Evil , Suffering and God? | Involuntary-Guest-Post
An Involuntary-Guest-Post from The BioLogos Foundation
Introduction
The most ancient and persistent objection to God’s existence is the problem of evil. How can a loving, powerful God allow so much evil and suffering in the world? Believers and nonbelievers alike must wrestle with this difficult question. Nonbelievers struggle with the atheist conclusion that morality is an illusory and ungrounded evolutionary artifact, in which case there may be no basis to complain about the unfairness of suffering, and believers battle with the apparent contradiction between God’s goodness and the suffering in the world.
The problem of evil has no simple answer, but many philosophers, theologians and others have developed helpful insights. This issue is addressed in chapter 2 of The Language of God, “The War of the Worldviews”. This response combines Dr. Francis Collins’s thoughts with insights offered by Timothy Keller in his book, The Reason for God.
FROM: THE BIOLOGOS FORUM
Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you were capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is an enemy of God just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy precisely because he can find nothing in you that gives glory to God. Perhaps he fears you because he can find nothing in you of God’s love and God’s kindness and God’s patience and mercy and understanding of the weaknesses of men.
Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God, for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice, your mediocrity and materialism, your sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.
What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope
The Rob Bell Controversy: Does Anyone Go To Hell?
“For God so loved the God-hating world that he sent his only Son … ,” we might accurately translate. Apparently, at least according to Jesus, God really, really, really loves the world.
This doesn’t, of course, by itself address the question of universalism, as the verse continues, “all who believe will not perish but have eternal life.” But the force of God’s love as articulated by Jesus does raise the question of why hell is so incredibly important to so many Christians? As a theological concept, “hell” is almost entirely missing from the Old Testament and surfaces as a minor concern in the New, showing up most frequently in Jesus’ parables (which, let’s not forget, regularly defy a literal reading). In contrast, topics like proper treatment of the poor, good use of money, and the imperative to care for neighbor and creation all capture a strikingly disproportionate amount of the attention of the biblical authors.
So why can’t a prominent Christian author even question how to reconcile Jesus’ description of God’s incredible, even incomprehensible love with the notion of condemning souls to eternal torment without being condemned as a heretic? I suspect there are several reasons…
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.
The Broken Truth | Involuntary-Guest-Post
An Involuntary-Guest-Post by Douglas Wood
(Illustration by a talented fellow called Karl)
Old Turtle And The Broken Truth
Once, in a beautiful, faraway land… that was, somehow, not so very far …
a land where every stone was a teacher and every breeze was a language, where every lake was a mirror and every tree a ladder to the stars…
into this far and lovely land there fell… a Truth.
This truth streaked down from the stars, trailing a tail as long as the sky.
But as it fell, it broke in two.
One of the pieces blazed off through the night sky, and the other fell to earth in the beautiful land.
In the morning, Crow found the fallen piece. It seemed to be a sort of stone, shiny and very pleasing to the eye. He picked it up.
Crow: “Caw, Caw, …This is a lovely truth…Caw…I will keep it.
Narrator: And he carried it away. But after he had held it for awhile, and examined it very carefully, Crow said,
Crow: “This truth does not quite feel right. A part of it is missing. I will look for a whole one.”
Most prayers are not really questions…and if we listen very closely, a prayer is often its own answer. …We pray because we are here - not to change the world, but to change ourselves. Because it is when we change ourselves…that the world is changed.
Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
Imagine a libertarian Christianity, which urged individuals to give away as much of their property as possible to the poor, to forget about the sex lives of their neighbors and focus on their own, to pray more than politic and to forgive more than to judge. Imagine, in other words, Christianity, and remind yourself how alien Christianism is to it.
4 Good Reasons Not to Read the Bible Literally | Involuntary-Guest-Post
Involuntary-Guest-Post by David Lose
Cards on the table:
1) I read the Bible — not as much as I should, I’m sure, but still pretty regularly. Moreover, I get paid to talk about the Bible with folks all across the country and have written a popular book to help people read the Bible with more confidence and enjoyment. So, you could say, I’m a pretty big fan of the good book.
2) I was a little shocked to discover that three in ten Americans read the Bible literally. That is, about a third of the American populace takes everything the Bible says at face value, reading as they would a history or science textbook.
3) I don’t read the Bible this way, and can’t imagine doing so.
Here are four reasons why:
1) Nowhere does the Bible claim to be inerrant.
That’s right. At no place in its more than 30,000 verses does the Bible claim that it is factually accurate in terms of history, science, geography and all other matters (the technical definition of inerrancy). “Inerrant” itself is not a word found in the Bible or even known to Christian theologians for most of history. Rather, the word was coined in the middle of the 19th century as a defensive counter measure to the increased popularity of reading the Bible as one would other historical documents and the discovery of manifold internal inconsistencies and external inaccuracies.
The signature verse most literalists point to is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” But one can confess that Scripture is inspired by God without resorting to claims that it contains no factual errors. We normally use the language of inspiration in just this way, describing a painting, a performance of Chopin, or even a good lecture as inspired. What binds the various and sundry texts found in the Bible together may be precisely that they are all inspired by the authors’ experience of the living God. There is no hint that the authors of the Bible imagined that what they were writing was somehow supernaturally guaranteed to be factually accurate. Rather, biblical authors wrote in order to be persuasive, hoping that by reading their witness you would come to believe as they did (see John 20:30-31).
2) Reading the Bible literally distorts its witness.
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Jerusalem Temple in the days immediately preceding his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, he does this near the beginning of his ministry, two years before his death. Similarly, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the day Jesus is crucified is named as the Passover, while in John it is the Day of Preparation; that is, the day before Passover. Inconsistencies like this are part of what undermines claims to inerrancy of not just the gospels but also many other books in the Bible.
But if the primary intention of the biblical authors was not to record history — in the post-Enlightenment sense we take for granted today — but instead to confess faith, then these differences are not troubling inconsistencies to be reconciled but rather helpful clues to understanding the confession of the author. So rather than ask who got it right, we might instead wonder why John describes these events differently than the other Evangelists. As it turns out, both of these examples stem from John’s theological claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb. For this reason, once he begins his ministry there is no need for Temple sacrifice, and he is crucified on the same day — indeed, at the exact hour — at which the Passover lambs were sacrificed on the Day of Preparation.
You can attempt to reconcile these and other discrepancies in the biblical witness, of course, and literalists have published books almost as long as the Bible attempting to do just that. In the case of the different timeframes for the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, one might suggest that Jesus did this twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and then again, for good measure, two years later. But far from “rescuing” the gospels, such an effort distorts their distinct confession of faith by rendering an account of Jesus’ life that none of the canonical accounts offers.
3) Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally.
We tend to think of anything that is labeled “conservative” as being older and more traditional. Oddly enough, however, the doctrine of inerrancy that literalists aim to conserve is only about a century and a half old. Not only did many of the Christian Church’s brightest theologians not subscribe to anything like inerrancy, many adamantly opposed such a notion. For instance, St. Augustine — rarely described as a liberal — lived for many years at the margins of the church. An impediment to his conversation was precisely the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation — that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts — that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it!) seriously.
The point isn’t that pre-modern Christians approached the Bible with the same historically conscious skepticism of the Bible’s factual and scientific veracity that modern interpreters possess. Earlier Christians — along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity — simply didn’t imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment. Hence, four gospels that diverged at different points, far from troubling earlier Christians, was instead seen as a faithful and fitting recognition that God’s truth as revealed in Jesus was too large to be contained by only one perspective. Flattening the biblical witness to conform to a reductionist understanding of truth only limits the power of Scripture. As Karl Barth, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest theologian, once said, “I take the Bible too seriously to read it literally.”
4) Reading the Bible literally undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God.
Read the Bible even for a little while and you’ll soon realize that most of the major characters are, shall we say, less than ideal. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister — twice! — in order to save his skin. Moses is a murderer. David sleeps around. Peter denies Jesus three times. Whatever their accomplishments, most of the “heroes of the faith” are complicated persons with feet of clay. And that’s the point: the God of the Bible regularly uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.
Why, then, treat the Bible itself differently? Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels — “jars of clay,” the Apostle Paul calls them — to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being “fully human and fully divine” that is normally reserved only for Jesus.
(via Unsettled Christianity)
- David Lose
David Lose is the Director of the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary where he also teaches with amazing students and colleagues and, once upon a time, served as Academic Dean. David led the creative team that developed Working Preacher where he writes a weekly column on the upcoming lectionary texts. Author of the popular books Making Sense of Scripture and Making Sense of the Christian Faith, David speaks throughout the U.S. and abroad on preaching, leadership, Christian faith in a postmodern world and biblical interpretation.
(via jamesfromta)
the Lord has told you what is good,
and this is what he requires of you:
to do what is right, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God
All kinds of weather are a grace, this life..this breath, it is a grace….
(via Old Soul)
The Meek and Lowly One
Christ is “lowly in heart;” he goes with what men call the vulgar herd; he hath nothing of affected royalty about him—he hath a nobler royalty than that, the royalty that is too proud to think anything of a stoop, that can only measure itself by its own intrinsic excellence, and not by its official standing. He receiveth the lowest, the meanest, the vilest, for he is “lowly in heart.”
- Charles Spurgeon
