Theological Journal - April 30: Why God Is Not In Control (2)

Theological Journal – April 30

Why God is Not in Control – And It’s a Good Thing Too! (2)

Here’s where we got to yesterday:

-God created the world as a temple in which he would dwell in order to be with his human creature and share life with them.

-God exercises his sovereignty through his human creatures, royal priests in his creational temple. Their proper discharge of these responsibilities manifests his sovereign rule over and love for his creation.

-Humanity spitefully spurned God and rejected their calling as royal priests opting instead in making a bid to be god itself, no longer manifesting the wise sovereignty of its Creator.

-Instead, creature and creation fell into chaos and disrepair, neither functioning as they were meant to. God’s intended creational home has been “subjected to futility” as Paul puts it in Romans 8 and must wait in groaning and tears to God reclaims and restores humans to their intended royal priesthood and practice of divine sovereignty in it and over it (Rom.8:20-22).

-bad things happen to us and in our world because of these failure on our part, not God’s. God, then, is not in control if by control we mean the effective, ultimate cause of all that happens.

 

On Imagination, Idolatry, Our Image of God, and Healing

We fallen human beings are inveterate idolaters, our hearts a veritable “factory of idols” (Calvin). Created to be dependent on God, in absence of relation to him we are impelled to find a surrogate deity to depend or rely on. We place ourselves in that role and decide whom or what we shall rely on to establish or bolster our efforts at self-rule. These become our idols, or “ultimate concerns” (Tillich) which give us our identity and vocation. We cannot do without them, because we are not truly self-sufficient and in need of nothing. We require some “ultimate concern” to give us that.

But when those idols fail and we are cast back on ourselves, the fantasy of our pretended self-deity evaporates. In desperation we cry out (in spite of ourselves) to someone or something greater than ourselves for explanation, comfort, and redress. We believe this or these somethings are greater than us and guide and direct or lives according to their plans and purposes. In other words, they control us and our world, much as we would were our pretended self-deity true. We can only imagine these deities according our distorted images of power, control, and responsibility. And we only have the deities we can imagine.

Christians begin their journey of faith with quite alloyed imaginations which yield quite alloyed and inadequate views of God. Peter Schakel, building on C. S. Lewis, writes,

“Usually we don’t try to shrink God – it’s just impossible not to. What we need are reminders that we are prone to do it. We fall back on the same old images, the conceptions we’ve become accustomed to, and they begin to solidify. Lewis says in A Grief Observed that the images turn into idols, so that in effect we’re worshipping a god made of our own images instead of the true God. Our familiar images let us keep God in a box and give us a sense of control – we can manage this Lord, this ‘tame’ version of God. Therefore we need reminders not to let ourselves rest content with small images of God. Just saying ‘God is great!’ isn’t enough. We need to be jolted, surprised, and challenged, occasionally, to move us out of our comfort zones. Those jolts can come in many ways, in many forms.” (https://www.cslewis.com/how-c-s-lewis-expands-our-view-of-god/)

The bad things that happen to us and our world (which, remember, we opened the door for; see last post) can become such reminders. But if we remain wedded to our alloyed images we will continue to remain stuck in the conundrums and quandaries these alloyed images of deity create for us.

In his grace, though, as C.S. Lewis writes in Letters to Malcolm: “Every idea of him we form, he must in mercy shatter." And this will go on until we look squarely into the face of the crucified and resurrected One in glory. Then we see and know God truly.

More tomorrow.