To Speak of Many Things

Ok. There were a couple posts up here about a good many important things. Like God, evil, history, Hell, creation, and grace. They're hiding, now, until I can wrap my brain around them better, and articulate them better.

In the meantime, I'm cutting and pasting a couple quotes that might still be worth something.

//EDIT: Sep. '07 I've taken the whole "Evil and Eschatology" post back out of hiding for now (unedited and untouched from whatever I wrote in March '06)//

I'm reading my medieval history textbook, and about Europe from 200 BC to 1000 AD. Some of the amazingly cool and amazingly depressing stuff happened then. And I'm convinced that people often are far, far too eager to say, "I know God's plan for history, and that's why this good thing happened here, and this bad thing happened there."

I do NOT read history and see "God's glorious providential script." God's glorious script, as far as I can tell, would have been a Perelandra, a world growing up under him without a Fall.

I read history, and I see evil and suffering and pain. And I see God's grace coming in from time to time, through people, and mitigating it and redeeming it. I read history and say, "Wow. I am floored by how many times God uses the evilly-intended actions of men to work great good."

As far as I can make out right now, Calvinism is amazingly unlivable. It doesn't hold up soon as I run into a non-Christian, or see and feel the suffering and pain and bentness of the world. If the renewal and union with God of a tiny 1% of people is the whole bloody hope that Christianity potentially promises -- to hell with everything else -- it's a rather tiny and limited hope.

I don't think God's grand plan of history is, "Yes, man rebelled and fell. I've got every right to let them all go to hell, but I'll stoop down and save a tiny 1% of them, and make those my new chosen people, and show my mercy and power and glory through their salvation and redemption. And the other 99%? They can just keep right on going to hell (literally). And I'll be just as glorified through that."

I look at the world right now, and about all I can say is, "There is evil. It hurts. God never desired injustice and evil and man's inhumanity to man, and man's abuse of creation, and man's perversion and abuse and misuse of all of the good things God gave to man. And yet God allows it to keep happening."

Let me be troubled by why God doesn't interfere more. Let me be troubled as to why he chose something as inefficient as his church to be the focal point of his interference -- to be the foothold of the spread of his renewal and hope. I can hold this in tension. I cannot hold in tension a God who looks at the world and says, "Renewal? Suffering? What are you talking about? It's going to hell in a handbasket -- just worry about growing in your personal relationship to me, along with this handful of other people I'm saving!"

Calvinism doesn't seem to mesh with reality. But non-Calvinism doesn't seem to mesh with the Bible. Yes, there's something of a syllogism in there, and it scares me.

People always say that Christianity is the only religion that takes seriously questions of evil and suffering. And then they turn right and around and say, "Why are you so torn up about evil and suffering? God had scripted all history beforehand for his glory, and that unsaved starving child in India is a part of it -- who are you to question the plans and purposes of God? God is God. You are not."

If Christianity requires me to inure myself to the suffering and pain of the world, and not be torn up by it, and say "and it's not really an important and integral part of the hope of Christianity to be fixing it -- just worry about your personal relationship with God and with the church" -- I can't live like that. And I AM rather frightened, right now, that this more limited hope is actually what the Bible teaches. And that a huge percentage of the things I looked at in Christianity and said, "Wow. Yes. True. Beautiful. Hard. Right. Livable. Of course." are not actually what the Bible teaches, and are not actually Christianity.

Basically...I'm finally having to confront, head-on, a good many of the loose ends that have built up since this and this. And it's a rather ugly tangle, with very very little light at the end of the tunnel.