A Bit on the Path to Perfection June 12, 2008

Just as the race course mentioned in Hebrews 12:1-4 is the path we take to the finish line, so the discipline mentioned in 12:5-11 is the path we take to perfection, wholeness, shalom.  We believe God has begun a work in us and we anticipate the completion of that work; but we cannot anticipate the completion of the work while dismissing or despising the discipline he institutes to achieve perfection in us.  Too many of us have this concept that God should just get to the results and forget the long, intricate work he goes to achieve those results; we want to be patient now!  We want to be faithful in our quiet times now, and why hasn’t God made that true of us?!  God can do anything; surely God can take away our lustful desires over night.  He can give us endurance and perseverance through one, deep Holy Spirit injection.

But all (latent) these expectations we have of God are not determined by who God is.  They totally miss his heart and his character.  He is the God who pursued Abram even in Ur, taking the course of Abraham’s life to fulfill his promises to him; who brought Moses out of Egypt to lead his people out from under Pharaoh’s rule, but not to the Promised Land for another generation–after Moses’ own death; who instituted Saul as King before David; who waited for his people to repent for centuries before sending them into exile to provoke repentance; and who so thoroughly desires the world to be saved that he sent his only Son to die on the cross for our sins.  None of God’s redemption comes in pat, instant answers.  If God must suffer so much on our behalf, where do we get off thinking he’ll satisfy our selfish desires to be made perfect without any pain?

We serve a patient God; a God who so desires our love, devotion, and loyalty that he’s willing to carefully craft those characteristics within us over the course of our lives.  We undercut God’s care for us when we insist that he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants–so why doesn’t he just take our sin away here and now, make us perfect here and now?  We are humans created in his image, placed here in space to represent God in time.  We were created to exist in time; why would God take no time to accomplish something that he created to happen within time?  He would over-ride our nature as humans if he were to do that.  Miracles do certainly happen, but many of the miracles we have recorded for us in Scripture address the healing of physical maladies that would not on their own heal over time; in this way, we see God intervening in time to instantly heal wounds that had existed for years, if not decades.  While he may at times work in such extraordinary ways, we should not expect the extraordinary to dominate the ordinary in our lives.  The ordinary ways of God accomplishing his will in our lives are just as glorious as the extraordinary ways; what is evident from both is that God’s power over-rides the power of sin and evil in our lives.

Just some thoughts…

A Bit On Natural Disasters and Human Responsibility February 6, 2008

I was thinking today about natural disasters. Here’re some of my thoughts.  I assume here that the Garden was the pattern for all creation and that Adam and Eve acted as representatives of all humanity.

Created in the image of God, we are responsible for allowing evil to enter creation on account of the fall. Prior to the encounter with the serpent, though, it seems that the charge of God to Adam and Eve would have involved them noticing when foreign and malicious creatures entered the Garden. Well before the serpent ever had a chance to speak, then, Adam and Eve should have expelled him from the Garden (yes, this is somewhat speculative, but I think it makes sense). As the rulers of creation, Adam and Eve should have eliminated any and all threat to the well-being of the growing plot of Paradise they were entrusted with. Instead, when directly confronted with the enemy, they chose to trust him over God.

So where did that get them? God, still honoring their position as rulers of creation, inquires about their sudden need to hide from him. He does not accuse, but elicits a confession (sort of) of their failure. By welcoming and submitting to a malicious outsider, Adam and Eve admitted the worst kind of disaster into their kingdom. Both their dominion and their dynasty were cursed on account of their foolishness; the land would work against Adam in his pursuit of food, and human life would no longer be secure in creation–meaning the life-long task of a mother bearing up her children would be wrought with the possibility of death and other kinds of destruction, such as lack of sufficient food.

The action God takes is in driving them from that place as broken images of their Creator. While he is still the sovereign ruler, never at any point does God go back on the promises he makes or the covenants he cuts. He created Adam and Eve as rulers of creation, and promises that–in the midst of the curse–the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. As the pinnacle of creation, humanity would be the one to drive out the chaos we had invited in. As God makes covenants with Abraham, Moses, and David, we see his commitment to honor the created dignity of humanity. He never bypasses the responsibility he gave humans on their first day of existence. His redemption, in every way, comes through human agency–and fails through human agency as well. And this redemption is not just a redemption of the soul or a cleansing of guilt, but it is the redemption that will make all of creation into a place fit for the dwelling of its Creator, a place where no human life is threatened by the vicissitudes of creation’s self-adjustment (fires, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.).

Because God chose humanity as his regal representatives on earth, though, he does not overstep our bounds. While his power would permit him to, his character and will would not. God is setting all things right through the very people through whom all things went wrong. We may look at the condition of the world, though, and wonder how anything we could do would ever be able to change things like tsunamis and earthquakes.  Even our best engineers can’t manufacture a way to prevent tectonic shifts thousands of feet below sea level.  How can God’s plan for the redemption of all creation be a good plan, then? We see his commitment to this plan of redemption foremost in the incarnation of the Son.  As the old formula goes, he became what he was not to do what we could not, but he remained what he was so we could become what we are not.  In other words, by being fully man and fully God, Jesus creates the world anew as the King and ruler for which humanity, creation, and the Spirit are still groaning.  He has brought new creation in his resurrection from the dead, but that new creation has not yet been made effective in every nook and cranny of the world.  The promise of redemption invested in his second advent is the banishment of all sin and all evil from creation.

Given that sin is any violation of God’s will for his world and evil is anything that seeks to thwart or prevent wholeness in creation (including the abundant life Jesus promised), this means that the threat of natural disasters on human life and well-being will pass when humanity takes its rightful place as benevolent rulers over creation–primarily in the person of Jesus, the Son of David.  Because God has willed that humanity represent his rule in creation and is not willing to overstep that declaration, he does not undermine us by preventing events that, by virtue of admitting the serpent as an authority in the Garden, we are responsible for admitting into creation.  But he has already taken all the necessary steps to work against the rupture in the order of the world that has made natural disasters a reality, and in his desire that none should perish he will patiently rule earth from heaven until that final day comes when he will claim his throne here among us.

A Bit on Evolution: From Dust to Personhood? September 22, 2007

A few months ago I made my way joyfully through Christopher Seitz’s edited volume Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism. The volume is a worthwhile read for more reasons than I could lay out here, but I found J. Augustine Di Noia’s article on the line from the Nicene Creed ‘by whom all things were made’ to be particularly challenging to my understanding of creation and personhood. He draws on one of the most influential theologians in my own studies, Colin Gunton, and takes the scientific data seriously in order to unpack how we understand God’s creatorship and our own identity as persons.

Di Noia’s aim in his chapter is “to recover and articulate the Christian understanding of the cosmos as a person-friendly place.” His path to this goal is mapped according to Gunton’s “theology of relatedness” as it applies to the trinitarian theology of creation. According to Di Noia, creation exists “because of the divine desire to share the communion of trinitarian life with persons who are not God” (65). Affirming Christian tradition, Di Noia says that creation is the result God’s entirely free, personal agency in Word and Wisdom. Moreover, “human persons are created in the image of God in order to become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:3-4) and thus to share in the communion of the trinitarian life and in the divine dominion of the created universe. At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons of the Blessed Trinity through adoptive participation in Christ” (68).

I quote Di Noia here at length to demonstrate to, well, myself as well as others from a similar background as my own regarding questions about Genesis 1 & 2 that Di Noia is not off his rocker in his view of who God is or who we are–so the reflections that follow can’t make me feel too crazy. In the last two sentences of the previous paragraph he affirms that humans are created in the image of God for dignified communion with Father, Son, and Spirit; we are given the task of exercising dominion over the world God has placed us in as his image-bearers; and we accomplish both this communion and dominion through Christ’s work on our behalf.

Without getting into the creatio ex nihilo discussion here, I want to lay out what I’ve found most challenging from this chapter–namely, that as the pinnacle of creation and those entrusted to represent and reflect God to creation, evolution through every stage of created matter gives us the physical history within creation to fulfill our identity as the imago dei. Could the theory of evolution heighten our status as image bearers, opposed to lower us (as often seems to be the assumption in Christian circles)? Perhaps by bringing us through a process of ascendency from dust to personhood and installing us as priests in the garden to steward and rule over creation, God made it so that we are at home with all aspects of creation–their form is in our personal history. Intrinsic to who we are, then, is a relatability to creation (being made from dust–origin as well as substance) and a relatability to God (being made into persons). We are truly priests in every place we may venture in God’s creation; as Herman Bavinck says, “Because the universe is God’s creation, it is also his revelation and self-manifestation. There is not an atom of the world that does not reflect his deity.” Or, there is not an atom of the world that does not reflect his personality, since his deity is in fact personal.  Even on this view, then, there was never a point at which humanity’s initial creation was not personal.

Moreover, beyond our hearts being idol factories, I think this perspective gives ample explanation for the propensity of humans to connect in deeply meaningful and religious ways with creation–nature is personal in that it has been created and is being sustained by our personal God, though nature is not itself person.   This is to say that there is both something in ourselves (desire for a god and a connection to creation) and something in creation (the personal touch of God) that make us desire a connection with it.  The connection we have to creation, though, is only properly put into perspective when we are put in proper relationship to the Creator.

On another note, there is no shame for humans to have evolved from apes, as the age-old evolution line goes. It seems that the Enlightenment has given animals a rather bad reputation, what with all the talk of animal instincts and uncontrollable desires; but animals hold the dignity of their position as part of the creation that God called ‘good.’ They also are personal, though not themselves persons. But instead of saying we descended from apes, perhaps it would be more accurate to say we ascended from apes as God brought us ever-closer to the specialized appointment in creation he had for his image bearers. Besides, it’s not surprising that God would spend so much time, attention, and delighted work in shaping and forming adam (humans) from adamah (dirt) before putting on the final touch of the breath of life.

I’m still unsure where I come out on this, but thinking over it for a few months has been enough to make me mutter ‘huh’ a whole lot. This is very different from what I’ve been taught–and I do have to admit how impressed I am with Di Noia’s heavy reliance on Colin Gunton (Di Noia being a Dominican priest who works for the Vatican). I recommend you check out Di Noia’s 10 page chapter since there’s much worthy insight I left out here in favor of trying to articulate some of my own thoughts on the matter.