Duke Chapel

Monday, November 17, 2008

A Suffering God Pt. 2

In the previous entry I discussed the reality of God suffering with his people. Having talked with a few individuals about this, I’ve come to recognize a concern, if not a problem, some people have with identifying God as a Being who suffers. This issue concerns God’s Sovereignty. In our minds it seems illogical for a God who maintains control over all things to be susceptible to suffering. Why would a Being with ultimate power and authority ever be subjected to suffering? This threatens some people’s understanding of the sovereignty of God.

This response may be simplistic but I do not mean for it to be so. Why could God not be Sovereign and still will suffering upon God’s self? Again, this sounds illogical and also masochistic. But what does it mean for God to will Himself to suffer? We must begin with what we know about God.

God is a God of revelation. Why does God seek to reveal God’s self? God is the greatest good, and included in that goodness is the desire to share goodness within community. Being sufficient in the Trinity, God nevertheless desired or willed to share God’s goodness with humanity. With this in mind, God created all material reality and revealed God’s goodness through the prophets, Holy Scripture, and ultimately through the Incarnation. Now those who argue that the suffering of God does not follow with the theology of God’s Sovereignty have a very difficult time in explaining the Passion of our Lord. If God’s Sovereignty simply served to protect God from any and all suffering, then why did God not simply ‘snap his fingers’ and fix the soteriological mess within which humanity finds itself? God willed the life, death, and resurrection of Himself in the fullness of Jesus Christ the God-Man. So before we even discuss the implications of a God who suffers alongside humanity, there is the problem of a Sovereign God who utilized suffering as one of the greatest acts of love ever known throughout human history. God suffered on a Cross because God willed Himself to suffer on a Cross, for the sake of His glory and the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ. This is Gospel.

So what do we say now in the post-crucifixion world? God continues to be a God of revelation. How do we see God today? We see God the same way as before, namely in the prophets, Scriptures, and the Incarnation. But now we have the Holy Spirit, operating in and through and under the work of the Church and her saints. In this truth we notice something else. In love towards one another, in and through the suffering of this world, God reveals God’s self in the work of God’s saints. Loving the sick, caring for the helpless, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the lonely, and every other act of love engaged with the world is Incarnational ministry. Immanuel, God with Us, is still the greatest of things. If God is with us then God suffers with us. The Father is not removed from the nature of His children, and God’s omniscience demands that God know all things, especially the painful, excruciating atrocities of human suffering. God knows us in all our suffering; God knows us intimately. Therefore, God knows our suffering. In this truth, God’s Sovereignty means that God chooses to suffer for love’s sake and for the sake of God’s name. God loves us. Let us then love one another.

A Suffering God

This is a topic we cannot escape but often ignore. It is the topic of suffering. This morning I spent an hour and a half with a chaplain at Duke Hospital and went on rounds with him during that time. In our visits we talked to one patient for fifteen to twenty minutes. This person was not only physically ill, but they had also gone through a lot of pain and loss in their immediate family. That being said, this person demonstrated an unrelenting faith in the goodness of God and that all things would eventually work out for their good. It was like watching Romans 8:28 take form before me. In facing suffering, especially in the suffering of the faithful, how does the Church continue to dialog with a hurting world and attempt to remind them of God’s goodness? What can be said when storms destroy cities, tsunamis wash away coastlines and homes, earthquakes swallow up neighborhoods where children play and live, illnesses take young and old alike, and suffering continues to plague all of our existence, regardless of religious affiliation? There is no answer to this question; a rationale can be constructed and proposed to explain away the problem of a sovereign God and a crippled world, but this rationale can not offer solace to a mother who has lost a child to cancer or a husband whose wife has been lost in a car accident. For the suffering there is no immediate answer. But there is one ultimate truth which continues to offer hope.

Immanuel, God With Us. “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me” (Matt 25:35-36). What does it mean to love God in the form of other humans? What does the Incarnation mean for God and mean for us as Christians? Do we believe the Holy Spirit is with us? Do we believe Christ is Incarnate God? When I visited that patient this morning and they told me their story, when I held their hand while the Chaplain prayed over the three of us, did I believe I was visiting Jesus Christ in the hospital, in the form of a sick, elderly individual? Do we dare to believe in such a thing?

If anything can offer solace to a world such as ours, it is the suffering of our God. A God who loves us so much that the greatest expression of that love was in the Self-Sacrifice of God’s own Son and God’s self in the crucifixion; the Gospel is God sacrificing Himself to Himself in the likeness of human flesh, all for the love of the world and the glory of God’s name. So when we suffer, we cannot forget that God suffers with us. God does not possess a distant knowledge of suffering nor did God the Father require God the Son to somehow explain to Him what suffering was. The Father knows all things, including the suffering of Creation. The Holy Spirit binds the Father and Son into the reality of humanity, allowing for the Incarnation to be perpetually present in and throughout our actions.

“Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit….God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him”
(I John 4:11-16).

Saturday, November 15, 2008

God the Bible or God the Word?

Over the last three months I’ve encountered some incredible things. New friends, new ideas, and new understandings all wrapped up in a new environment in a new state with a new home and my new bride have spurred on some interesting developments in this new life. I hesitate to say this because I know next week will only bring a new emotion or new experience, but the most significant encounter I’ve had over the last three months has been my approach to the Scriptures.

My understanding of Scripture has drastically changed over the last 3 months. For most of my life, the reading I now bring to Scripture was known as a ‘liberal’ way to view the text. But I do not want to get caught up in that word. The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are simply words used to categorize people and label them, thinking we can understand them and thus judge/approve of them accordingly. I despise these words and only use them out of necessity. Besides, they are inadequate. For example, despite my ‘liberal’ reading of the text, I still consider myself a morally ‘conservative’ person. ‘How does that make sense?’ some might ask. That is the point; it doesn’t work because these words ultimately fail to provide any type of understanding or clarity.

Before coming to Duke I assumed a lot about my beliefs. By assumed I mean there were certain elements of Scripture and theology that I distantly knew about and for which I had opinions, but never once tried to understand or clarify. In some cases, I did not know why I believed what I believed. I simply believed. In some scenarios there is nothing wrong with this. I believe in many things which I cannot explain or clarify, like the Trinity or how the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ were necessary. These are mysteries. So in some situations, faith is all you have and all you need. Where this ceases to be OK is when one approaches certain issues in Scripture.

These issues are not unfamiliar to many in the scholarly world. They are points of tension and conflict between evangelical conservatives and Protestant liberals. These two groups barely exist as unified groups, but they very often say and write things concerning the other while rarely talking with each other. The left decries the fundamentalists (another inadequate term) while the right sets up bastions of apologetics against the liberal hordes. And nothing changes. What both groups refuse to see is that both sides are part of the Church. There is no correct side. From both groups have come encouragement as well as pain, liberation as well as imprisonment to lifestyles and ideas, harsh as well as loving words for the Church, and far too many words of misunderstanding and judgment.

Since coming to Duke, however, I’ve had some of the most passionate encounters with the Holy Bible that I have ever had. I’ve seen and learned things I’d never heard of before. And above all, I feel as if I’ve fallen in love with God all over again. There are weaknesses in how both conservatives and liberals read their Bibles. If one strays too far to the left, the Bible simply becomes a book of human texts, lacking authority and intentionality. Too far to the right and one’s faith rests in a book rather than in God. Textual contradictions and problematic historical data shake a faith founded on straw and toothpicks, and if one of those toothpicks falls then one’s world can shatter. Regardless, the Bible exists as the written Word of God, to serve as a revelation to the Incarnation of God, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. This is our God. May the Father keep us from making an idol of His revelation.