offended by God?

offended by God?

by john - 26/01/2005 - 17:16
Dissident Heart (in response to the comment above 25/01/05 9.41pm) You raise a number of direct issues - perhaps the easiest way is to take them point by point.
  1. Regarding the “undermining” of (my view of) God:
    Simply, if the case can be made for God as a manufacturer of Evil, as Guilty of Evil, then (my view of) God is definitely undermined in exactly the senses you elicit: my God is indeed diminished and stained by Guilty Association. Even within the context of your broad scenario in which God responds to his guilt by the cross, he remains less of a God than the one I presently look to, who is Perfect and Good and Love.
  2. I have explained my position with regard to the classical prooftext of Isaiah 45.7 et al. You mention a number of others to which I will raise broadly the same objection.
    The Hebrew word for evil used in these contexts - I think invariably - is rah, the association of which is adversity, affliction, calamity. The context is judgemental. God, the Perfect Creator dispenses adversity, affliction, calamity; but not injustly, as you infer in your posts.

    This is a vital distinction. God’s morality is unblemished, his goodness untarnished, his perfection intact. In a sense, God is taking responsibility for evil by allowing another evil to come against it. This is not his permanent solution - as the cross is - but a balancing, temporal moral redemptive act.

    This leaves room for your crashing presentation of the cross at a later stage, in which God, morally perfect but outside of humanity, now, within humanity, in the Human Being of the Son, made Perfect in Suffering (Hebrews 2.9-10)

  3. Your criticism of my panoramic view of Scripture seems odd. I do not avoid the blatant instances you refer to, I harmonise them in the ways I have set out.
    These are admittedly complex issues, but avoidance? A little unfair after the lengths I went to to share the basis for my rejection of the demonic-in-Yahweh theorem. The book I cited takes on these issues in depth - I hope to present a summary / review of the arguments some time. These are vital issues for the emerging Christian commmunity to grapple with.

    Conversely, you must be aware of the difficulty you face in harmonising your view of God’s “guilt” with the scriptures I cited, which, in turn, cite God’s Perfect Character? Do you blatantly ignore them? Or do you have an alternative explanation for those parts of Scripture which praise God’s Perfection?

  4. This leads onto a stronger issue I would take with your insistence upon God’s complicity with evil: you rely upon somewhat obscure and disharmonious First Testament scriptures.
    The Gospels speak about “the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.” They say, as far as I can recall, nothing about taking away the sin of God.

    In others words, your thesis (re. the Guilt of God) is argued from the silence of scripture, not its definite voice. How do you explain this absence of divine confession?

  5. Regarding (your problem with) the “ethical implications… for an illegal, immoral, unjust death sentence to somehow set things right between God and Creation”
    You’ve left me behind here. Are you raising this objection about your own theorem or mine or some other (such an Penal Substitution)? If it’s the third, you really need to take that on with someone who is positing that theory: the intent of my post was to propose an alternative which is free of many of the implications of that kind of theory.

    If it’s my theorem you have in your sights in this regard (a) I can’t see how you apply these elements to it and (b) that it applies any less to your theorem. What does your scenario achieve if it’s not to “somehow set things right”? I thought that is exactly what you were suggesting: that the Guilt of the Powerful (God) had finally caught up with him at the cross and, if we join him there, things are (at least in process of) being set right?

    In fact, your final posit seems to uphold that - just like the Penal Substitutionists - you still see the cross as about the satisfaction of Justice.

    To reiterate my view of the Innocent Sacrifice: it was not illegal, immoral or unjust. In fact, it was not about satisfying Justice, but about the Way into Eternal Life - through Victory over Death (disease, destruction, disharmony, idolatry etc.)
    The Sacrfice was Jesus allowing himself to be led like a Lamb to the slaughter, in order to engage the principalities and powers, most notably Death and to overcome them.

    It was not some Deity putting His innocent Son upon the altar. God did not perform the ritual sacrificial death of Jesus in order to satisfy his blood lust for cosmic justice. He did not kill Jesus.

    The Human Race, notably the murderous Romans, elicited by the Jewish Hierachy, did. The Sacrifice was made by Jesus himself, who was, in fact, YHWH himself, come to finally Deliver Israel and Humanity, by Defeating Death, Rebellion and Wickedness through the Resurrection Power which heralds and ushers in the First Fruits of a New Creation.

    In this scenario, the cross has real redemptive value because it engages the power of Death. Where is the Redemptive value in your Scenario, I am left wondering? Justice Satisfied still does nothing to bring in a New Creation, nor to impart Eternal Life.

    Like you say you are to me, I remain sympathetic to your Scenario: it drags us kicking and screaming toward the horror of the Cross. But I do not think we are to be dragged there to join a morally unstable Deity.

    Nor simply to meet with unflinching, unscrupulous Justice. We go there to find that this horrible Death is the way into Abundant Life, to follow a Lamb who went there ahead of us, to be our Captain, our Leader, our Apostle, our High Priest, to become Perfect through Suffering, that he might bring us also to that same Glory.

    Shalom!
    John

A 'Lamb'-centred atonement theory By: john (34 replies) 16 January, 2005 - 23:22