Doubt

Kathy over at Beyond Words has written a stunning and expressive post on the subject of Doubt as a Spiritual Discipline.

Putting One's Hope in the The Word Made Flesh

Below is an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor from this week's edition of The Church Times entitled 'Putting One's Hope in The Word Made Flesh' written by Jeremy Craddock of Huntingdon.

I'm posting this excerpt mainly because it resonated with me, but I think that there are also connections to two entirely separate conversations I've been having in the blogosphere about: 1) The Fall; 2) The place of 'death and dying' in Christian theology. To me, there seem to be shades of WH Vanstone's theology in this letter.

'Mr. H' wrote a letter the previous week articulating the age-old objection to faith that 'bad things happen every day'.

Mr. H says that, in addition to all our good qualities, God also made cruelty, cancer, and tsunamis. But suppose that God did not design the world directly and in detail. If he did, then there would be no freedom of choice, and he would be some kind of monster. Suppose instead that he made the world make itself. If that were so, then he would be suffering as creatures preyed on one another, and species died out to make room for others.

Now suppose that God's act as creator is really that he sustains the world that makes itself, moment by moment, at a cost to himself. That is, he stands by creatures who suffer from cruelty, cancer, and tsunamis. Indeed, he suffers with them; but we might want - accepting that human words fail to describe the unknowable God - to say that he suffers with his creation because he observes its suffering at first hand.

But the idea of incarnation goes a stage further. Of course Jesus was fully human. Be the incarnation suggests that, in Jesus, God knew by experience, not just observation, what it was to be rejected, and hunted down; and by experience, to know the ultimate horror of being God-forsaken. The reason I can't cope with a love such as that is not just that I want to think of Jesus as no more than a godly man; it is that I can't bear it.

The Wrath of God

Paul Nuechterlein's website, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary quotes Robert Hamerton-Kelly's very interesting take on divine wrath:

...the wrath revealed in the gospel is not the divine vengeance that should have fallen on us falling instead on Jesus, but rather the divine nonresistance to human evil (cf. Matt 5:39), God’s willingness to suffer violence rather than defend himself or retaliate. It is the permission granted us by God to afflict ourselves unknowingly; it is the divine nonresistance to human evil. It is God’s unwillingness to intervene in the process of action and consequence in the human world by which we set up and operate the system of sacred violence, and so paradoxically a sign of love as the refusal to abridge our freedom and a respect for our choices even when they are catastrophic.

There are interesting connections here with theodicy and free will.

For those not familiar with the Girardian concept of "sacred violence", the basic premise is that all human societies maintain internal cohesion by first identifying and then expelling/murdering a scapegoat. The completion of the violence against the scapegoat results in a temporary and false "peace" for members of the "in group" as they contemplate ultimate matters of life and death in the wake of the violence. But sacred violence does not last and must be repeated over and over in order to keep the "peace".

The concept of sacred violence and its inability to bring about permanent peace is why I am increasingly coming to reject penal substitionary atonement as a legitimate theory of atonement. PSA seems to substitute the temporary, human, sinful tool of "sacred violence" for the divine and permanent tool of God's "Shalom".

The idea of "God's wrath" essentially being His refusal to interfere in our human, violent wrath is intriguing. It is certainly consistent with the commentaries on Matthew 13 - the Lectionary reading a fortnight ago - which insisted that "wars and rumours of wars" originate in human society, not in God.