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I Just Don’t Understand God Sometimes

Okay, so I’ve promised you I would take you along (drag you along?) on my journey of learning and discovery, and as I’ve just started Christopher J. H. Wright’s The God I Don’t Understand (I know, I know, I was supposed to be reading this all along, but with so many summer events intervening, I quite lost track of my reading), I’ll make a few worthy observations.

This may take a couple of days.  Bear with me.

These problems (with God) are not new.  As Wright says, “I well remember having arguments with friends at school and university more than forty years ago about some of the issues in the chapters of this book.  But I think when you are young, you put these questions on a mental shelf marked ‘To be sorted out later’.  You half hope that there must be an answer to them, with a bit more reading and study, or by listening to more senior and learned Christian leaders.  Surely somebody somewhere must have cracked these problems.  But as life goes on, you find that nobody seems to have done so convincingly.  Does anybody really have an answer to these things?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps we are not meant to.”

Hmmm…might he mean we have to live the questions?

There are different kinds of not understanding, when it comes to God, according to Wright.  There are things that make us angry or grieved.  There are things that “leave us morally disturbed.”  There are things that are puzzling.  There are things that flood us with gratitude.  There are things that fill us with hope. Perhaps “we can at least clear away some wrong, inadequate, or misleading answers to them.”

I like his explanation (not really a definition) of faith.  “Perhaps this is the special feature and gift of poetry, but it is also a profound recognition that faith seeks understanding, and faith builds on understanding where it is granted, but faith does not finally depend on understanding.”  [I’ll interject here.  I think this is where I want faith to fail, because I can’t explain it.]  Wright continues, “This is not to say, of course, that faith is intrinsically irrational (quite the contrary), but that faith takes us into realms where explanation fails us–for the present.”

Wright begins with the “mystery of evil” and explains that in other traditions (other than Christianity) there is no good, no evil, OR there is, but there are many gods, some evil, some good, so the presence of both is easily explained.

I think the most damning thing (I think I had a quote from Mother Theresa on my main blog page at one time, expressing the same sentiment) is a passage  delineating out our quick accusation of God whenever a catastrophic natural disaster strikes.  It’s something to think about, at least.

Leading up to the passage, Wright is talking about how we’ve “normalized” the evil associated with human beings’ “culpable actions or failures.”

“But whenever something terrible on a huge scale happens, like the 2004 tsunami, or the cyclone in Myanmar in 2008, or the earthquakes in Pakistan, Peru, and China, the cry goes up, ‘How can God allow such a thing?  How can God allow such suffering?’  My own heart echoes that cry and I join in the protest at the gates of heaven.  Such appalling suffering, on such a scale, offends all our emotions and assumptions that God is supposed to care.  We who believe in God, who know and love and trust God, find ourselves torn apart by the emotional and spiritual assault of such events.

“‘How can God allow such things?’ we cry, with the built-in accusation that if he were any kind of good and loving God, he would not allow them.  Our gut reaction is to accuse God of callousness or carelessness and to demand that he do something to stop such things.

“But when I hear people voicing such accusations–especially those who don’t believe in God but like to accuse the God they don’t believe in of his failure to do things he ought to do if he did exist–then I think I hear a voice from heaven saying:

“‘Well, excuse me, but if we’re talking here about who allows what, let me point out that thousands of children are dying every minute in your world of preventable diseases that you have the means (but obviously not the will) to stop.  How can you allow that?

“‘There are millions in your world who are slowly dying of starvation while some of you are killing yourselves with gluttony.  How can you allow such suffering to go on?

“‘You seem comfortable enough knowing that millions of you have less per day to live on than others spend on a cup of coffee, while a few of you have more individual wealth than whole countries.  How can you allow such obscene evil and call it an economic system?

“‘There are more people in slavery now than in the worst days of the pre-abolition slave trade.  How can you allow that?

“‘There are millions upon millions of people living as refugees, on the knife-edge of human existence, because of interminable wars that you indulge in out  of selfishness, greed, ambition, and lying hypocrisy.  And you not only allow this, but collude in it, fuel it, and profit from it (including many of you who claim most loudly that you believe in me).’”

After reading Wright’s words, I’ve come to the following conjecture:  What if God gave us the responsibility to rid the world of “evil,” and we’re doing a horrible, despicable, miserable job of it?  What if it’s our fault?

Oh, the horror.

Any thoughts on this?

[Post image: Michelangelo’s God]

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