Hello Again
Hello everyone! It's nice to be back, and sometime soon, I'll be posting a quick-and-dirty vacation report. But first, I wanted to jump back in with some thoughts on a couple of lovely posts from Erin (Chasing After Wind and the luminous Chasing After Wind II) on what constitutes true faith, over and against what she identifies as “Praise God for my bargain washing machine” faith. I was particularly interested in her thoughts because I’d recently been involved in conversation about just this topic. A friend of mine, a professor at a Christian liberal arts college, was complaining of the shallowness of the expressions of faith he often hears in Christian communities, where people regularly attribute all sorts of conveniences to God’s intervention but have no satisfactory answers for God’s reluctance to intervene in situations involving true suffering.
An aside: On the question of God’s reluctance to end the suffering of the world (the problem of theodicy—how can an all-good, all-powerful God exist in a world that contains evil?), I have little to add theologically. Personally (and I don't expect this quick summary to suffice for all or even any), I believe that free will is a precondition for the sort of love God or any being desires, and that the possibility of free will necessitates the possibility of departure from good. Departures from good in the form of sin have caused suffering and introduced death. To eliminate these consequences would involve eliminating free will in a way that would compromise the possibility of freely offered love. God’s solution then was not to eliminate free will, but to offer another free choice: to accept a remediation in the death of Christ. I realize this is a pretty simplistic discussion, and I have further thoughts that I could bore you with later, but my main point in this side note is to say that I don’t think the mere existence of the problem of theodicy negates the plausibility of Christianity.
So, anyway, one of my friend’s objections to the Christian talk he hears is that the logical problems it presents have alienated some of his friends from faith itself. Now, on the one hand, I think Christianity could be true even if everyone who believed in it were ill-informed and just plain stupid—gravity functioned just as effectively before Newton proved it intellectually, and even now, a lot of ill-informed people believe in it and probably would give a lousy scientific explanation of it. So the obnoxiousness of some Christians doesn’t provide an excuse for a refusal to entertain the tenets of Christianity—everyone has to come to terms with his or her own belief individually.
But of course the objection still has merit, not as a de facto defense of unbelief, but as a meditation on two problems: First, what do we do with glib-sounding claims that God has provided washing machines, parking places, and speedy recoveries from root canals? Erin has some profound wisdom, I think, on this question in her second post. And second, what do we do with Christians who make these claims—how do we respond to them and their alienating behaviors in a world where 1) we have to live with them in the family of Christ and 2) they contribute to the reputation and witness of Christ in the world, something we should all care something about?
An aside: On the question of God’s reluctance to end the suffering of the world (the problem of theodicy—how can an all-good, all-powerful God exist in a world that contains evil?), I have little to add theologically. Personally (and I don't expect this quick summary to suffice for all or even any), I believe that free will is a precondition for the sort of love God or any being desires, and that the possibility of free will necessitates the possibility of departure from good. Departures from good in the form of sin have caused suffering and introduced death. To eliminate these consequences would involve eliminating free will in a way that would compromise the possibility of freely offered love. God’s solution then was not to eliminate free will, but to offer another free choice: to accept a remediation in the death of Christ. I realize this is a pretty simplistic discussion, and I have further thoughts that I could bore you with later, but my main point in this side note is to say that I don’t think the mere existence of the problem of theodicy negates the plausibility of Christianity.
So, anyway, one of my friend’s objections to the Christian talk he hears is that the logical problems it presents have alienated some of his friends from faith itself. Now, on the one hand, I think Christianity could be true even if everyone who believed in it were ill-informed and just plain stupid—gravity functioned just as effectively before Newton proved it intellectually, and even now, a lot of ill-informed people believe in it and probably would give a lousy scientific explanation of it. So the obnoxiousness of some Christians doesn’t provide an excuse for a refusal to entertain the tenets of Christianity—everyone has to come to terms with his or her own belief individually.
But of course the objection still has merit, not as a de facto defense of unbelief, but as a meditation on two problems: First, what do we do with glib-sounding claims that God has provided washing machines, parking places, and speedy recoveries from root canals? Erin has some profound wisdom, I think, on this question in her second post. And second, what do we do with Christians who make these claims—how do we respond to them and their alienating behaviors in a world where 1) we have to live with them in the family of Christ and 2) they contribute to the reputation and witness of Christ in the world, something we should all care something about?
posted by Tara | 3:50 AM
2 Comments:
I have nothing thought provoking to add to the topic at hand, but I did want to leave a comment to welcome you back!
Welcome back! Nice post and interesting questions. Thanks for the links to my posts. I'd like to add to your list the concern of helping one another build faith on rock, not sand. Many people leave or reject the faith out of a sense of disappointment in God. Do we have a responsibility to one another in this regard?
I don't know exactly what do with the washing machine thing when I encounter it. Mostly I just say "that's great, I'm glad you're doing so well." Which is the truth. Occasionally I ask a private follow-up question if a teacher has advocated this view in a large-group teaching. My exploration of the issue on the blog generated a lot of concern from a friend of mine, who is also a key leader in my church. We have been able to have a calm, public dialog in which neither of us has budged. The reality is that people stick with what works until it doesn't work anymore, and only then will we look for something different. I'm not sure that initiating these conversations regularly would be helpful. I do like to ask people about their spiritual and community life as often as I can, and when I have the opportunity to share what "god is doing in my life" I try to focus on those two things.
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