Politics and the Other

2017 has been a year that has made me less political in general.  As a teenager I was a staunch conservative; since at least 2004, however, I have proudly called myself a liberal.  These days even though I still am a bleeding-heart liberal deep down, I have mostly been lamenting the inability of people within our culture to talk to one another.  I myself am extremely poor at this because, like all of us, I tend to gravitate toward my own echo chambers, a destructive tendency which has only been exacerbated by the rise of social media.

Anyway, this is my experience this morning:  Feeling pretty down and not knowing what to do after my morning prayers I turned on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" only to hear the talking heads screaming at each other about the Russia Investigation, the #MeToo campaign, and every other trending topic under the sun.  My first reaction was to think, "What are we all squabbling about?  I know that this stuff matters immensely, but is this really what life is all about?"  The things I had read in the Psalms and in Thomas Merton seemed far more profound and important than what they were so angry about.  Now I say this with plenty of hesitation because I am an intensely political person.  History/Political Science was my major in college.  Politics fascinates me because I believe that it matters and that it matters on a grand scale for lots and lots of people.

But what if all real, genuine political action is local?  I think this is an intellectual option that most on both the right and the left today do not consider.  It is so very easy for us to hate-watch certain TV shows, get pissed off at how screwed up Washington is, and vent our rage out into the internet ether.  It is like we are all collectively screaming at each other and no one is listening.  But what if the most faithful political action that we can engage in as Christians is to feed the local hungry, befriend the lonely, and share a peaceful life together in small, organic faith communities?  The very alluring alternative is what my professor Luke Bretherton at Duke called "Fabianism": the notion that if we could only fix the "out there" then everything would be all right "in here."

I'm going to be hard on my fellow liberals for a minute.  Liberals are really smug.  Their views of the world emerge from privilege (a fact that many of them cannot help).  Liberals fall into a pharisaical judgmentalism every ounce as harsh and counterproductive as that on the right. And then when someone dissents from liberal orthodoxy -- however anyone wants to define it at the time -- they are shouted down as "racist," "sexist," "violent," and "evil."  I have confronted such venom personally in the classroom up on Chicago's north shore.  The guilt produced by such confrontations can be crushing:  am I supposed to be ashamed for being a male?  for being white? for being born into a Christian home?  for being straight? for being a simple midwestern boy?  I can't help it!  Of course I can strive to learn and stay open minded and listen to varying perspectives, but what if I one day have a perspective that is not in conformity with one particular tyrannical liberal's personal orthodoxy?  When we all go around with a chip on our shoulder saying "I have the right to not get offended by you and I have the right to shut you up if you do offend me," then dialog and free speech disappear.  This is how totalitarian regimes are born.  (I write this right around the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; we would do well to examine that chapter of the 20th century very seriously to see what exactly went wrong).  Two of my newest friends, a Christian man from India and a Muslim man from Turkey, both tell me the same things:  "Stop feeling guilty for being white!  You white people can't help it and the guilt of it is driving you all insane!"  I often suspect they might actually just possibly be right.

I type this on my MacBook (likely the product of South-East Asian slave labor) in a McDonald's (oh how my orthodox liberal friends would hate me for eating here, but it is all I can afford) with some old farmers sitting in a corner shooting the breeze and sipping coffee.  We are, all of us, helplessly enmeshed in structural evils.  We sin in thought, word, and deed all of the time.  Yet these good farm folk are talking about the World Series, problems with their boats and with diesel motors, how the workers at this McDonald's are related to each other, and so on.  It sounds like they've probably been coming to this place at 9am on Sunday mornings for years.

So do I judge them?  Do I look down on these good, sincere, salt-of-the-earth people?  Do I hate them because they don't have any black or gay friends?  Do I snidely judge them for using a word like "retarded" in their private conversation?  Now I certainly would not use such a word, but are these hard-working, uneducated old white men bad people because they don't use all the proper nomenclature?  They probably have no knowledge of the non-binary, gender-neutral pronouns "zim" or "zey."  Are they evil for that reason?  I think not.

It seems to me to be very important to look at people's intentions.  This was key to the ethical thinking of John Wesley.  Whereas man looks at the outside, God looks at the heart.  Whereas we often look at the actions of "the Other" and attribute it to their own malicious and evil nature, it might often be far more accurate to attribute their words or actions to ignorance.  Yes, it might at times be a willful ignorance, but we do not know when it is willful or not.  Only God knows such things which is why only God is granted the right to judge and redeem.

I know this blog entry covers lots of territory.  I tend to write in a stream of consciousness mode these days.  But I suppose here is my primary admonition today:  Can we all just try to stop screaming for a few seconds and try to listen?  Can we "shut the hell up" for a minute as a veteran in AA recently said to a first-timer in the program?  That takes deep humility to respond with a "yes" to such a question!  Can we actually swallow our damn pride for long enough to gain "ears to hear"?  It seems to me like our collective salvation might be at stake.

Shame: Foe or Friend?

Shame is a long-time companion for me.  In fact, our relationship goes back to the day I was four years old and, tagging along with a neighbor friend, we stole some green beans from a neighbor's garden.  I can still her the voice of the woman yelling out the window, "Hey!  Stop!  I'm going to call the police!"  It was a moment of moral awakening for me. I remember the hot flash of shame consuming my whole body.  It's almost as if I had taken a bite of the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, my eyes were opened for the first time, innocence was lost, I knew the difference between good and evil (or so I thought), and I was aware of my nakedness.

Shame has been a companion on my journey ever since.  I lived roughly four years without it and have now lived over thirty-two years with it.  But I still can't always determine if this sensation is a friend or a foe.  Maybe someone else will read this and help me decide.

On the one hand, Shame often makes me reject myself.  It makes me want to run and hide from others lest they see who I really, truly am and also decide to reject me.  On the other, Shame is often the thing that prevents me from judging others.  Shame makes me the tax collector at the back of the temple who beats his chest and screams, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner!"  Without Shame I would be the Pharisee standing in the front, saying, "Thank you, God, that I am not like that sinner over there!"  And, because I really don't want to be the Pharisee, I thank my Shame.

Nevertheless, Shame has at times driven me to the very brink of complete self-rejection.  Those who have been there know what I mean.  In these moments, I suspect that Shame is my deepest, oldest enemy.  I suspect it becomes (or was it all along?) what the ancient ones called "the Accuser" or "ha satan."  But then, is the answer to utterly reject shame in all of its forms?  I hope not.  Because if I did not feel any Shame whatsoever about any behavior, then I could very easily become a monster to others, a selfish black hole that sucks in all the joy and happiness around me.  And, if that is what I become, it would be better for me not to exist at all.  That is, if I became my own god, I think I would become a tyrant.  Unless I have a Master to submit myself to I will become the very "accuser" that I so loathe.

And so, as you can see from my wanderings in this post, I am unable to answer this question.  It is very disorienting to not know which voices inside of oneself to trust.  Now I know that some will say, "Greg, you need to distinguish between guilt and shame.  Guilt is productive whereas shame is destructive."  But that only pushed the question back a step.  Even if I did agree to this distinction (and I'm not sure I do as I wonder sometimes if it is a Western mental construct to divide our internal experiences into such sharply distinguished categories), it only pushes the question back one step.  Because then the question becomes, "So how does one distinguish between guilt and shame?" And I, for one, have never had this internal, spiritual "sixth sense" for determining when I am feeling a so-called "healthy guilt" vs. a so-called "toxic shame."  Or at least I certainly don't have that sense right now.

The Elegant, Simple Solution to My Most Pressing Questions

I have spent most of my life devoted to learning about and finding God.  When others have opted to build careers, make money, earn degrees that actually assist one throughout life, and so on, I have spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on "theological education" because I have always had this insatiable hunger to know, find, and experience the divine.  I do not say this in a self-congratulatory manner.  In fact, I've come to the devastating conclusion that these decisions I have made are a monumental waste of time, energy, and resources.  Yet because I have invested so very heavily throughout the years in this pursuit, because I have become a cog in the institutional machine that is the church, because I have been unwilling to pay the extremely high social cost of facing any alternative narrative... I have suppressed my questions.

To be sure, they have bubbled to the surface from time to time, but only briefly and only long enough for me to stare at them in agony and then dismiss them because they are too painful.  No longer.  If Paul Tillich is right in defining religion/God/god as humanity's "ultimate concern," then this has certainly been the case for me.  I was once taught -- and quite strongly believed -- that if I really did prioritize this quest, if I really did "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" then the rest would be taken care of.  This is why I moved to China for a year, it's why I went to seminary, it's why I not only became a pastor but asked to be appointed to a very difficult, dysfunctional, and impoverished parish, it's why I spent thousands and moved my family across the country to study under some of the world's most brilliant theologians at Duke Divinity School, and it's why I have spent the past four years working to earn a PhD and trying to figure out just what it is that makes this thing called American Christianity tick.  In short, I've been obsessed and tireless as I chase my "ultimate concern." For if the story that I inherited is, in fact, not true... if it is a tremendous hoax or what Richard Dawkins refers to as a particularly powerful yet deceptive "meme" that has strangely lived on within our species for millennia, well then not only have I wasted my time, thought, energy, money, and everything else, but something far worse must be faced:  We all are, in fact, just a speck of dust floating in an endless expanse of darkness, heading nowhere, and all the things we scurry about doing day after day signifies nothing.  The prospect of this horrifying emptiness has for so long filled me with such dread and trepidation that I have been unwilling to stare for more than a few minutes into the abyss.  Like Kierkegaard, I have at times simply WILLED myself to believe because I am just not strong enough to face the horrifying alternative:  it's just darkness all the way down.

Now surely some committed Christians will say that I am writing this from a deranged mind and they could be right.  Even Sigmund Freud claimed that any person who asks about the meaning of life is already psychotic.  And I admit that I bring to this long-standing human debate my own baggage -- and plenty of it!  I have PTSD, I am severely clinically depressed, I daily bear a suffocating religiously-induced guilt, and so on.  More than this, my wife of fifteen years has left me and I am allowed only very brief, supervised encounters with my two precious daughters.  So it is certainly true that I may not be thinking clearly.  I have never known that such pain was even possible. It is an ocean of pain and I am drowning in it.  But there is another possibility here:  what if this pain has finally awakened me from a very long slumber and forced me to face my "ultimate concern" on a deep, genuine, existential level that was, prior to this, not even possible for me?

So before I come out of the closet fully, I want to first pose the burning questions that have simultaneously obsessed and frightened the hell out of me for decades.  Then I'll make my full, honest, and sincere confession.

--

MY QUESTIONS

1.  Why does a supposedly omni-benevolent, omnipotent God allow such horrendous suffering in the world?  I'm not just talking about stubbing toes here.  I'm talking about irredeemable, unfathomable, and permanent suffering.  I'm talking about the suffering of the innocent -- of babies, of animals, of forms of life that bear no personal responsibility or moral culpability at all.  Even the suffering of rational and intelligent adults who perhaps bring some suffering upon themselves, even their suffering seems completely disproportionate.  Saintly, selfless women and men who die of cancer.  Parents whose children suffer and die before their very eyes.  Starvation, war, hurricanes, tsunamis, addiction, loneliness, and on and on and on forever and ever, Amen.  Why create such a world?  If the evolutionists are right (and they obviously are to anyone who has given it even a modicum of thought), then this entire world is founded upon the edifice of millennia of bloodshed.  The strong eat the weak and the weak die unavenged and forgotten.  If Mark Twain once quipped that there is enough evidence in the joint of his thumb to convince him that there is a God, then I would retort that there is enough evidence in the tooth of a tiger to convince me there is not one.

2.  Why, if God is so relational... why if as the Christians claim that the very essential nature of God is perichoretic, trinitarian mutuality... why if this God so loves the world that He sent his Only Son and all that... then why the hell is He so silent and inaccessible?  If He is indeed out there, then why do my screams into the night and the screams of millions of others go unanswered day after day, year after year, century after century?  If this God is so damned set on relating to me, then why -- after all my genuine, wholehearted searching and yearning and crying and seeking -- is He absolutely nowhere to be found?

2b. Personal example:  On the 30th of April I stood on the top of a tower in Dallas and looked over the edge for about three hours, deeply longing to throw myself off.  I had lost absolutely everything I had ever cared about in my thirty-six years of life and I wanted nothing -- NOTHING! -- more than to die and enter the everlasting rest of blackness.  But a small sliver of hope convinced me that before jumping I should perhaps cry out to this Supremely Relational One whom I had been taught is out there.  In my darkest, worst moment, in this moment of absolute surrender to death, I stood on that tower and pleaded and begged and sobbed and pounded my fist into the cinder blocks, screaming, "ARE YOU THERE?  DO YOU SEE ME?  DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ME? BECAUSE IF YOU ARE THERE, NOW IS THE TIME TO SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING!  I HAVE NEVER NEEDED YOU MORE.  I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE ALONE!  I HAVE SOUGHT YOU BUT I HAVE NOT FOUND!  So speak to me NOW for I am about to die!"  For three whole hours I screamed and pleaded with the void.  Know what I heard?  Nothing.  I heard silence.  I heard the wind beating against the cold building.  Think about this, my dear reader: If I wanted to relate to you in some way, I could drive to see you or call you on the phone or hug you or chat with you late into the night.  There are any number of ways in which you and I could relate to one another.  But this GOD, this "all-relational-one," would not give me even the slightest hint or whisper or feeling or sight or evidence or ANY GODDAMNED THING to me.  All was silence and all was suffering.  I needed God and He abandoned me.  I searched, but He was nowhere to be found.

There is only one reasons that I did not jump that day... only one:  I, as a father, did not want to abandon my own children and cause them to suffer.  Does that make me a better father than God is?

--

Those are my two big questions.  They are related to one another and they certainly are not novel.  These are questions that are as old as humanity itself.  The oldest book of the Hebrew Bible -- the book of Job -- asks the same ones (and doesn't really provide any answer other than "you aren't God."  Thanks a lot, Book of Job.  Duh.)

Now for my confession.  I am coming out of the closet.  I believe there is one absolutely clear and perfect explanation for the two questions I have posed above.  If we want to look for a simple and elegant and powerful solution to these questions, it is staring us in the face.  We just have to have the balls to accept it.  There is no God.  He's just not there.  It answers my questions perfectly and unapologetically.

AND SO...

Marx is right:  God is an opiate for weak people like myself who cannot bear the pain of real life.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach is right: God is just a projection of humankind's desires.

Dawkins is right: belief in God is a powerful "meme," an evolutionary trick of the mind that assists us in propagating our species.

Nietzsche is right: all that exists is man's Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.

Camus is right: It's just all suffering all the way down.

Epicurus is right: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?  Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Macbeth is right: 

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The sheer simplicity and brilliance of these conclusions can no longer be ignored by my inquiring brain. It's time I stop living within the Matrix and see things for what they really are.  God is not.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.  

UPDATE:  I don't delete past published posts lest I forget where I've been, but this post came at the lowest of my low moments.  I am no longer there.  I now actually believe that God WAS there with me on my cross/tower on April 30.  But I will have to blog about that another time perhaps.

Coates on Coates: A Book Review of Between the World and Me

Hailed as one of the best books of 2015 and winner of the National Book Award, critics continue to heap approbations on the newest work of the critical race theorist and emerging black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Written in the form of a letter to his fifteen year old son, Coates writes about what life in a black body is like in a world build upon the systematic enslavement and destruction of black bodies.  Though we are allowed to overhear this conversation between one black man and his son, it is clear that the real audience for this book is the white "race," a people Coates constantly refers to as "the Dreamers" due to their singularly undivided focus on attaining the American Dream -- an edifice that they have constructed by means of oppressing and (ab)using black bodies.  What is the Dream? "It is perfect houses with nice lawns.  It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways.  The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts.  The Dream smells like peppermint and tastes like strawberry shortcake."  And, try as he might to attain the Dream, it remains ever inaccessible to his people because "the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies" (11).

Though deeply cynical and acerbic in its tone, Coates does powerfully communicate to the white reader many sharp insights into life and struggles of black women and men.  Coates exposes the ways in which large-scale systems -- legal policies, city districting and policing, cultural attitudes, and so on -- operate to disadvantage those with black skin.  Particularly insightful is Coates' recurring argument that the enslavement of black bodies was and is a profoundly physical act, not some abstract idea.  Racism destroys particular people with particular experiences, preferences, and characteristics.  This racism "is a visceral experience... it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth" (10).  The insidious ideology of white supremacy possesses a foul taste, a rancid smell, and leaves dead bodies in its wake.  If Coates' highly emotive language feels like a punch in the gut, it does so for good reason.

Regrettably, Coates structures his argument in such a way that a white man like myself is denied permission to voice any disagreement lest I be charged with the crime of "privilege" or even "racism." (Nevermind the fact that as a black man Coates seems to know precisely what is going on in the white mind).  And though I plead guilty to the former, recognizing the way my social status has shaped my own perception of the world around me, I want to resist the latter label.  Likewise I reject the tendency ubiquitous among both the far left and the far right to deny certain people the right to dissent, to express reasoned disagreement, and to subject every idea to rigorous scrutiny.  If we cannot dialogue, after all, what hope do we have to arrive at even a modicum of understanding?  Yet this, it seems, is precisely what Coates considers to be impossible.  Rooted dogmatically in the Nietzschean ethic of "will to power," the author's arguments throughout the book assume that relations between whites and blacks must ever remain marked by struggle, conflict, and even violence.  Assuming that white people can change, that they might one day be anything other oppressors, that they will stop plundering black bodies for their own personal economic gain, Coates tells his son, is harmful idealism that distracts from the pragmatic, ongoing project of the struggle for black power.  In this world, one either eats or gets eaten.  And the Dreamers have been feasting on black flesh for far too long.

Given his rejection of theism and the uniquely Christian hope that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, it should not surprise us that Coates offers no suggestions for a way forward other than armed popular resistance.  Trashed as idealistic gas is the pacifism of Martin Luther King; in its place Coates seeks to revive the militant tactics of the Black Power Movement and the violent rhetoric of his hero Malcolm X ("If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.  He would not turn the other cheek for you.  He would not be a better man for you.  He would not be your morality") 36.  For this reason, Coates denigrates those heroes of "Black History Month" who staged sit-ins, marched for freedom, and "seemed to love the worst things in life -- love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets" (32).  Nonviolent methods are lauded by whites because pacifism poses no genuine threat to white power, Coates cynically argues.  It is an oppressor's morality.  Besides, any willingness to suffer or die nonviolently for a cause depends upon the conviction that history is aiming at a particular end or telos.  Yet that is not the world we inhabit, according to the author.  Ridiculing those who believe that the meek will inherit the earth, Coates inhabits a universe that is purely "physical, and its moral arc [is] bent toward chaos then concluded in a box" (28).

As a Christian and a theologian, I must part ways with Ta-Nehisi Coates at this juncture.  Though he has much to teach me about endemic racism, the social and physical conditions of urban poverty, the black diaspora, the shortcomings of the white Dream, and much more, I must (at the risk of being discarded as another privileged white oppressor) declare my belief in the possibility of reconciliation and transformation.  Christ's prayer for those who crucified him remind us today that the cycle of violence -- long though it may have lasted -- can grind to a halt through the power of forgiveness.  History is not condemned to be, as Coates believes, one long game of "king of the mountain" in which whites stand on top of the pile, shoving down black and brown pretenders to their throne.  In contrast to all of this stands the kenotic movement celebrated by Paul in Philippians 2, the master who washes his servants' feet, the black baptist preacher who instructs his followers to overcome hatred with love.

For though Coates' vitriol positively drips with righteous indignation, he never offers to me a convincing reason why I ought to share his outrage at injustice.  For if the world we inhabit really is mere chaos that ends in a box, for what reason might I consider surrendering my status as a white male?  If that's the game we're playing, then I will do what I will do, compelling others to serve my own purposes and making no apologies for doing so.  Coates either overlooks the danger of the oppressed becoming the oppressor or else he tacitly approves of it.  And it is this great struggle which provides Coates and his son with meaning and purpose in their lives.  In perhaps the most honest moment in this letter, the author states the conclusion that he is compelled to embrace: "Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about this world is meant to be... These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope" (71).  This is a profoundly dark and cynical perspective from which to advocate for "racial justice," one which effectively renders terms like "good," "true," "beautiful," and "just" devoid of any meaning beyond the personal and subjective.  And so I have every right to reject the author's idea of justice just as much as I might claim to dislike tomatoes.  Who is he to argue with me?  On what grounds will he convince me otherwise?

Thankfully, I believe in the God of Justice and Peace who provides content and definition to such ideas, enfleshed in his very body hung on a cross and resurrected.  Just as guns will one day be reforged into garden tools and just as the lion will one day lay down with the lamb, so too I cling to the hope that "one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls" and we will know peace.  This was Dr. King's dream.  One day we will all wake up to find that this reconciliation is the fabric with which this universe was woven all along.

A Few Pastoral Reflections on Newtown

Like many Americans, I wept when I heard the news from yesterday.  Perhaps it’s because I have a kindergartener myself.  Perhaps it’s just the utter disbelief that it happened in an elementary school.  Whatever it was, the news of yesterday’s shooting in Connecticut hit me harder than any story since 9/11.

Now after this tragedy, as is the case after every tragedy, we are once again faced with the question, “Why?”  For those of us who believe in God, we are faced with the even more difficult question, “How could God allow this to happen?”  While I don’t really know the answer to that (and anyone who claims to is lying), I wanted to jot down a few thoughts just in case they might be helpful to someone somewhere asking these same age-old questions.

1.     This school shooting was not God’s will.  Sadly, Christians are coming out of the woodwork to explain how this could be God’s will.  I’ve heard it said, “This is God’s punishment for our nation removing prayer from schools” and other such nonsense.  Plain and simple, this did not come from God.  To think that it did is to turn God into the devil. 

2.     Yesterday’s events can be best understood as an act of human free will.  Perhaps God could have created a world in which free will did not exist, but he judged that human free will and all that comes with it – both good and bad – was preferable to a universe populated by robots.

3.     This shooting is not the end of the story.  As Christians, we must insist that evil does not have the final say.  To paraphrase St. Paul, “We mourn, but not as those who have no hope.”  We do not know what the end of the story will look like exactly, but we do believe that even the worst of evils will pale in comparison to the beauty and goodness that will envelop us.  This is not to downplay what happened and how horrific it was; it is just to insist that what happened yesterday is not the end of the Grand Story.   We believers insist on the truth of Jesus’ words:  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)

4.     The victims did nothing wrong to deserve this.  It’s truly remarkable that some Christians today still see tragedies like this as a sort of retributive justice from an angry God.  We heard the same drivel after Katrina.  To those who make such hurtful and misguided claims, I plead, “Please read the book of Job.”  Or perhaps recall the time Jesus said: “What about those twelve people who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them?  Do you think that they were more guilty of wrongdoing than everyone else in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4).  The point:  there is no correlation between tragedies and the morality of those who suffer from them.

      5.  If we feel pain over loss, God feels it all the more.  The picture of God in Scripture is the Suffering One.  When we want to see the heart of the divine mystery, we look upon the cross.  Let’s not get this mixed up:  God is not the one inflicting pain; he is the one feeling pain next to us.  Too many Christians get this wrong and make God out to be evil rather than good.

I realize that I’m not saying anything new here.  There’s nothing very profound in what I’ve written.  Yet I feel that people need to hear this simple theology in the midst of tragedy.  As many struggle to make sense of what happened this week, we join them, recognizing that we don’t have all of the answers.  But in the meantime we cling to hope.  If we believe anything as Christians it is this:  God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good.

Is God in the Earthquake?

Pat Robertson has done it again. He insists on seeing God as the author of evil. In the aftermath of the horrific and tragic earthquake that struck Haiti this week, he announced that it was their deserved punishment for "making a pact with the devil." Rev. Robertson, pardon my saying so, but your "god" is my devil. I serve a loving God who is not willing that any should perish. I serve a God who is working for the good, who does not require evil and violence as a means to his own end, who wraps children in his loving arms rather than crushes them under brick and mortar.

Jim Wallis has said it well this week: "My God does not cause evil. God is not a vengeful and retributive being, waiting to strike us down; instead, God is in the very midst of this tragedy, suffering with those who are suffering. When evil strikes, it’s easy to ask, where is God? The answer is simple: God is suffering with those who are suffering."

So many Christians are utterly confused on this point. They assume that everything that happens is part of the will of God. "There are no accidents," they faithfully proclaim. "We may not understand, but we do know that God's will is never thwarted." These well meaning people look in the face of tragedy and shrug, "It must have been what God wanted."

But look into the faces of the dead children lining the streets in Port-au-Prince and tell me that God did this. The New York Times reported: "The tiny bodies of children lay in piles next to the ruins of their collapsed school. People with faces covered by white dust and the blood of open wounds roamed the streets. Frantic doctors wrapped heads and stitched up sliced limbs in a hotel parking lot." And you are going to tell me that the God revealed in the suffering love of the cross is behind this?!? If you are right -- if, in fact, God did cause this to happen -- then I will rise up against that God and with everything in me revolt against him. I will join together with others and initiate a revolution to overthrow such a tyrant.

David Bentley Hart stated it better than I ever could in his reflection on the 2004 Tsunami in Southeast Asia:

"Only a moral cretin at [the moment of a child's death] would have attempted to soothe [his parent's] anguish by assuring him that his child had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact his death had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world... Ours is a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces -- whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance -- that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred... [In the eschaton] God will not unite all of history's many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history as false and damnable... rather than showing how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new'" (The Doors of the Sea 99-101, 104).

The Great Question

As one who sometimes barely holds on to the Christian faith at times, I am haunted by the recent disasters in Burma and China. In my opinion, the single greatest argument for atheism is what philosophers of religion call "the problem of evil." Briefly stated, the argument goes like this: 1) God is all powerful, 2) God is good, 3) Evil exists. One of these three things, they argue, cannot be true for if God is all powerful and all good, then he could prevent evil from taking place. While I subscribe to a free will theodicy which accounts for much of the evils in this world (such as the Holocaust), I have less to say in the face of cyclones and earthquakes -- those events that many call "acts of God." While I have wrestled with this question for years (I took a course on it in college and another in seminary), the force of evil still hits me when I see pictures like this taken in China's Sichuan province by the BBC:


Who cannot cry out to God "Where are you!?!" in the face of such horrendous evil? I sit in silence and ask "why" and oftentimes do not come up with an answer.

And yet I cling to faith. It is all I have. I cling to the hope that God will somehow, someday make all things new and set these evils aright. I cling to the hope that this child buried under the rubble is either now or soon will be riotously celebrated in the kingdom of God to such an extent that her suffering on earth will seem small and trivial.

Of all the books I have read on the subject, David Bentley Hart's short piece of poetry-philosophy is the best. In his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? he writes the following:

"As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy. Such faith might never seem credible to someone like Ivan Karamozov, or still the disquiet of his conscience, or give him peace in place of rebellion, but neither is it a faith that his arguments can defeat: for it is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead. Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history's many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe all tears away from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new.'"

That is an answer! That is the hope I cling to.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.

Ali Hussein

This two-year old boy named Ali was killed in an explosion in Iraq on April 29th. I ask you to look into his face for at least 30 seconds and then ask: "Does any principle, no matter how lofty, justify this?"

I'm pissed right now at my own nation which began this conflict and at my own church which has largely supported it. The church kept silent as our country marched to war and, in fact, condoned this brutality by blindly supporting a so-called "Christian" presidential administration.

I feel the need to allow some vitriolic sarcasm to escape my lips. I pray the prayer of Mark Twain: "O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale form of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolate land in rags and hunger and thirst."

Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.

Whip Spiders and Augustinian Theodicy

Last night I watched a documentary produced by the BBC on "Life in the Undergrowth" hosted by David Attenborough. On the program, they introduced the viewers to a strange creature that I had never heard of before -- the "whip spider" (see below for a picture). Virtually everything on this creature is intended to kill. It has venomous fangs, strong body armor, and foot-long legs used to feel for prey. This got me thinking about my own view of the fall and its deficiencies.

I have traditionally accepted an Augustinian view of the fall. This teaches that the world was once a place of perfect harmony where man and animals got along perfectly, man introduced sin into the world, and this caused all of creation to go haywire -- tornados, earthquakes, enmity between man and nature, etc. So here is my question: Did God create the whip spider before the fall? If so, then did it have venomous fangs? Or would it have been a totally different creature (completely peaceful) that "evolved" the fangs after the fall? Or is my view of the fall too childish? Is it more metaphorical than this? Should I accept the Darwinian view that this spider developed these traits because of survival of the fittest as many theistic evolutionists contend? I am leaning in this direction, but the question remains, "Then how do I read the Biblical account of the fall?"

To put my question more simply, "Did lions always have claws?" If God originally intended nature to exist in harmony, then why would they need claws? If you say that "no they didn't have claws," then did they just evolve them after the fall?

Stiff-necked

Deuteronomy 9:1-6 Hear, O Israel. You are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky. 2 The people are strong and tall-- Anakites! You know about them and have heard it said: "Who can stand up against the Anakites?" 3 But be assured today that the LORD your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them; he will subdue them before you. And you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly, as the LORD has promised you. 4 After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. 5 It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 6 Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.

God has chosen to use his people to combat evil in this world and, ultimately, evil will be defeated. Systems of oppression and injustice, demonic powers that enslave people to addictions, and the inner chaos and turmoil of broken relationship will one day be overcome by God's shalom. But in the meantime, the church must remember this one very important fact: God is doing this through his people not because they are so good, but because evil is so bad. It's as if God shakes his head and says, "Well, it's not much to work with, but it's all I've got." This keeps us from getting a big head. We are told explicitly three times in these short verses a very simple fact: you are really bad people. You are stubborn, stiff-necked, grumbling, idolatrous people. In a strange sort of way, I find comfort in this rebuke. It reminds me that I am a man of unclean lips who live among a people of unclean lips. I don't come down from my holy hill in all of my righteous glory and condescend to relate to poor, miserable sinners. No, I am among the poor, miserable sinners and God supernaturally works out his plan of salvation through this broken vessel. And so I can sing with the saints: "Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne!"