Marginal Christianity

In this Post Script to my posts on God in Control I share a piece I ran across last night. In it Cameron Combs excerpts and comments on the thought of one of the best Pentecostal theologians working, Chris E. W. Green on the theme we have been considering. Worth pondering in tandem with those earlier posts in my estimation. What we think of God matters. When we have this faulty conception of God as just the strongest agent or being in existence we end up speaking of God’s action (or seemingly non-action) in the world wrongly. Green argues that we need to stop saying “God is in control” and rather start to understand that God is sovereign. Control and sovereignty are not the same thing. To say that “God is not in control” doesn’t mean that he is just as surprised at the events that take place as we are and it’s not to say that God is at “the mercy of what happens in the world.” The difference between control and sovereignty is important. Green writes,  “Sovereignty is utterly...

To try and pull together the threads of this meandering series of thoughts about God’s relation to us: -God is not in control - if we mean God has pre-scripted everything that happens to us and therefore our lives are not truly our own. This misconstrues the nature of God’s relation to the world and leaves him open to charges of mismanagement of his world and failure to properly control things in it – and it’s a good thing too! -God is not in control - if we mean by control precisely the same thing we mean when we say we or anyone else is in control of someone or something. Our language about God does not mean exactly what it means when we apply it to others humans. When we do this we run into the same problems noted above – and it’s a good thing too! -Practically speaking, then, thus means we should not tell someone to whom something bad has happened that “it is all part of the plan.” That’s about the worst thing, pastorally speaking, one can say it that kind of situation....

If God is not in control, that is, does not determine in advance what is going to happen, that there is no “plan” or script unfolding in all the ups and downs of every life and event, how might we best envision his governance of the world (as far as we are able to do so)? I would suggest we think in terms of fixed goals and open routes. What does that mean? -God’s plans and purposes for his creation are sure and certain and, as God, is able and willing to achieve them. -He achieves them by being true to himself. -God desires real relationships with his creatures and real relationships are open-ended ever-changing. -God’s power to achieve his purposes in such a world constituted by real relationships is his love. He does not coerce, manipulate, or force. He woos, guides, directs, and acts in the best interests of his creatures toward their fulfilment and his good ends by the quality, intensity, and relentlessness of his love. Even in discipline, judgment, defeat, and exile ...

We’ve already noted that thinking that God is in control misconstrues how the Bible portrays God’s rule and how God relates to his world in the first pose of this series. I got that insight from Tim Gombis who is doing a multipart series on this theme too. In one of his posts he explores additional ways this way of thinking inhibits a proper understanding and practice of our faith. We will follow him and look at those problematic implications in this post, three in particular: -it provokes unbiblical ways of responding to suffering. -it hinders us from taking to heart the ways scripture directs us to respond to pain. -it does not accurately picture how biblical writers address God’s anxious people who face suffering. Gombis addresses in particular the way this view of God’s control affects our imagination which, as C. S. Lewis argues, complements reason, which “ is the natural organ of truth” while “imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors o...

We’ve taken a look at the part of the biblical story line that tells us what God intended in creation (his sovereign kingship), humanity’s role in God’s intention (to manifest God’s sovereign kingship as his image-bearers over creation), how we defaulted and rejected that plan seeking to down things our own way, and how that rejection of God’s rule corrupted us, turning us into idolaters and marring and undoing God’s good creation. Next we zoomed in a bit on idolatry to take a closer look at the nature and dynamics of that pervasive human affliction. We cannot avoid it since we are created to be dependent and draw life from a greater power nor can we fix by ourselves because we become enslaved to whatever surrogate we depend and rely in place of God. This is the fundamental knot at the heart of who we are that ties us up in dilemmas, conundrums, and enigmas we can neither fully explain or ourselves resolve. Today I want to fill out the rest of the biblical picture looking at ho...

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...

When we say “God is in control” we usually mean something like “God has either (pre)planned or exercises such rule over human affairs that nothing happens that God is not ultimately responsible for.” There are lots of different variations and shades of meaning that have been developed around the discussion of this matter, complicated and learned discussions. I’m going to stick with the usual, rather straightforward expression of it noted above in these reflections. We all seem to have some sense over a larger power or force at work in human affairs. Some call this power God (of one variety or another), some do not. But instinctively when something bad happens we almost inevitably wonder -“Why did God/other power let this happen?” -“Why didn’t he/it prevent that catastrophe and loss of life?” -“Why did he/it do this to me?” In one Calvin and Hobbes comic strip Hobbes asks Calvin if he believes in God. Calvin replies that he guesses he does and adds, “It sure seems l...

I wrote in the last post in this series “from a Christian perspective, any serious search for one’s authentic self has the potential to make contact with the self’s gracious createdness by God.” To that I would add today that our authentic selves are vouchsafed in Christ and we have been graciously included in all he has done for us. Creation is redeemed in Christ and it is there we find our authentic selves, our true identity. Paying attention to God entails saturating ourselves in this knowledge until it becomes our self-knowledge, until its reality shapes and reshapes us into its image, until we are able to “find the divine in the human, life in suffering, strength in weakness” (Andrew Root). That is, until we are sufficiently conformed to the image of Christ (which is God’s will for us, Rom.8:29) to find in him the God. We can do this in a number of ways I’ll look at in a future post in this series. The God we pay attention to is the One who comes to us as a minist...

One can certainly be excused for assuming that violence is an intrinsic part of all life in our world. Nothing and nobody is free of its taint and corruption. Well, almost nobody. Jesus of Nazareth, a 1 st century a.d. Galilean peasant and prophet, acclaimed the Messiah of Jewish expectation and Lord and world ruler by Christian faith, seems to have lived free of its taint and even its allure. And therein lies the nub of the problem investigated in this study. How do we understand this Jesus, and the God he worshiped and served, and the books of the Bible that witness to him? Especially since the latter, and the God they present as the “Father” of this Jesus, his “Son,” seem as “bloody, brutal, and barbaric” as the world in which it arose and to which it claims to witness to a redemptive nonviolent alternative reality and possibility for human life on this planet. The Bible itself testifies to the near ubiquity of violence in the life of our planet. Most of its content is ...

God is love. Love is . . . -committed to us. We’re stuck with God for good or ill, like it or not. -working for us. God wills and works for our good. God will make us like Christ no matter the cost (to us or to him). -always seeking to save us (and we always need to be saved). We’re loster than we can imagine, God is more resourceful than we’ll ever know. There’s little God won’t do, other than not be himself, to save us. This may seem to put a dent in his reputation, vex and perplex us, raise all kinds of doubts, even at times drive us away from him (really or ideas of him) so we might truly find him and be saved. -tough as nails (like the ones that bound his Son to the cross) on us and our world as needed. -accepting us, actually sitting next to us on any trash heap we end up on, like Job’s friends sans the lousy theology. -challenging us to be as good as we were made to be. -unfathomable as chess’s Grandest Master playing all of us at the same time and somehow allow...

Advent Begins in the Dark with God                                                                                                                                       (Year C, 2 nd Sunday 2018) (Malachi 3:1-4 / Luke 1:68-79/ Philippians 1:3-11/ Luke 3:1-6) Advent begins in the dark. So we have seen. But that does not mean w...