’s holiness, we find that time and time again there’s very little thought and discussion about the place that Jesus holds in forming our understanding. In fact, this is true for many (perhaps most) discussions about God, which tend to be either highly abstract or anthropocentric. Here I am reminded here again of something that C.S. Lewis once said: ‘What makes some theological works like sawdust to me is the way the authors can go on discussing how far certain positions are adjustable to contemporary thought, or beneficial in relation to social problems, or “have a future” before them, but never squarely ask what grounds we have for supposing them to be true accounts of any objective reality. As if we were trying to make rather than to learn. Have we no Other to reckon with?’
[5] C.S. Lewis listed it as one of the ten most important books in his life.
[6] Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (trans. J.W. Harvey; London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 12–3. One is here reminded of Paul Tillich who describes holiness as ‘the quality of that which concerns man ultimately’, and as ‘the unapproachable character of God, or the impossibility of having a relation with him in the proper sense of the word, is expressed in the word “holiness”‘. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (vol. 1; London: Nisbet & Co., 1955), 239, 271. Also of Jacques Derrida’s definition of holiness as the ‘unscathed which is safe and sound’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ in Religion (ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 36.
[7] Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 75.
[9] John Webster, ‘The Holiness and Love of God’, Scottish Journal of Theology 57 (2004), 256. See also John A. Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah (Leicester: IVP, 1993), 76–7: ‘Holiness is God’s hidden glory; glory is God’s all-present holiness’. Also Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 49: ‘Holiness is ‘sheer difference from everything else’.
[10] Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (trans. J. Baker; vol. 1; London: SCM, 1961), 270: Holiness is ‘that which is marked off, withdrawn from ordinary use’.
[11] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 (ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 500–1.
[12] In many way the crux of Isaiah’s vision here is the hymn in v. 3: ‘And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory”‘. We must not here miss the significance of the Seraphs song, and particularly the repetition of the word holy. The repetition, which is called the trishagion (i.e., three-times holy), represents a peculiar literary device that is found especially in Hebrew poetry. The repetition functions as a form of emphasis. When we want to emphasise the importance of something in English we underline the important words or print them in italics or bold. We might use an exclamation mark or quotation marks. But for the OT Jew, one device that they used was repetition. So we hear Jesus saying ‘Truly, truly, I say unto you …’. And by doing this, he is alerting his hearers to the fact that what he is about to say is of particular importance and that they need to sit up and listen. But only once in the Bible is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. The Bible never says that God is love, love, love, or mercy, mercy, mercy, or wrath, wrath, wrath, or justice, justice, justice. But it does say – in at least two places – that God is holy, holy, holy. And here in Isaiah it draws attention to God’s transcendence.
[13] See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.1 (ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance; trans. J.W. Edwards, et al.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), 95.
[14] John Arthur Thomas Robinson, In the End, God: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of the Last Things (London: James Clarke & Co., 1950), 104.
[15] P.T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ: The Congregational Union Lecture for 1909 (London: Congregational Union of England and Wales/Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 347.
[16] James B. Torrance, Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), 42–3. There are implications here for our sexuality, which is something that the Christian community seems to tie itself up in knots over. So William Stringfellow, ‘The Humanity of Sex’ in The William Stringfellow Archives (vol. Box 8 of Ithaca: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, 1965), 8–9: ‘Can a Homosexual be a Christian. One might as well ask, can an insurance man be a Christian? Can a lawyer be a Christian? Can an ecclesiastical bureaucrat be a Christian? Can a rich man be a Christian? Can an infant be a Christian? Or one who is sick, or insane, or indolent or one possessed of power or status or respectability? Can anybody be a Christian? Can a human being be a Christian? All such questions are theologically absurd. To be a Christian does not have anything essentially to do with conduct or station or repute. To be a Christian does not have anything to do with the common pietisms of ritual, dogma or morals in and of themselves. To be a Christian has, rather, to do with that peculiar state of being bestowed upon men by God … Can a homosexual be a Christian? Yes: if his sexuality is not an idol’.
[17] Cited in Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 152.
[18] Helmut Thielicke, How To Believe Again (trans. H.G. Anderson; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 60, 63.
[19] See C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 205–6.
[21] Stringfellow offers us a wonderful definition of hell: ‘Hell is when and where the power of death is complete, unconditional, maximum, undisguised, most awesome and awful, unbridled, most terrible, perfected. That Jesus Christ descends into Hell means that as we die (in any sense of the term die) our expectation in death is encounter with the Word of God, which is, so to speak, already there in the midst of death’. William Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 110.
[22] Here I draw upon Rowan Williams, ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’ (Conference paper presented at The 3rd Global South to South Encounter, Ain al Sukhna, Egypt, 28 October 2005, 2005).
I was glad to be up on Aotea (Great Barrier Island) this week to speak to a group of mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings at an event called Going Further. My brief: talk about (i) God’s goodness and trustworthiness, and (ii) God’s holiness. A number of people have asked me for a copy of the talks. They were not recorded (except by the seraphim), and, as per my usual practice, I departed often and widely from my notes. But for those who may be interested in the thrust of what I said, I thought it worth posting my notes here. I will post those on God’s holiness later.
God’s Goodness & Trustworthiness
There’s a classic passage in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in which Mr. & Mrs. Beaver are telling the Pevensie children about Aslan, whom they are about to meet. They become quite nervous when they learn that Aslan is a lion:
‘Is – is he a man?’ asked Lucy. ‘Aslan a man!’ said Mr. Beaver sternly. ‘Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion, the Lion, the great Lion’. ‘Ooh’, said Susan, ‘I thought he was a man. Is he – quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion’. ‘That you will, dearie, and make no mistake’, said Mrs. Beaver; ‘if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly’. ‘Then he isn’t safe?’ said Lucy. ‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver; ‘don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king I tell you’.[1]
I plan to return to this passage when we consider God’s holiness, but tonight is about an invitation to think together about Mr Beaver’s words – ‘But he’s good’.
Life is like an omelette, and jazz
A mature life – which is the life that the Spirit calls us into and gathers us up into in Jesus Christ – is a life that requires a lot of broken eggs. As you already know, life is messy.
I’m suspicious of people who have life sorted out all too neatly. And I’m suspicious of theology that’s too tidy. Theology that speaks to the deep realities of life is more like an omelette than it is like a neat hard-boiled egg. Theology that speaks to the deepest realities of life will have a certain messiness and unpredictability about it – because life is more like a Jackson Pollock painting than it is like a Rubik’s cube. And even the life of faith is more like jazz than it is like techno.
I’m reminded of the book All Creatures Great and Small, where James Herriot tells of how he stripped to the waist one night in a cold barn in the middle of a North Yorkshire winter and laid on his back in cow dung and mud, straining to pull a new calf from its mother. And the whole time he was struggling in the muck and the mud he was cursing under his breath the lovely picture of birth he had been shown in textbooks back at the veterinary college in Glasgow. The photos in the textbooks were of vets dressed in white lab coats, standing in a clean concrete holding stall, delivering a calf without a drop of blood or muck around.
That’s not a picture of reality. Most questions that we wrestle with in life arise when we’re waist deep in muck and mud, when we’re drowning in more questions than we have answers and when we’ve got cold and sharp wind, mud and muck to contend with. And so if we spend our life trying to avoid the muck then we are in danger of living an unexamined life, a life in which there are no longer any satisfying answers at all because we are just too afraid to ask any decent questions. And the mature life is more about questions than it is about answers. And it’s about learning to really define and give voice to the right kinds of questions. And that takes time … and patience … and community … and humility … and a certain resolve.
And it’s the same with our life with God. We don’t start out by thinking about God in sterile settings. We start out by living. And living as we do, we have a bundle of beliefs, mostly passed on to us by others.
And so when it comes to the question of God’s goodness, or of God’s love, or of God’s steadfastness, or of God’s whatever, where do we start? And upon what basis or for what reason do we believe that God is like this and not like something else? And in regards to tonight’s topic, upon what basis might we believe that God is good and trustworthy?
And it gets even more interesting because if we believe that truth is not a set of propositions but that truth is a person (as in John 14.6: ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life), then what we are trying to understand isn’t a something but a someone, and that gets messier and a lot more interesting and a lot more open-ended because to engage with a someone – as opposed to a something – is to engage with a living dynamic who is on the move and who refuses to be contained by us and by our categories of thought.
So what is it about the story that the community of Jesus lives by which makes it believe that God is altogether good, merciful, just and unconditionally loving, rather than unreliable or wicked?
Defining God’s goodness & trustworthiness
For the sake of time, I simply want to say that Christian theology has a very specific logic at work, and that that logic determines what we can and what we cannot say about God. And that logic has a name. His name is Jesus of Nazareth, and Christian theology, at its best, is wrapped up in him and in his own witness to God. Christian theology, at its best, never seeks to say anything new or novel, but only to point, and to keep pointing, like John the Baptist, to the revelation of God in Jesus.
That said, we also need to say that any knowledge that we now have of God is as St Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 13.12: ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’. In other words, our knowledge of God is knowledge that reaches across what theologians call an eschatological boundary. In other words, it’s a knowledge that reaches across the discontinuity created by our own death. And what this means is that for now we know God as and only as we are carried into the death of another, and there we share the knowledge that is part of the life of the Kingdom. This is the Church’s story. And in order to breathe in the air of this story and to know the Author of this story we need to be a part of a community where the story is constantly being lived and recited and lived and recited. And the way that the community of Jesus tells this story is through bread and wine and water and words.
Let’s move on.
So why should we think or assume that God is good? More specifically, why should we assume that God is all-good, or even that God is what medieval philosophers called ‘the highest good’? And why should we assume that God’s intentions for us are good?
Let me take a stab at it. I want to suggest that we know that God is good and God is trustworthy because God takes responsibility for all that God makes.
I want to say that ‘goodness’ and ‘trustworthiness’ are not things that can be described in the abstract, i.e., as some sort of independent and pure idea which is then transported onto God. Rather, I want to say that goodness and trustworthiness is defined and made evident in what God does. It’s not that God’s actions make God good so much as it is that God’s actions are the expression or overflow of who God is as the fountainhead of all goodness. If we could somehow get inside of God we would discover a community of persons who know one another fully, who love one another completely, and whose enjoyment for one other another is contagious. And in the Incarnation – i.e., in the act of God, as it were, becoming one of us and sharing our broken humanity – God opens himself up to us so that we can see and so that we can participate in the knowledge and the love and the enjoyment that the Father and the Son and the Spirit have with one another.
So in Christ, and by the sheer gift of the Spirit, we get to listen into and to participate in (which is what prayer is) the eternal conversation that is going on 24/7 between the Spirit and the Son and the Father. And the more we listen, the more we get to see that their conversation does not consist of random updates (like with Twitter or Facebook) but that it’s purposeful. In fact, the reason that we get to listen in is purposeful too. It’s because God doesn’t want to be God without us, and so God lives with us and brings us into his own communion so that we may have no other God before him, so that we may learn that the only way to be fully alive is to be fully alive in community, and so that we may learn to serve life rather than death.
And for those three things – (i) that we may have no other God before him, (ii) that we may learn that the only way to be fully alive is to be fully alive in community, and (iii) that we may learn to serve life rather than death – God speaks torah to us. He gives us his law, his teaching, his instruction. In fact, one of the great blessings that God gives us is his gift of the commandments.
So we have Moses’ great speech in Deuteronomy 4:
So now, Israel, give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe, so that you may live … You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today? (vv. 1–8)
Israel knew that God was good and trustworthy not because they sat around and philosophised about God’s goodness and trustworthiness, nor because they went away to some beautiful island and heard a talk about it. Israel knew that God was good and trustworthy because they had experienced in their own story the saving action of One who had heard their cry and liberated them from Egypt. And Israel knew that God was good and trustworthy because the God who had heard their cry and gave himself to journey with them gave them torah, words by which they might live and order their life, words that would bring life and not death.
You see, the Lord’s commands are not arbitrary. Rather, they are, as the book of Deuteronomy puts it, for our ‘well-being’ (4.40), ‘for our lasting good … to keep us alive’ (6.24); indeed they are our ‘very life’ (32.47). This is because they are that which enables human life in the first place: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’ (8.3).[2]
In fact, the Bible also tells us that it’s not just the law that reveals that God is good but also that God ‘has not left himself without a witness in doing good – giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy’ (Acts 14.17). Here is God blessing creation so that creation can be the theatre of his glory and the stage upon which his covenant promises might be acted out. This is echoed again in James 1.17: ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’.[3]
Here James tells us is that God does not change, that God is faithful, that God is trustworthy, that the God who confronts us when we are 10 and chucking a wobbly is the same God who confronts us when we are 38 and chucking a wobbly. And you see, if you’re like me and you’ve committed the same sin for the 700th time, and then you ask God for forgiveness, you begin to have a fear in your mind that this time God might say, ‘No! I’ve had enough! That’s it! You’ve blown it!’ We begin to fear that we might wear out God’s patience, God’s will to forgive, God’s friendly welcome of us, God’s joy in our repentance, God’s joy in our presence. But James says, ‘No. God does not change’. God is not erratic or unreliable. God is not soft one day and hard the next. God isn’t like your father or your mother or your boss or anyone else. God is consistent. The God we pray to on Monday is the same God we pray to on Thursday. God is constant in his compassion. He is constant in his love. He is constant in his patience. He is constant in his perseverance. He is constant in his forgiveness. He is constant in his goodness. And he is constant in his determination to know you and for you to know him. Here is a God who is trustworthy.[4]
Certainly the Bible is univocal in the claim that God is good and trustworthy:
‘Good and upright is the LORD’. (Ps 25.8)
‘O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him’. (Ps 34.8)
‘For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations’. (Ps 100.5)
‘Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good’. (Ps 135.3)
‘The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made’. (Ps 145.9)
‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!’ (Jer 33.11)
‘The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy’. (Ps 111.7)
And then, of course, there are Jesus’ own words as recorded in Mark 10 and Luke 18: ‘No one is good but God alone’.[5]
So what’s at stake in even thinking about God’s goodness and trustworthiness?
And what is the greatest challenge to God’s goodness and trustworthiness?[6]
For everything that I spoken of so far is way too easy, and way too unsatisfactory, to leave the question of God’s goodness and trustworthiness here.
Suffering – the challenge to God’s goodness & trustworthiness
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.[7]
So penned Elie Wiesel in his moving record of his childhood in the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. For Wiesel, as for countless others – both inside and outside of the camps – the systematic extermination of millions of human beings – whether Jews, political activists, or homosexuals – meant the death of faith and of God.
As Wiesel wrote in another place:
In truth, Auschwitz signifies not only the failure of two thousand years of Christian civilization, but also the defeat of the intellect that wants to find Meaning – with a capital M – in history. What Auschwitz embodied has none. The executioner killed for nothing, the victim died for nothing. No God ordered the one to prepare the stake, nor the other to mount it. During the Middle Ages, the Jews, when they chose death, were convinced that by their sacrifice they were glorifying and sanctifying God’s name. At Auschwitz the sacrifices were without point, without faith, without divine inspiration. If the suffering of one human being has any meaning, that of six million has none. Numbers have their importance; they prove, according to Piotr Rawicz, that God has gone mad.[8]
The fact is that ‘suffering is especially a problem for the person who believes, or who wants to believe in God’,[9] and especially for the person or community who want to claim that God is good. For, you see, suffering, the kind of suffering that ‘plucks the tongue from the head and the voice from the heart’,[10] demonstrates the logical incoherence of Christianity. So does the fact that among the six million who died in Auschwitz there were some who sang and shared their soup and sacrificed themselves for others. [Thanks for this point Kim]
But ‘it is in suffering that the whole human question about God arises … [Suffering] is the open wound of life in this world’.[11]
The problem was famously articulated some 300 years before Christ by Epicures (341–270 BCE) who argued that once we recognise the reality and evil of suffering we are forced to choose one of four options if we believe in a good God:
1. God wills to remove evil but can’t.
2. God can and won’t.
3. God can’t and won’t.
4. God wants to remove evil and can.
Indeed, C.S. Lewis once rejected the existence of God on the basis of the existence of evil: ‘My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust’.[12] He reasoned that
(a) there is evil in the world + (b) evil is incompatible with God = (c) therefore God does not exist.
Or as the great Jewish theologian, Martin Buber, put it:
How is life with God still possible in a time in which there is an Auschwitz? … Can one still hear His word [i.e., his Torah]? Can one still, as an individual and as a people, enter at all into a dialogical relationship with Him? Dare we recommend to the survivors of Auschwitz, the Job of the gas chambers: “Give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy endureth forever”?[13]
To be sure, it seems that people of faith, and people of no faith, have always sought to articulate answers to these most challenging of questions.
Here are some inadequate (though not necessarily entirely wrong) responses to the problem of suffering:
1. Suffering is an illusion.
2. Suffering is a product of dualism. Suffering is the inescapable reality of things in a universe where the forces of Sauron and the forces of the Ilúvatar (the All-Father of Middle-Earth and of all other earths) battle it out.
3. Suffering represents the unalterable will of God.
4. Suffering is a punishment for sin.
5. Suffering happens because God is finite or limited.
6. Suffering serves some greater good.
7. Suffering is inevitable.
8. Most suffering – not all – happens because love requires the free to do good or evil.
9. Pain is ‘good’ when it alerts us to problems that require attention. But pain is ‘evil’ when it makes no sense, when it seems to produce harm not good.
10. The religion of the Bible puts human suffering into a cosmic context: the battle of good and evil, God and Satan.
11. God both allows and sends suffering.
12. It’s not our suffering that matters most but our response to it.
13. Suffering can deepen our relationship with God and with one another.
14. Suffering forms us for service.
In his book, The Good and Beautiful God, James Smith writes:
Terrible things happen to wonderful people. Wonderful things happen to awful people. We cannot look around the world we live in and build a case that sinners are punished and righteous people are blessed. Reality simply does not bear this out.[14]
And then Smith goes on to quote from the theological giant of the fourth century, St Augustine:
We do not know why God’s judgment makes a good [person] poor, and a wicked [person] rich … Nor why the wicked [person] enjoys the best of health, whilst the [person] of religion wastes away in illness … Even then it is not consistent … Good [people] also have good fortune and evil [people] find evil fortunes.[15]
Smith and Augustine are both right. But I would want to go even further and say:
We can’t know that God is good by looking at history. John Howard Yoder is right here: ‘we can no longer so simply identify the course of history with Providence. We have learned that history reveals as much of Antichrist as of Christ’.[16]
And we can’t know that God is good by looking at creation. [e.g., The same beautiful bird that God used to speak to Howard was then attacked by his cute friends. And the same beautiful and calm water across which you might come to a peaceful and beautiful island, is the same water that would swallow you up were you to fall in and loose the strength to swim]. So we can’t know that God is good by looking at creation – whether we are talking about a sunset, or about our relationships, or about the fact that something that we have been praying about for 15 years has finally been answered as we had hoped.]
So where can we look?
Jesus – the revelation of God’s goodness & trustworthiness
Consider this poem by Vinicio Aguilar which arises out of the struggle for human dignity in Central America:
Where was god, daddy; where, where, where,
when the commissioners
broke the fence,
burnt the farm,
destroyed the harvest,
killed the pigs,
raped Imelda,
drank our rum?
HE WAS UP THERE, boy.
Where was god, daddy; where, where, where,
when because we complained
the state judge came and fined us
the bailiff came to arrest us
and even the priest came to insult us?
HE WAS UP THERE, boy.
Well then daddy; we must now tell him plainly
that he must come down sometimes
to be with us.
You can see how we are, daddy,
with no fields sown, no farm, no pigs, nothing, and he
as if nothing had happened. It isn’t right, you know, daddy.
If he’s really up there
let him come down.
Let him come down to taste this cruel hunger with us
let him come down and sweat
in the maize-fields, come down to be imprisoned,
let him come down and spew on the rich man
who throws the stone and hides his hand,
on the venal judge,
on the unworthy priest,
and on the bailiffs and commissioners
who rob and kill
the peasants;
because I certainly don’t want to tell my son when he asks
me one day:
The good news is gathered up in the words of one who said about himself, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14.9).[18]
Friends, there is no God behind Jesus Christ. But in Jesus we are given to see God in his fullness. As the Fourth Gospel puts it, ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth … No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known’ (John 1.14, 18).
Reflect with me for a moment on this ‘Sketch of the Trinity’ by William Blake. And ask yourself, Where am I in this picture? Whether you know it or not, whether this is already or not yet your story, you are in Christ. And where is Christ? Christ is in the bosom of the Father. How? By the gift of the Spirit. Here in the Father’s embrace of the Son by the Spirit is the revelation of God’s goodness and trustworthiness. Here alone, in Christ, can we know that God is good, that God is faithful, that God is trustworthy.
And it is specifically in the wounded Christ that we really see the goodness and trustworthiness of God. In fact, we do more than see God’s goodness and trustworthiness in the wounded Christ – we participate in it. His life becomes ours. His wounds become ours and our wounds are healed in his.
And in that participation – which is the life that the Bible calls faith – we come to see that in the face of unspeakable suffering and tragedy the questions of God’s goodness and of God’s trustworthiness are not ‘problems’ to be ‘worked out’ but realities in which to live, and that that life is opened up to us in the wounded heart of God.[19] There is no ‘answer’ to the problem of suffering!
There’s a very well-known Christian philosopher named Nick Wolterstorff who, some years ago, ‘lost’ his 25-year-old son Eric in a mountain-climbing accident. And I can tell you that there are few things more painful than to bury your own child. Nick decided to pen a memoir of his journey of grief in what was later published as Lament for a Son. And as we draw to a close, I would like to read you some sections of that book:
The world looks different now. The pinks have become purple, the yellows brown. Mountains now wear crosses on their slopes. Hymns and psalms have reordered themselves so that lines I scarcely noticed now leap out: “He will not suffer thy foot to stumble.” Photographs that once evoked the laughter of delighted reminiscence now cause only pain. Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard for me to look at? This one here, holding a fish longer than he is tall, six years old? Why is it easier to look at him as a grownup? The pleasure of seeing former students is colored by the realization that they were his friends and that while they thrive he rots.
Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence something is finished, done. My life is divided into before and after. A friend of ours whose husband died young said it meant for her that her youth was over. My youth was already over. But I know what she meant. Something is over.
Especially in places where he and I were together this sense of something being over washes over me. It happens not so much at home, but other places. A moment in our lives together of special warmth and intimacy and vividness, a moment when I specially prized him, a moment of hope and expectancy and openness to the future: I remember the moment. But instead of lines of memory leading up to his life in the present, they all enter a place of cold inky blackness and never come out. The book slams shut. The story stops, it doesn’t finish. The future closes, the hopes get crushed. And now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memory, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone.
So it is with all memories of him. They all lead into that blackness. It’s all over, over, over. All I can do is remember him. I can’t experience him. The person to whom these memories are attached is no longer here with me, standing up. He’s only in my memory now, not in my life. Nothing new can happen between us. Everything is sealed tight, shut in the past. I’m still here. I have to go on. I have to start over. But this new start is so different from the first. Then I wasn’t carrying this load, this thing that’s over.
Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that’s when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn’t quite it. Perhaps what’s over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that.
Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea …
I remember delighting in them – trees, art, house, music, pink morning sky, work well done, flowers, books. I still delight in them. I’m still grateful. But the zest is gone. The passion is cooled, the striving quieted, the longing stilled. My attachment is loosened. No longer do I set my heart on them. I can do without them. They don’t matter. Instead of rowing, I float. The joy that comes my way I savor. But the seeking, the clutching, the aiming, is gone. I don’t suppose anyone on the outside notices. I go through my paces. What the world gives, I still accept. But what it promises, I no longer reach for.
I’ve become an alien in the world, shyly touching it as if it’s not mine. I don’t belong any more. When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.[20]
Here Nick describes the suffering which is the valley of the shadow of death. And we must not make light of that shadow for the valley is, in every sense, dark. Death is never OK, and the valley of its shadow is never a location to which we ought to be resolved. But – and it’s a huge BUT – this is precisely the valley in which God too hangs out. As Nick puts it:
For a long time I knew that God is not the impassive, unresponsive, unchanging being portrayed by the classical theologians. I knew of the pathos of God. I knew of God’s response of delight and of his response of displeasure. But strangely, his suffering I never saw before.
God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart. Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God.
It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor.
And great mystery: to redeem our brokenness and lovelessness the God who suffers with us did not strike some mighty blow of power but sent his beloved son to suffer like us, through his suffering to redeem us from suffering and evil.
Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.
But I never saw it. Though I confessed that the man of sorrows was God himself, I never saw the God of sorrows. Though I confessed that the man bleeding on the cross was the redeeming God, I never saw God himself on the cross, blood from sword and thorn and nail dripping healing into the world’s wounds.
What does this mean for life, that God suffers? I’m only beginning to learn. When we think of God the Creator, then we naturally see the rich and powerful of the earth as his closest image. But when we hold steady before us the sight of God the Redeemer redeeming from sin and suffering by suffering, then perhaps we must look elsewhere for earth’s closest icon. Where? Perhaps to the face of that woman with soup tin in hand and bloated child at side. Perhaps that is why Jesus said that inasmuch as we show love to such a one, we show love to him.[21]
Friends, we know that God is good, and that God is trustworthy, because – and only because – Jesus, who is God’s Word made flesh, has revealed God’s goodness and God’s trustworthiness to us, and that supremely in his own experience of god-abandonment. And the cross is the word of God’s promise, it is the action of the promise-keeping God. And, of course, there is a sense in which his promises are all we have. God is only as good as his word. So, for example, how do you know that God loves you? Forgives you? Journeys with you? You don’t always feel loved. You don’t always feel forgiven. You don’t always feel accompanied. At the end of the day we only know that we are loved and forgiven and accompanied because of the promises of the promise-keeping God. We literally live by the promises of God. And the promises of God are literally the word of the cross. So think for a moment: when has God ever failed to be for you all that he promised to be in his cross? God is trustworthy! God is good! And we know this only because Jesus, who is God’s promise to us, has proclaimed to us in his own broken body what God’s goodness and God’s trustworthiness look like.
A final thought:
Thinking and talking about God’s goodness and trustworthiness demands an eschatology
That is, it demands a sense of time which has already begun to open up in the resurrection of Jesus but which is yet to reach its fulness. It demands a future, or what theologians call ‘eschatology’. And it is eschatology which makes life so unlike a soap opera, and reminds us that no matter how many glimpses of God’s goodness and trustworthiness we experience now, and no matter how much richer these experiences make life for us, their full satisfaction awaits us, and God.
And so we live now in faith, love and hope. And hope sees in the resurrection of Jesus not the eternity of heaven but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands and which his cross secures.
And so we live now in this tension, in this time between the times, in this linear space between what has passed and all that is coming. This is called living in hope. And hope means that we are unable to reconcile ourselves with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly threatens the end that God is moving all of creation towards.
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Fontana Lions, 1980), 75.
[2] It’s interesting that the first thing that is named as being ‘good’ in the Bible is not God but ‘light’ (Gen 1.4) – light, to be sure, which appears at God’s bidding; light which is literally spoken into being. In fact, the word ‘good’ appears 12 times in Genesis 1–2 alone, suggesting that if creation is good, it must say something about the Creator and about the way that the Creator who alone is good in himself does not keep that goodness to himself, but longs to share it, longs that creation may mirror it and participate in it. So there is a sense in which creaturely goodness is always borrowed goodness. But what we are given to see in Jesus Christ is that God is in himself perfectly good and that God delights to share that goodness: He is the God who gives of himself so unbegrudgingly and without keeping any records.
[3] And if we read Psalms like Psalm 89, we see that God’s faithfulness to creation is undergirded by his covenant with creation. And we are reminded that creation is good because it is the theatre, the stage, the location upon which and in which the story of God’s covenant can be played out. So what creation is good for is being a object of God’s blessing. What creation is good for is creatures. What creation is good for is the resurrection of Jesus. God’s goodness has to do with God’s ‘beauty’ and God’s ‘excellence’. The Hebrew word for ‘good’ is tob and means ‘pleasant’ or ‘joyful’ or ‘agreeable’. And we see this sense in the Genesis account of creation itself, that when God creates, what God creates is good, even very good, i.e. ‘wholly functional and proper’. It’s not a statement about the moral worth or otherwise of creation. It’s a confession that creation is working, is fruitful and is beautiful. It’s a confession that creation reflects God’s creative goodness, reflects the fact that God is for creation, that God has planned nothing evil, reflects the fact that the pain and brokenness which set the scene from Genesis 3 onwards are at odds with God’s good intention for creation. Thinking more theologically, creation is good because it sets the stage upon which God’s action of creating sons and daughters in Christ might be carried out.
[4] As an aside, it might be worth noting that the Bible rarely describes God as ‘trustworthy’. The word ‘trustworthy’ is used to describe the posture of the person of faith, i.e., those who trust in God and in the promises of God, those who look to God and to God’s righteousness. What the Bible does bear witness to, however, is One who is in every sense worthy of our trust, and it points out why we have every reason to trust in God, and why only the fool would not trust in God, even when the circumstances call God and God’s trustworthiness into question.
[5] One way that the Bible bears witness to this is in recalling the way that God goes into battle against his enemies: ‘The LORD is good, a stronghold in a day of trouble; he protects those who take refuge in him, even in a rushing flood. He will make a full end of his adversaries, and will pursue his enemies into darkness’ (Nahum 1.7–8). Also noteworthy is that sometimes our experience of God’s goodness appears to be qualified. E.g., Lam 3.25; Ps 73.1. Of course, this begs the question of how Israel and then the Church came to believe that God is good. For it is not self-evident that this is indeed the case. So we read in Psalm 4.6, ‘There are many who say, “O that we might see some good!”’. To see God as good, therefore, seems to be something that does not come ‘naturally’ to us but requires the eyes of faith.
[6] Few have put the problem more succinctly than the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (perhaps the most famous atheist of the 20th century) who argued that if God does not exist, it is meaningless to speak of ‘good’. He wrote: ‘The existentialist … finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only [people]. Dostoievsky once wrote, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’, and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist …’. Stephen Priest, ed., Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 32.
[8] Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 183.
[9] John W. de Gruchy, Theology and Ministry in Context and Crisis: A South African Perspective (London: Collins, 1987), 102.
[10] Daniel Berrigan in Hans-Ruedi Weber, On a Friday Noon: Meditations Under the Cross (Grand Rapids/Geneva: Wm. B. Eerdmans/World Council of Churches, 1979), 28.
[11] Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 47, 49.
[12] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 41. The famous Scottish philosopher David Hume put it thus: ‘Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?’ David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Stilwell: Digireads.com Publishing, 2006), 63.
[13] Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Shocken Books, 1967), 224.
[14] James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 45.
[16] John Howard Yoder, A Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994), 55.
[17] Cited in Julia Esquivel Velasquez, ‘A Letter from Central America’, International Review of Missions 66 (1977), 249–50. Also in Thorwald Lorenzen, Resurrection and Discipleship: Interpretive Models, Biblical Reflections, Theological Consequences (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 261–2.
[18] This means that in order to come to a place where we know that God is trustworthy and that God is good takes a miracle. It is not self-evident. It takes revelation. And it takes faith. And both revelation and faith are gifts. More specifically, it takes being taken down into death – being put to death in the death of Christ, being taken into his personhood, and into his sufferings.
[19] So Donald M. MacKinnon, ‘Atonement and Tragedy’ in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays (ed. George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker; Philadelphia/New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968), 104: ‘It is a lesson to be learnt from tragedy that there is no solution of the problem of evil; it is a lesson which Christian faith abundantly confirms, even while it transforms the teaching by the indication of its central mystery. In the Cross the conflicting claims of truth and mercy are reconciled by deed and not by word. The manner of their reconciliation is something which lies beyond the frontier of our comprehension; we can only describe and re-describe’.
[20] Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987), 46–7, 51.
Most of us, by now, have read Nathan Kerr’s book Christ History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission. Now it’s time for the movie. This short public-information film (made during the early 80s – the Men at Work and Wham! years – by the Australian Board of Civil Defence) was recently discovered in an old university archive and nicely anticipates Kerr’s best insights and presses his cautiously-anti-Yoderianism just a tad further.
Warning: Some viewers made be offended. It has some ‘adult’ themes and ‘language’.
I’ve spent one third of my life asleep,
I read, and so I considered
how the drag and suck of Everyday
conspires against my waking—
jobs, meetings, grocery shopping,
house repairs and mortgages.
After I’d added on the dread of everything
I should have done but didn’t, or did,
and had things turn out the very way
I’d feared, I just wanted to lie back
and dream, but I made myself sit up
in my chair, which brought to mind
my grandmother who liked to tell me
at family dinners, if I didn’t sit up
straight, I’d become a hunch-back
as an old man, and now I was one,
at least in part, my shoulders slumping
forward, too heavy to hold up.
By then I was living in the past,
those dinners when all my grandparents
were alive, and my great-grandparents
on my mother’s side and all my aunts
and uncles. I was saying their names—
Anna, Henry, Eleanor, Emma, George—
when, of course, I fell asleep and dreamed
that someone was whispering,
Wake up! Wake up! in a room
that the afternoon sun had warmed,
but now was running out of light.
And still I did not wake up.
Recently, I posted on the Dunedin City Council’s move to axe library services, a phenomenon clearly not limited to the imbeciles who reside in the same neck of the woods that I inhabit. Well it seems that the DNA of city councils, managed as they all-too-often are by tunnel-visioned accountants [NB. This could serve equally as a decription of many other 'public-service' institutions] is as balmy, fatuous, asinine, squirrelly and moronic in other parts. The friends of Somerset’s, Glastonbury’s and Shepton Mallet’s libraries recently produced this clip to aid their compaign against library closures. I thought it was brilliant … and worth sharing.
Time again for another ‘Who Said It?’ game. Who made the following statement?
‘Every Weltanschhauung, whether religious or political – and it is sometimes difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins – fights not so much for the negative destruction of the opposing world of ideas as for the positive realization of its own ideas. Thus its struggle lies in attack rather than in defence. It has the advantage of knowing where its objective lies, as this objective represents the realization of its own ideas. Inversely, it is difficult to say when the negative aim for the destruction of a hostile doctrine is reached and secured. For this reason alone a Weltanschhauung which is of an aggressive character is more definite in plan and more powerful and decisive in action than a Weltanschhauung which takes up a merely defensive attitude. If force be used to combat a spiritual power, that force remains a defensive measure only so long as the wielders of it are not the standard-bearers and apostles of a new spiritual doctrine’.
Reading:
