conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

Tripp, I'm curious: how does the problem of evil fit into this way of viewing the world? Your reflection puts me in mind of genocides, and the people who either act against them, or choose not to act against them, instead leaving the problem in God's hands. And believing people who are or were the victims of genocide -- would you expect that their belief would require them to conclude that their deaths, by bullets or gas or machete or whatever, were happening in God's hand or by God's will?

Ah, I don't think that God wills things that are clearly cruel and evil. You have to include free agency there. To do so is to ignore our own cratedness and the possibility of sin. We sin. We have to be free to do so...

I think that God's always cradling us, even when we destroy one another. I think that, in a way, God weeps in these situations. And I also believe that those who commit such acts or sit by allow it will face judgment as well. It is not God's will that these things happen. It is our will.

In this way, I think John Calvin ruined theology for us. Heh. Calvin did not believe in free will. He thought that everything was preordained. I think that's a load of crap. But I do think that God can take any atrocity we lay in and redeem it...or be with us when shit is just shit. God's vision and sense of opportunity must be larger than my own. God's capacity for compassion must be greater than my own.

Leaving things in God's hands is not the same as inactivity "Let God sort it out." No. It is, however, the realization that when we perceive failure to make a holy change, that God is at work in that process as well and had not abandoned us. We are to be steadfast, because even in the midst of the cross and the utter despair that the followers must have felt, God has resurrection in mind.

That's how I think about it.

Well, that answered the easy part of my question. How about the hard part? :)

How does your reflection extend to the believing people who are on the *receiving* end of what you term "failure to make a holy change"? As I asked above, would you expect them to conclude that their suffering and death was the work of a loving God?

Not at all. Their suffering is not necessarily the work of God. It could be the work of another person. But God has not abandoned them to their situation either.

God has given us so much power, Megan. We can make Hell here on earth for one another...and for ourselves. And because God has given us the freedom to do so, sometimes it feels like God is doing it. But I think that is simply not the case, or at least not as often as many suggest it is so.

We should expect to find God in the interventions of others on our behalf. We should expect to see sin in the hurdles that keep justice from being done...in the violence/oppression/confusion itself. And where there is sin, God is in the midst of it attempting to redeem. We are not always willing to allow God to redeem us however, and thus we injure one another...etc. But God is always in the midst of our lives redeeming, changing, transformin...and that is salvation.

Wow, I did put you up on your pulpit or soapbox, didn't I?

How do you see it that God has not abandoned people who are being murdered? This of course goes straight back to the cross, where Jesus apparently believed, at least for a while, that he had been abandoned by God.

Perhaps, if God has abandoned us, it is only to one another. Matthew's Gospel has that wonderful story about the sheep and goats "Where did we see you, Lord?" You mak know it "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me." So, we feed one another. We love one another. And in that way, we love and feed God. We deny those things to one another, we deny those things to God.

So, if we murder one another...we murder God.

Heavy stuff. Well, I think it is. But it is in that logic that we find God present. You see, God is in upmost solidarity with us because God, who is Christ, Jesus, the guy who on the cross said "My God My God..." as you said, know suffering. He too died at our hands. But he was resurrected. And that too is our promise.

Don't make it a vacant promise, either. Because people are really being murdered...just as God was.

We have so much responsibility for one another. We hold one another's lives in our hands. Thus the metaphor is so powerful for me. God holds this whole dynamic cradled in God's hands.

Anything that leads to murder or mehem is our own doing and not God's.

(Ah, the soapbox.)

Man, I really need to learn to type.

Yup. Starting with the word "mayhem," though I like your "mehem" as an alternative, individualized first-person version. :)

Here's the thing, Tripp. You're constantly turning around to the point of view of the murderer. I'm asking about the point of view of the murderEE, and how that person is to be expected NOT to believe they've been abandoned by God while they're being tortured to death, or permitted to starve, or whatever.

You wrote above, "if we murder one another, we murder God." Does that mean, then if we are murdered BY one another, we are murdered by God?

No. God does not murder.

How do I get at this...why is it abandonment when bad things happen to people. God never promised that we would be safe from one another. That has never been the deal. Nor does God simply walk away from us when we are in trouble. But, and this is why I switch it around, we can circumvent (-vene?) God's purposes of peace and wholeness and love. I think that those who fall victim are just that, victims and they are not God's victims either. They are someone else's victims. Some dictator or murderer or whatever.

God is with the victim in solidarity. God is, I hope and believe, working on the hearts of those who might commit such an act as well, but God is with the victim always.

And this is where the church comes in. We are the Body of Christ. We are God's Body on earth.

Also, and I do not mean to be flip, death is never the end of the story. This is what Easter teaches us. This is never to mean "Ah well. Who cares." No, an unjust death is a sin and the weight of it falls on the one who kills as much as it falls on the heads of the one who allows for it to continue/occur.

But God never abandons us in our suffering...even if it feels that way. That too is a lesson we can take from "My God. My God. Why have you forsaken me?"

Megan, I gotta jett. Sorry if I am cutting this off before you are done. I'll check in later to see if you commented again.

-The Soapbox Kid

I'm not so much talking about death as I am about hopeless suffering -- which certainly happens on occasions other than imminent violent or neglectful death, but is certainly present at that time too.

God is with the victim... doing what? If you take the frequently used analogy of God as parent and human as child -- if someone were torturing your child, would you just sit by in passive, silent solidarity? Particularly if you had the power to do anything you wanted about it?

That's an interesting way to look at it. But I am not sure that the current "arrangement" allows for God to do whatever God will. I am thinking about the idea that there is a second coming, or however a tradition may talk about it. There is a certain distance between us and God in this way. God is not corporeal...except in us. At least not until the second coming if you hold to that particular in the Christian narrative.

I have been thinking about Kushner's stuff on theosis since we started this conversation...and in an attempt to get off my soapbox. As a rabbi, he had a really interesting perspective on the Holocaust...and where God was located within it. The Jews have always understood God to be active in history, but did God inflict the Holocaust upon them? Certainly not. And in some ways "the best" God could do is be with us. And the best the sufferer could do is allign themselves with that presense no matter what someone else might inflct upon them.

For me, I think about Jesus' suffering. If that is any kind of paradigm (He was tourtured.), then the resurrection is the final act of God. God does save God's child. It is the great scandal of Christianity. Somehow Jesus came back. God saved Jesus. Jesus, as God, showed us something of what the fullness of God looks like.

But not everyone rises again on the third day...obviously. And that is why the entire theology of the second coming and the final Judgment exists, I think. Suffering is a beast. But we are never abandoned to it.

The entirety of Psalm 22, the words that Christ says on the cross in Matthew (?) are from Psalm 22. BTW, I think that it is an interesting choice by the author of Matthew to put those words in Jesus' mouth. Anyway, The psalmist in the end assures themself of God's presense by recounting God's acts and God's nature. There is a foreshadowing of God' loving and saving work by the time you get to the end of it. That Jesus remembers this psalm on the cross suggests that Jesus was foreshadowing the resurrection. Well, that's how I read it anyway.

The work of the one suffering, he says in his comfy home in the suburbs, is to remember the work of God and to hold to the promise that God will act. But this work is within a system...a system where others are acting as the Body of Christ, where we stand in God's place in this world. We, who are supposed to allign ouselves with God's will, are supposed to allign ourselves with God's action.

And we are not always successful.

Finally, and I am just stating the obvious here, the poetry of the metaphor "held in God's hands" is just that, poetry. But it speaks of the truth of God's enduring presence. God loved us into existance. God will continue to love us in our suffering...and God's love is remarkable. It does things like raises the dead and creates the universe. It is no casual affection.

But there is always sin...that thing not in line with the will of God that speaks to everything else but love. And can, if given half a chance, empty suffering of any hint of God.

Gee, I wish I had gotten in on this conversation. I'm not quite focused enough right now, but I do think that this is the paradox of faith. I also think that the metaphor of God as parent along with Calvin and Augustine are the places from which these expectations of God flow. God as parent is frought (SP?) with problems as we have previously discussed. Right now, I think our best interpretation is God as Creator. My issue is that then I feel like a lab experiment.

I have come to expect less from God for me and more from God for others. That seems OK from a selflessness perspective, but lousy when I see that my caring and praying for others has not made that large of a difference in the human condition.

Megan, we don't really know each other, so this may be out of line. If so, just let me know. Why must there be an answer to these difficult questions to arrive at a possibility of faith? I ask for discussion purposes, not as a direct challenge. I am curious about these things too, and I am not satisfied by the answers of the church and its representatives (Sorry, Tripp), yet, I just sense that God exists in some form. He/She may not be anything like we imagine, but I can live with that. I'd rather rail at the people who corrupt the spirit of love, peace and life in the name of faith than focus on the holes in the God-story. I am a factual kind of person, a science oriented person, and I wonder about the relationship between an allegedly all-powerful God and evil too. But, I have found it easy to put that aside when I see the power of love and community to win the small battles of life.

And I would suggest that the small battles of life contain the answers to the greater questions.

;-)

Perhaps. Or, the greater questions are immaterial to the life we are given, and all we have is the hope that in making our lives and the lives of others more bearable, we are God in the world. What lies beyond is not useful to ponder as we cannot know. We should continue to ask and probe the scientific world in the hope that we can see the "signature" of God, but we ought to stop being concerned with salvation in the traditional religious sense, and instead, be salvific (to use your word) in the ways we have been taught to act in the physical world. For it is in living the right life that we can die peacefully and discover what eternal life may actually mean. And this is where the Eastern faiths join the Western to me. I believe that Jesus actually preached a Western form of right living, but in the monotheistic nomenclature of his culture and possibly out of his oneness with God. Whether one believes in the divinity of Christ or not, the message he brought to the world is not only a valid positive force for living, it is in harmony with the thoughts of other cultures at its core.

By the way, I have come to the conclusion that I would be a disciple of Marcion, had the church not destroyed his work. I am reading a History of Christianity by Paul Johnson, and the layers of thought that have perverted the interpretation of the gospel are simply incredible. But, back near the start of it all, there was still a strong strain of rationalism and basic love theology that was suppressed and yet continues to surface to challenge Augustinian thinking. It has been fascinating.

Marcion? So, you think that the world was created Evil and by the evil Hebrew God and only Paul's writings have anything of worth to say to humanity? Heh. Interesting. Marcion also thought that. Gnosticism(s) held that love was the truest form of human expression, but we had to erradicate what was physical in order to attune to that love.

Interesting stuff, Rich. Honestly.

I think that, and this is no diminishment of "greater" things, what we have here is a difference of interpretation of moments in life. For me, those small moments where we serve one another are lenses through which we find God's greater intention for us all. This is where the power of the Cross bleeds through into our lives.

Of course it is "scientific" to some degree. But don't toss the baby out with the bathwater. Theology is the mother of science, or so said Galileo. We look to our world for signs of God, just as you suggest. To remove the world of the flesh is to remove the divine. We have to look at "real" things.

I always find the endings of our conversations interesting, where we generally say the same things, but we say them so differently that it appears to be disagreement.

On Marcion, the things to which you refer are not listed in my book as documented examples of his theology. In fact, the only record that exists of Marcion's work is the paraphrases by other theologians trying to refute his work. Yes, he did reject the Old Testament, as do I. Yes, his theology was love based. But the phrases that appealed to me in this text were:

"So we do not know the details of Marcion's system. His God was the Pauline God of love. He rejected fear as a force God would employ to compel obedience."

and further,

"Marcion's controversy with Tertullian gives us a glimpse, perhaps for the first time, of two basic types of Christian: the rational optimist who believes that the love-principle is sufficient, man having an essential desire to do good, and the pessimist, convinced of the essential corruptability of human creatures and the need for the mechanism of damnation. Successful Christianity is essentially a coalition of views and spiritualities: it needs to contain both types even when they produce a certain conflict and friction."

Marcion was eccentric at best (another role model), and he appears (through Tertullian's presentation of him) to believe that procreation was bad and celebacy good, a sure way to kill a cult. But, like all of this historical review, we can only guess at the big picture. Certainly, I like him better than Augustine. I've never read a history of the church that wasn't Catholic in its initial POV, so this is a great read, and seems to be even handed in its concern that the record is not what the institutional church holds it to be.

So do I. It always amazes me that you have to toss most of "orthodoxy" to get where you are and I have to find my way into it to get where I am...and they are such similar positions.