All Too Human

To witness the apologies of an erudite monergist and similarly disposed synergist is to witness a very sophisticated and deeply theological discussion that at times seems to border on the insane.

Who are God's own? Does he determine the ends but not the means of those who are not his own? These are very old questions that so often lead to a terrible breach wherein God can neither live nor die. Right thinking; useless to a woman who has just lost a son and who wonders where he may have gone to? So much more offensive than useless; a mother has to wander off in search of comfort. In Tess, the parson though not without decent sentiment for the death of her illegitimate son Sorrow, refuses to bury the baby himself but grants her permission to do it. So she buries him in a corner of the church cemetery, and makes a little cross for his grave.

Harold Bloom wrote a book called Jesus and Yahweh, The Names Divine, and it reads with such forlornness. Professor Bloom writes that Yahweh is "much too human." And so he is, in both Scripture and doctrine. And reading the book brought me to imagine how a Jew might feel about the appropriation of the Old Testatment by Christians.

The reason Scripture will always retain magnificence is because it's bottomless. Fecund or sane but disconsolate minds can cull sound teaching and obtain comfort from its pages. Ambiguous and contradictory, it can prove inscrutable as well.

You know what I thought of when the Egyptian reporter threw his shoe at President Bush? I thought of the Sypro-Phonecian woman whom Jesus asks why he should give what belongs to the Children to dogs? That passage is a good historical reminder of the inveterate hatred that moves and plagues the Middle East.

When you ascribe to God arbitrary action and hate you're not going to be able to make him believable to a world that you could only hopefully designate as pagan. It's not a matter of judging God's right to hate whom he will hate; it's a matter of not being able to place any confidence in God's friendship.

Deuteronomy notes God's love for the Alien. And it references a free-will offering. Is it possible that the idea of covenant can become idolatrous?

The Theology of The Cross is indeed beautiful, but if its powerful example of God's love for Man can't save a baby or a child, it loses its sweetness and delight first, and its ineffable beauty second. I confess to having no ability to imagine my own glory, but I do see the glory of a baby and a small child. And the Fearsome Comrade is right when he writes that "calling the cross a metaphor for God's love is like calling a lifeboat a metaphor for being rescued from the sea."

If I had a son, I'd want him to be a lot like the Comrade.

I have an atheist friend who recently wrote to me that he would always feel compelled to defend Christianity, and felt sad that he'd not been "gifted" with faith. What should I have written in return: I'm sorry, you're right to remember the teaching that faith is a gift, and I'm sorry that God has rejected you. Maybe you're too prideful? Maybe you're just not one of his elect?

Barth kept up a correspondence with one of his Buddhist students for many years. Each was unafraid to argue for what he believed, but I don't think Barth saw this favored student of his as a God hater. If Barth did then end as a theologian who could no longer defend limited atonement or seemed to capitulate to universalism, it wasn't cowardice or compromise that brought him to that point. It had to have been in some measure related to an understanding that a God who would become Man solely for those he had predestined to redeem was a God who ceased being wholly other and became arbitrary, inefficient and not easy to trust in or believe.

Lewis wrote once that an act of kindness from a man or a woman who had known very little kindness in their own lives could possibly mean more to God than an act of generosity from someone who had always known security and surfeit.

You can't pretend people -however incompletely they study or understand doctrine- don't know the dark heart of doctrine. It's that dark, mysterious heart that makes the likelihood that God is your friend fraught with the temptation to doubt and disbelieve.

Make God bigger than has been the wont. Have the fortitude to look a mother in the eye and convincingly assure her that God hates no babies or children, that God didn't take a child's life in order to spare him the fate of a criminal. Stop making God into an all too human ogre, and maybe for some that will restore the Hope of things to come, and the evidence of things unseen.