So what is a prophet? I think the best answer to that question is found in the book The Prophets by Abraham Heschel. [He is a scholarly man, but his approach is more life-full than most of the scholars of Scripture which I read. He provides a general look at prophecy and also some particular studies of individual prophets. As a Jew his angle is different from mine, but even with that it is one of the most influential books I have read.]
What I took away from the book (I have read it twice, once in seminary long ago and the most recent a few years ago) was an inisght into inspiration. His theory (if I have him right) is that God reveals His heart to the prophets. That the prophet is filled with insight into God's desires and plan. That the prophet then shares this message with God's people. And that the prophet is overwhelmed by God's passion.
What is God passionate about? Justice! Faithfulness! Right worship! Some people are troubled by the last of these. They think God should not be so "egotistical" and want people to worship Him. It doesn't seem humble enough.
This flawed thinking reflects a couple of things, I believe. One, it is the 'heresy of democratization' (a function of modernism). In simplest terms, it makes the error of thinking that because each person in Western society is entitled to vote, to enjoy freedom of thought and self-determination, that means everyone is "equal and the same." Politcal rights are not the only factor to consider. There remains a hierarchy and life makes it clear, that your vote don't mean jack in a large number of circumstances. [one easy test, when was the last time the democratic process changed the weather?] Two, it is clear that people do not understand what the word "God" means if they think He should not be worshipped. The Creator-creature relationship by virtue of its nature requires worship. And people who argue otherwise do not understand the definition of the terms. [and because we live in a nominalist age where people feel free to change the meaning of words I assume this statement does not close the debate...] Lastly, (though there are many more) worship has an impact. If you worship idols you are either worshipping yourself (as projection) or some personal (dis)value which is finite but given infinite value. Worshipping the wrong thing(s) means your life is out of order (called disordered). Worshipping the wrong thing means you are shaped and formed by the wrong thing (call it the demonic). If "you are what you eat" physically then "you are what you worship" spiritually. It does not take long to figure out what people worship, look at their lives....
So God desires right worship for our own good. If we worship Him and construct our lives in obedience the there will be justice. It is our task to do this. The prophet gives reminders along the way. The prophet's message is usually hope in dark times and threat in good times (when we stray). Both are judgment. Judgment is condemnation and salvation, depending on where you stand. And the prophet shares the heart of God as a message of judgment. A judgment FOR His people and a judgment AGAINST those who worship other gods (in myriad forms). So predictions of the future are usually of an impending act of God to save/punish His people (within this generation) or a generic promise of the great Day of salvation when everything is made new. This latter, ultimate judgment, is more apocalyptic sounding and develops into full blown apocalyptic literature in the centuries before and after Jesus.
The story of Jesus is the story of THE FULLNESS of the apocalyptic promise in the here and now of first century Galillee. It is the FULLNESS of the OT story summed up in the life, death, resurrection, ascension and reign of Jesus. It is the FULLNESS of God's heart revealed to us and for us. Today we live in the evil times. Babies die in hot cars and God does not seem to lift a finger to help (as a commenter noted on a previous blog). Where is God's justice and mercy? Where is providence?
The prophet's answer is not univocal. Different ones answered in different ways. They might say the sins of society are manifest here. That our choices and injustice have created a world where all manner of preventable problems are manifest. Others would remind that God has given it over to us, so we are to blame for our choices and we are responsible for the outcomes. Maybe another would say it is God's act of destruction because of sin, He withdraws a hand of salvation from the land because the people have expelled Him by their decisions. Some might point out that God is connected, intimately, with the suffering poor. The (analogical) "death of God" is expressed in His sharing of His creature's suffering and death (cf. Isaiah 52:13-53:12; a basis for understanding the cross of Christ) and so each tragedy is "felt" more deeply by the Divine Trinity then we can know. Perhaps there are many answers because God is bigger than our minds can comprehend. Whatever the best answer to this particular dilemma, I think the prophetic message is clear. Return to the Lord and live right. Do not let your questions about God deafen you to the message He speaks through His prophets. In the face of tragedy and loss remember God hears the cries of the poor and saves His people. And, as Jesus said, don't think the child which died is being punished as worse than you---but you will all end this way and worse if you do not repent."
In my thinking on this issue, I've been focusing on the question of the goodness of God (assuming, for purposes of discussion, that there is a God to begin with, which I don't believe).
ReplyDeleteIf you or I just stood around and watched a child die in a locked car, we would be culpable, and if it became known, we would be disgraced.
But if God is there, He must be doing just exactly that. He watches it happen for the whole time it takes the child to die and does nothing.
What conclusion should we draw from this about God's goodness? (I had forgotten that this site limits the length of messages, so I'll have to post this in segments)...continued...
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ReplyDeleteI get the impression from one point in your post that you think the mere fact of His having created us makes the question a closed issue and that we "must" call Him good for that reason alone. But perhaps I misunderstand you on that point.
It seems to me there are four chief possibilities.
1. God is cruel and enjoys the spectacle of our suffering. It is certainly no great leap to go from the facts of the world as we observe them, to that bleak conclusion.
2. God is so large and complex that it would be absurd of him to care about us as individuals. Humans care about the welfare of populations of bees, because they are valuable in ecology, but no one gets upset about the life or death of an individual bee, which would be ridiculous.
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ReplyDelete3. God is in fact loving but even He is limited by the interdependence of all events in reality. He "must" let my father die of cancer at 49 because that results in my attending a hospice volunteer workshop 6 months later, where I meet my children's mother, which results in the birth of my son, who now reads the New Testament in Greek and wants to work on the Codex Sinaiticus, etc. If events are real and are part of chains of causes and effects with real outcomes, even God can't frivolously intervene in one instance without upsetting (and possibly destroying) a great many other outcomes, some of them perhaps very desirable in themselves.
4. God knows that contrary to appearances, the very horrors that so appall us are part of a chain of cause and effect that will lead to outcomes of such unspeakable glory that, could we even imagine the hundredth part of it, would cause the present horrors to seem as insignificant as wisps of smoke. On this view, every instance of starvation, torture, murder, etc. was a necessary ingredient without which the eventual glory would not have been as bright. God does not merely allow the child to die in the car; he actively ordains it, knowing that it will lead to supernal bliss.
Philosophically, there is something to be said for each view. I assume your own view, Jeff, is somewhere between number 3 and number 4.
I see problems with both of them. I'll call number 3 the "I'm doing the best I can" theory, and number 4 the "Going for broke" theory.
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ReplyDeleteThe problem with "I'm doing the best I can" is that the Creator has ample notice that things are getting worse as they go along. For instance, civilization became possible when we domesticated animals, but it also exposed us to the beginning of infectious diseases. It was an advance for us in the West to discover the Far East, but the rats aboard the ships docking at Genoa carried fleas that carried bubonic plague, wiping out much of the population of Europe.
Today, so I read recently, 1/6 of all live births, or 8 million babies a year, are born with birth defects. If true, that means 22,000 babies a day or one every *4 seconds.*
It hardly seems unreasonable to ask if, given such outcomes, it is reasonable for the Almighty to continue to bring children into the world. If things have really gotten this out of hand, such that even He can't prevent this from happening because the events are too intricately related to other events that must not be disrupted, perhaps it's time to rethink the whole policy of "Be fruitful and multiply?" If a human enterprise resulted in this many variations, we would hardly consider it the result of Supreme Intelligence.
Theory 4, the "Going for broke" theory, appears to have some support in what St. Peter says in Acts 2:23: "Him, by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye delivered into the hands of sinful men," etc., a thought that seems to be echoed in St. Augustine's "mousetrap" theory of the crucifixion, in which Satan fatally overreaches and seals his own doom the moment he sheds the Savior's blood.
The idea has a certain terrible splendor about it; the problem, as I see it, is that it makes the good partly dependent on evil. It seems to be saying that the greatest good can be realized only by overcoming its opposite. It seems to me that if something is good, it ought to be sufficient in itself. I think St. Paul must have had something similar in mind when he wrote "What? Shall we sin all the more that grace may abound? God forbid..."
GOD does not think like man, so we can not measure GOD as we measure the goodness of another person. Instead we must Accept GOD, and worship him without placing man's views of what GOD should do or not do.
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