I have several objections to the idea of a broadcast sermon:
I think our worship services are already too far from the idea of active participation. I’d like us to move toward 1 Corinthians 14 worship. (See my post The Problem with 1 Corinthians 14 Worship.
Broadcasting one man’s (or one woman’s) message to multiple locations tends to build the false notion that only the professionals are qualified to share the Word. What an opportunity having multiple campuses would provide to train up more Christians to share?
Using the one sermon in multiple locations elevates the authority of one person over the body.
The very idea of one church with multiple campuses takes us away from a style of authority that treats the body of Christ as a single body, not as a large passive audience to be entertained or informed.
I think every worship service should involve active participation and personal contact. I can watch or hear great sermons from great preachers on my television if I want.
And while we’re at it, we need a service long enough to cover the ground, which includes hearing the scripture itself (not just someone’s discussion of it), prayer, interaction, discussion, learning discipleship, and preparing to take the message outside during the week.
The following is a sermon I presented at the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Pensacola on September 11,2005 and originally posted here on September 13, 2005. I’m reposting it because when I went to look for it, I found that the original post had somehow been truncated, and also because there is a one word at a time blog carnival today on the word fences.
It was 4 years ago that we woke to the news of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the failed attack on one unknown target. That morning, all of our lives were changed. Those who felt complacent were shaken. Terrorism before that was largely something that happened somewhere else. It happened either to other people, or only to those people courageous, or some of us probably thought stupid enough, to travel to the wrong places. For most Americans, however, it was somebody else’s problem.
Then the twin towers fell. Terrorism was no longer somebody else’s problem, something we could conveniently dismiss from our minds, assuming those responsible would take care of it. Terrorism and our national response to it became a topic of nearly everyone’s conversation and thinking.
As a result of that day, many things have happened. Decisions have been taken. Diplomatic (and not so diplomatic) missions have been launched. We’ve launched two foreign wars. We’ve reorganized and combined government departments. We have had changes in our national laws, intended by their authors to increase our security and make us safer.
To be specific, we did the natural thing. We started to build fences.
My question to you is this: After all of these activities, are we safer now than we were four years ago?
I’d like to suggest that you look at New Orleans right now as you try to answer that question. We have experienced four years of reorganization, which were supposed to have resulted in providing us with a new, extraordinarily efficient form of response to disaster. Besides being able to predict and thus prevent many terrorist attacks, we were supposed to be able to contain the results and prevent mass destruction.
Well, we have had a disaster. It wasn’t a surprise attack by terrorists. It wasn’t an unpredictable natural disaster. In fact, I watched the development of the computer models and the projected paths of Hurricane Katrina as the storm approached, and the forecasts were extraordinarily accurate and clear. We had warning. Insofar as one can have time when a hurricane is approaching, we had time.
But if the results appear to anyone to be exceptionally efficient, if those results are what one would expect after a crash program of reorganization, training, and planning, then I would guess that person has exceptionally low standards.
The results don’t live up to the expectation.
What is the problem? How can so much energy be expended in a cause with so little in the way of positive results?
Let me suggest that what we are watching is simply all the reasons why political and social action often fail to achieve their intended results, but we’re seeing it in exceptionally large scale.
Economist Henry Hazlitt, in his little book “Economics in one Lesson” says that almost all errors in economics result from seeing issues with two narrow a view and over two short a time frame. Now there are some people who would likely claim that Hazlitt himself made a few of those errors, one of which may have been naming a book “Economics in one Lesson.” I think he had a point. But he didn’t go far enough.
I’d like to add to the principle these words: . . . and assuming that things that make us feel better necessarily solve actual problems.
Let’s apply it to politics and social action. Most errors or failures in social action result from looking at the situation from too narrow a viewpoint, over too short a time frame, and assuming that what makes us feel good necessarily solves the actual problem.
See, I’m wordy. It would take me at least two lessons to teach all of economics.
Near the end of the 1988 movie “A Fish Called Wanda” there is a wonderful scene in which a man, played by Michael Palin, who has been put upon and trodden under through the entire movie finds himself driving a steam-roller towards his now helpless tormenter, a former CIA agent played by Kevin Kline. Kline’s character has his feet stuck in setting cement. “Revenge!” cries Palin’s character as he rolls over his tormenter. Having crushed his tormentor, he finds that his stutter is cured, his self-confidence restored, and in the best tradition of comedy, he lives happily ever after. So does the steam-rollered victim, for that matter, so all’s well. Revenge accomplished, life is sweet.
But what about real life?
Does this happen in real life? Well, part of it does. After I accepted the invitation to speak today, and chose the topic, I began to feel that the universe was conspiring to provide me with illustrations. Last time I spoke here, I led with an illustration from the mouth of Pat Robertson. It seems that Pat Robertson only opens his mouth to switch feet. I really didn’t want to use him as an illustration again, but he volunteered, he really did!
Expressing his annoyance with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Pat Robertson suggested the U. S. should assassinate him. Quoting Robertson:
You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.
As a Christian, my immediate thought was that while perhaps I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, I do recall something about a commandment somewhere or other, and then there’s Jesus’ comment that if one is even angry with someone, one has already committed murder—murder in one’s own heart.
With that in mind, consider the response of the so-called Christian right. Well, perhaps you won’t be able to consider it, because in effect there was none. It took days for anything to happen, and then the primary response was to criticize the media for jumping on Robertson for “making a mistake.” In my personal activity online, I exchanged messages in an online forum with a pastor who required several exchanges before he would even acknowledge that it would be morally wrong, and not merely a mistake, to assassinate the freely elected leader of another country.
And here I thought that was a no-brainer!
But recall again the statement of Jesus: Murderous anger is the equivalent of murder. I’ve found that many people who most loudly proclaim their intention to follow the teachings of Jesus are least likely to actually want to take those teachings seriously. Let’s see how it worked in this case.
When finally pushed to an apology, Robertson said:
“Is it right to call for assassination?” Robertson said. “No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.”
guess it’s OK to call for an assassination as long as you’re frustrated. Please don’t let anyone suggest that a media-savvy man, trained as a minister, can accidentally call for murder. Sorry Jesus! We’ve decided to reverse your command. We’re not avoiding the murderous anger; we’re using mere frustration as an excuse!
Now you may be thinking that I’m talking about things that are far away from home. I suspect none of you are in danger of following Pat Robertson. But I want us to notice two things: This “solution” results from thinking in the short term—it suggests we get rid of one man, as though President Hugo Chavez was personally responsible for all the problems of Venezuela, or at least all the problems the United States has with Venezuela. It results from looking at the situation narrowly—there’s this guy who annoys us, so we get rid of him. We can ignore the real nature and breadth of the problem. We don’t have to answer the question of why Latin American countries tend to distrust Americans. Lastly, it solves the problem by satisfying a personal desire for revenge. It would make ole Pat feel better, but it would not really solve anything.
It would, I believe, be the equivalent of fence building
I’m actually thankful to Pat Robertson for providing this example. Sure, he’s far out. It’s a terrible thing to propose murder. But all he’s really done is taken some very common policy reactions and carried them out to their logical conclusion, stripped away their disguise, and laid them out boldly for all to see.
And it is likely that somebody in government has suggested precisely the same thing. Hopefully their plan was rejected outright.
War almost always operates in precisely the way that Pat Robertson’s statement did. I sometimes teach classes on the biblical book of Revelation. There are people all over who are seeking timelines and detailed predictions about the end of the world. They are pretty much all wrong, and their wrongness has been repeatedly demonstrated, but that doesn’t keep them from trying.
But they generally miss the point of some of the symbols. For example, there are the four horses of the apocalypse. I recently asked a class I was teaching to compare the four horses to the war in Iraq. Let me cite some key phrases to show you what I mean:
2And I looked, and there was a white horse, and the one who was sitting on him had a bow, and he was given a crown, and he came for conquering and setting out to conquer.
3And when he opened the second seal, I head the second living creature saying, “Come!” 4And another horse went out, and this one was red, and authority was given to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, so that people would kill one another, and he was given a very large sword.
5And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and there was a black horse, and the one who sat on him had a balance in his hand. 6And I heard something that was like a voice in the middle of the four living creatures saying, “A measure of wheat for a denarius and three measures of barley for a denarius, yet do not hurt the oil and the wine.”
7And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” 8And I saw a pale horse, and the one who sat on him was named “Death” and Hades followed along with him, and authority was given to them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with the sword and with famine and with plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth.
As the troops entered Iraq there was almost a euphoria amongst the American people. Peace activists watched the start of the war with some discouragement, as President Bush’s popularity topped 80%. The white horse was “conquering and setting out to conquer.” But who could have doubted that the traditionally “military” part of the war would be easy? Surely nobody imagined that the ragged Iraqi military was going to seriously challenge an invasion from the premier army on earth!
But shortly after we started to see the non-traditional warfare. The second horse takes peace from the earth. People began to die in substantial numbers.
The third horse impacts the economy. We didn’t see that part here in the United States as much, but the people of Iraq saw considerable hardship as means of distribution were destroyed.
The fourth horse is named Death, and Hades follows him. The fourth horse watches the count of the dead increase.
Now I’m not suggesting that the author of Revelation predicted the Iraq war. What I’m suggesting he did was tell us in literary and symbolic language what war is like. One goes into a war on the white horse, glorious, bands playing and flags flying. But before it’s over the horse is pale, we’re surrounded by death, and Hades is following. Perhaps hell is actually a human invention—but unfortunately not merely an invention of the mind, but a result of our actions.
War is building fences. It’s solving the immediate problem without looking toward the ultimate solution.
The key here again is that what we intend is not what we get.
I would suggest that unlike the story in “A Fish Called Wanda” we do not live happily ever after, our problems are not solved, and the momentary emotional high doesn’t last.
But I think as a nation we have been living the life of Michael Palin’s character.
It’s the traditional response.
When threatened by people from the Arab world we put up barriers. Sometimes barriers are necessary. But barriers help stabilize things temporarily. They don’t finally solve the problem.
After Saddam Hussein fell, who did we think was going to create a stable, lasting government in Iraq?
Once the barriers have been created, people have been arrested, terrorists have been placed in long-term storage in Guantanamo, and Americans have been identified, cataloged and tracked, we still must ask what is going to make the world better. What actually solves the problem.
We haven’t made any progress on that!
What we need to do is fundamentally change the way we think as a nation. Let me challenge you with a story of my goat Carraway.
When I was about 12 I kept goats. I had four of them, and we surrounded them with an electric fence. I will suggest that if anyone wants to keep goats, they should just invest in a solid, non-electric fence. The goats are either more determined, or in some cases more intelligent than the fence.
Carraway was more intelligent than the fence.
Three of my goats would attack the fence head on. They looked at the wires. They tested them. Eventually they would work up their courage and go straight at it. They would protest the shock, but they wouldn’t let it stop them. They looked at the fence in the traditional way, the way I wanted them to look at it.
The fourth, Carraway, took a completely different approach. She would go all around the fence, looking for places where the ground was lower, and provided more space. She would observe the fence carefully for a long time. Inevitably she would find the weakness, and then she would move her body just so, dipping ears and tail at precisely the correct moment, and she’d be out without so much as a spark from the fence.
Carraway looked at the spaces. The other goats looked at the wires. She looked at the fence in a different way than I did.
I’m challenging myself, and you, to be like that goat. Don’t be forced into looking at things from the “expected” direction. The fence maker wants you to look at the boards or the wires. Don’t get caught! Look for the spaces!
One time there was a picket fence
with space to gaze from hence to thence.
An architect who saw this sight
approached it suddenly one night,
removed the spaces from the fence,
and built of them a residence. (Source: The Picket Fence by Christian Morgenstern)
I believe we need architects of the spaces, people who take the spaces and build with them.
This isn’t something new. There have been quite a number of architects of the spaces that I can hold up as examples. I’m going to stick with the traditions with which I’m most familiar, but there are many in other traditions as well. There’s no shortage. We just often have difficulty following them.
In the 6th century BCE the anonymous prophet scholars generally call “2nd Isaiah” proclaimed in Judaism the notion that God didn’t care just about Israel, but cared about the whole world. He took a space from the fence. The exiles who returned to Judea after the preaching of 2nd Isaiah entered into the most isolationist and exclusive period in Jewish history.
In the first century CE Jesus took another space when he said, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you.” Afterward he was crucified, and his followers often have chosen to kill one another over interpretations of his words. Nonetheless many have found inspiration in his words to help them see and use the spaces.
In the 19th century, Siyyid Ali Muhammad, known as il Bab (the gate), had the idea that God wasn’t finished with the world with the revelation of the Qur’an. He believed that people of many religions could work together, that they had much in common. He was the forerunner who opened the way for Baha’ullah, founder of the Baha’i faith. He was executed, but he opened the way for a faith that still lives on.
In the 20th century, Gandhi got the idea that one could resist evil without using violence. He spent his life standing against all violence, even when engaged in by his own followers. He was assassinated, and his beloved India was divided, but he has provided an inspiration to many.
But the architects of the spaces don’t have to be important people, or do earth-shattering things.
In our living room one day there was a group of young people discussing the film “The Passion of the Christ.” They talked about how they couldn’t understand the opposition to the film. It was just telling the story of a fundamental element of their faith. I’m somewhat disengaged from time to time, and wasn’t involved, but my wife poked me in the side, “You need to say something,” she said.
So I asked the young folks to think about the picture from the Jewish point of view. I told them about the passion plays in the middle ages that would whip people into a frenzy after which they would go out and kill Jews, take their possessions and destroy their homes.
Afterward they said, “Wow! That gives us another view. I guess we need to be careful and considerate in how we speak of this!”
I took a space from the fence, and did some building with it.
When Americans were in trouble, tiny Sri Lanka gave a donation of $25,000, which they said was just symbolic. But it symbolized something very important. It said, “We’re not a country of victims, waiting for help from you more important Americans. We’re part of a world community in which nations help one another.
They grabbed one of those spaces and built with it. And there are many more examples.
In the disaster in New Orleans, I see something positive that might emerge. It’s a space from the fence that I hope we can pull out and build with. People are beginning to realize that we still have a tremendous prejudice against people who are poor. I hope this recognition will help us to change that.
Let’s take this space from the fence and build with it!
How can we make it work?
Well, I continue to challenge you to be like Carraway the goat. No matter what the forces of hate throw at you, no matter how they try to box you in, no matter what they come up with to stop you, refuse to think the way they think. Never be limited by the narrow thinking of your opponents.
Let’s frustrate the forces of hate by coming at them with love. Instead of shouting “Revenge!” as we roll over them, we can shout “Peace” as we approach, looking for a way to help.
I just put an extract from Dave Black Online on The Jesus Paradigm. (I have permission to do this.) Unfortunately, Dave’s blog doesn’t allow linking to a specific entry, so I’m linking to the extract. All I want to say here is “Amen!”
My wife said some important things in her devotional yesterday, First Century Church Wanted. If I might summarize, many of us want what the early church had, but we don’t want to do what the early church did.
The Christian Post has a headline that reads Apologist Josh McDowell: Internet the Greatest Threat to Christians. Now if you read the article, you’ll realize the biggest problem here is headline writing rather than what Josh McDowell had to say. In the end he concludes that Christian parents need to be knowledgeable. I’d have a hard time arguing against that.
At the same time, I have to ask just why the availability of knowledge about atheism is such a serious threat to Christianity. In my view, we should be reading and discussing those arguments fairly early in our children’s lives.
Holding a position or belonging to a group because you don’t know any better is not a particularly valid choice. If the only way we can keep members is by limiting knowledge, then we deserve our fate.
McDowell is arguing for more knowledge. (For what it’s worth, I don’t really find his books very helpful in that regard, but that’s beside the point.) The problem is that I frequently hear Christians speak as though the best thing would be if we could restrict the availability of the knowledge.
That ship has already sailed, and it was a leaky one at that.
The Christian Post has an article on depression amongst pastors and ministry leaders, which, in turn, links to an article at The Gospel Coalition. Now the Gospel Coalition article is part one of a five part series, so I’m not going to comment on how far they will go before they are done, but I think they could expand on their first item: Unrealistic expectations.
Not only are our expectations of pastors unrealistic, but they are sinful, and our descriptions of them are deceitful. The surprising thing is not that there are depressed pastors and ministry leaders. The surprising thing is that we have any functional leaders at all! I have long believed that if we described what we want in a pastor in a job description, nobody would be able to fulfill the role.
What we want, I believe, are Christ figures, who, rather than leading the church, will be the church, and will eventually sacrifice themselves, and probably also their families on behalf of a local church. That local “church” is only a church in name, because they are not behaving as the body of Christ, but rather delegating that task to a paid professional. Visiting the sick and shut-ins, serving in the community, spreading the gospel message, giving, and study of the Word are all functions of everyone, not just one ordained person.
Just leading the teaching ministry of a mid-sized congregation would be a solid, full-time job for one person, and that only if he or she spends most of the available time equipping other teachers in the church.
As long as we have unrealistic–yes, sinful!–expectations enshrined in our church organization, we’re going to have leadership problems, not to mention plain old “living the good news” problems.
Dowd, Michael. Thank God for Evolution. New York: Plume, 2007. 380 pages + front and back matter. ISBN: 978-0-452-29534-6. (All numbers in parentheses are page numbers from this edition of the book.)
I was interested in this book from the moment I saw the title, not because I immediately expected to agree, but because it, along with its blurbs and description, takes a celebratory approach to evolution. My own position is that evolution is a fact and a valid theory, but it requires some theological work to deal with that. So a book that claims that evolution is not only compatible with Christianity, but something that Christians should thank God for, sounds pretty challenging to me.
The early pages of the book set some pretty high standards. In the “Author’s Promises” Dowd makes some very strong promises, claiming that he is bringing forth a new form of Christianity. For example, speaking to “devoutly committed Christians” he says that “. . . whether you consider yourself conservative, moderate, or liberal, my promise to you is that the sacred evolutionary perspective offered here will enrich your faith and inspire you in ways that believers in the past could only dream of” (xxvi). He also expects that his exposition will be enriching to atheists and freethinkers, amongst many others. That’s a tall order, and if you read the complete section of author’s promises, you’ll find the mission gets even more daunting.
I was reading this book along with my Sunday School class, and I tried to look at it in two ways. First, I wanted to see how much it challenged my thinking and made me reconsider things I already believe. Second, I wanted to see how well it fulfilled the author’s own stated mission.
So how does he go about his task? He divides his presentation into five sections:
The Holy Trajectory of Evolution
Reality is Speaking
The Gospel According to Evolution
Evolutionary Spirituality
A “God-Glorifying” Future
The first section lays out the view of evolution that underlies the rest of the book. I would summarize this by saying it’s a very directed and goal-oriented view of evolution. The evolutionary process is not just natural laws being laws; it is a process that is leading the universe, and of course our world, to ever greater heights. The second section attempts to relate the concept of revelation with science, and deals, in a sense, with epistemology. The third section attempts to restate basic Christian doctrines in terms of evolutionary theory. The fourth expands this into a more general spirituality, including presenting some ideas of spiritual disciplines. In fact, the fourth section goes so far as to discuss speaking in tongues and relating it to this evolutionary spirituality. The fifth section, to be honest, started to feel rather redundant, but I’d summarize it by saying that it restates the evolution of the entire universe such that it is leading to the fulfillment of the dreams of an American 21st century liberal. Many of these dreams are not at all bad–the question that remains is whether evolution is inevitably pushing in that direction.
As usual, let me state the positives of this book. I’m afraid my reaction is not all that positive, so this is harder than usual. The author’s style is engaging, though I must temper that note by noting that it seems redundant from time to time. The section of spiritual disciplines and some on evolutionary psychology were interesting, though understandably a bit basic. I’m not sorry I read the book, but it doesn’t go onto any of my “you ought to read this” lists.
There are a some things this book is not. It is not an outline of evolutionary theory. There are some basic descriptions of evolutionary processes, but nothing that I find challenging, and I am not trained in any of the natural sciences. (I should note, however, that I’ve been reading books on creation and evolution since I was about 10 years old.) It is not a deep book of theology. While it runs through a number of theological concepts, the major contribution, in my view, was in redefining terms. It does not deal extensively with scripture. If you want to look at how to interpret scripture in the light of the principles expressed here, your guidance is limited to telling you not to take the Bible literally, and to look for revelation of God in the ongoing, evolutionary story of the universe around you.
Before I discuss the success of this book at attaining its stated goals, I want to write a note on accommodationism. Accommodationism is the view that science and religion can be accommodated and need not conflict. The problem with this is that it doesn’t define “religion” and “science.” My religion and mainstream science can be accommodated, but let’s say someone believes that the only way to faithfully read Genesis 1 & 2 is as historical narrative description the creation of the world, then that particular form of religion and mainstream science cannot be accommodated.
I might want to suggest that this view of Genesis 1 & 2 is less important or less essential, but it’s not my place to tell others what about their belief system is essential. I can suggest, but obviously the decision is theirs. I cannot claim to have accommodated their faith to science unless, in the process, I have respected what they regard as important.
Similarly one must define what one means by science. I see science as a way of studying the natural world. If something is supernatural, it can only be observed by science as (and if) it impacts the natural world in a measurable way. So I don’t understand science as the one and only way to know. Yet there are those who do. If one believes science is the one and only way to know, then accommodation with religion will again be impossible.
Thus accommodationism itself tends to become a scientific and religious position on its own, rather than a reconciliation of other positions. In accommodating science and religion, proponents often alter the components in ways that will not be acceptable to adherents of the supposedly accommodated views.
Note that I distinguish a form of political accommodationism, in which proponents of the teaching of evolutionary theory work together even though their positions on religious and philosophical issues may differ greatly. This is simply agreement on certain goals, something much different, in my view.
What Michael Dowd has done, in my opinion, is to create an accommodationist religious position, with some prejudice to both Christianity and evolution. It’s hard to say which takes the bigger beating, though I think Christianity in any orthodox form comes in for the worst treatment.
Evolutionary theory, it seems to me, loses as well, by being presented as a teleological process. It is a very optimistic view, which essentially holds that all the competition and death and suffering of biological evolution leads ultimately and (almost) inevitably to cooperation, enlightenment, peace, and joy. It’s not that I disagree with the kinds of goals that Dowd expresses. His hopes are very attractive. I actually wish I could believe they are as inevitable as he seems to think. I just don’t think it’s so.
Christianity comes in for redefinition. All the words are there, but they come into new meanings. You can claim that resurrection or eternal life means coming back as some sort of stardust (97-100), but that’s not what it means to most Christian believers, and I suspect you’re not going to find that many who want to exchange one view for the other. Similarly, the “realization” of various miracles (Appendix B, 357-370) is going to fall flat for most evangelical or orthodox Christians.
In fact, I would say that if you being this book as an orthodox or evangelical Christian, and substantially accept what it teaches, you will no longer be recognizable as a Christian, except in vocabulary. You’ll use some of the words that Christians use, but you will not mean the same thing. I try not to tell other people whether they can call themselves Christian; I believe God can deal with the labels issue. But these changes in vocabulary are so radical that they really no longer appear to relate to the same religion.
In a sidebar titled “Realizing ‘the Centrality of the Cross’” (210) there is a great illustration of what I’m saying. In describing the traditional Christian understanding of this phrase Dowd says that “. . . it is often taken to mean that only Christians who believe that God’s Son suffered and died on teh cross for their sins will ascend to a place somewhere outside the universe called heaven. Everyone else will be tortured forevere in hell. . . .” In its place, evolutionary Christianity would say that this refers to “vertical integrity,” or “getting complete with the past and being responsible for the future . . .” and “horizontal integrity,” “being in right relationship with my nested world.”
Now the vertical and horizontal components do form a sort of cross, but the only connection between those two views is in the vocabulary. Further, the orthodox position could be stated much better, and would subsume integrity, though in quite a different way. I do like the concepts of horizontal and vertical integrity, but they are not the essence of “the centrality of the cross.”
The main purpose for which I could recommend this book would be in order to understand this evolutionary Christianity movement. Many of the theological positions would be better studied from writers expressing theological positions such as process theology or panentheism. I rate the book three stars out of five.
I believe that both Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God and Richard Colling’s Random Designer provide a better presentation of ways to reconcile Christianity with evolution.
Peter Kirk links to Roger Olson on why he defends Love Wins. Now I haven’t read Love Wins and it isn’t on my reading list. The reason for this post is to comment on this (Peter quoting Roger Olson):
I think that is what offends critics of Love Wins–the suggestion that God doesn’t get what he really, perfectly wants. That seems to them to demean God, to lessen his glory. …
And yes, I could have gone directly back to Olson’s post for the same quote. I suggest you do so, because Olson covers all this in more depth.
My major problem with Calvinism could be summarized by saying that it seems to me to force God to want something that humans can understand and accept. What if what God wants is a universe filled with creatures who can choose whether or not to love him? It may turn theologians’ brains into pretzels, but why should it be limiting to God’s glory to want that instead of to want what Calvinists prefer that he want?
It seems a very narrow few of God’s glory, and frankly strikes me as something more like a desire for God’s simplicity or comprehensibility, than one for God’s glory.
I can’t understand how a God who can set off the big bang and who knows the end from the beginning can also make creatures with choice. But I suspect he can.
