February 27, 2018
 
 
 
 
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God of Our Silent Tears - Lenten Series Part 3 of 5

Guest Authored by Fr. Ted Howard

 
 
 
 


Today’s issue provides material for the 3nd of 5 sessions in our adult forum series on God of Our Silent Tears. Session 3 meets on Sunday, March 4th.  All issues of The Rector’s Pen will be posted on our website as they are written. Quotations in today’s issue are drawn from The Rt. Rev. Dan Edward’s book “God of Our Silent Tears.” Page numbers are referenced in parentheses.


Edwards opens Chapter 5 by saying, “If we want to know how God responds to pain and sorrow, we must first sweep away false images of God.  We must get clear on who God is not.”  In this chapter he debunks “the false definition of God as the supreme omnipotent being who made the world and runs it to suit his fancy.  That patriarchal picture of God is the key to the ‘problem of evil.’” (64)


First, Edwards says, “God is not the supreme being that we think God is.”  Edwards states that “Orthodox, traditional theology teaches that God is not a being along with all the other beings, just bigger.  God is that out of which all being arises and into which all being sinks when it ceases to be…God does not fit inside anything.  Everything must fit inside God.” (64-65)


Second, God is not literally omnipotent, meaning that God can do anything.  In scripture, as Edwards points out, the word “almighty” means “most powerful—not literally omnipotent.  In the Bible, things usually do not go God’s way.  Moreover, absolute omnipotence does not make sense. The leading authorities in theology have always acknowledged that “God cannot do anything that is either logically inconsistent or foreign to God’s nature.”  “For example,” Edwards says, “God cannot will evil…God cannot make the world flat and round at the same time.”  Edwards says that God cannot make parallel lines intersect. Edwards adds that other theologians will argue, “God has deliberately limited God’s own jurisdiction, withdrawn divine power, in order to let the cosmos be free and personal with a meaningful history instead of just play out a script or dancing like a puppet.”  Furthermore, Edwards believes that “equating God with power is corrupting.  It deifies power, not love…The celestial dominator is not the God of love represented by the Trinity [nor] the God revealed by Christ on the cross.  The Christian God can also be manifest in weakness, defeat and suffering. (66-68)


Third, Edwards accepts that God is the Creator.  However, God may not be the creator we think God is.  A popular definition of God, with deep roots in Christian tradition, “is that God is the one who designed, constructed, and rules the world subject to no limitations but his own unfettered will.”  Edwards believes this understanding of creation makes the problem of evil formidable. But there are other models of creation. “When theologians describe the act of creation, they are actually speaking metaphorically about how God is involved in our world. What is God doing? Is God connected to our lives?  Can God be of any help?  The way we describe creation of the world is a metaphor for how God is involved with us.” (69-70)


Edwards then explores four different ways that God may “create” the universe.  (1) Making the universe, meaning God creates the universe out of something or perhaps out of nothing at all.  God is like an architect-contractor who designs everything and then brings into existence by force of his own will.”  The picture of creation in Genesis looks like this sort of “making.”  Edwards takes issue with the early Church’s doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing).  He argues that “the Bible does not say God created the world out of nothing…Rather in Genesis, God speaks light, life, and order into a dark, inanimate chaos that God did not create. Chaos—‘formless and void’ to quote Genesis directly—was just there from the beginning.  The biblical model of making order out of chaos suggests…a tendency toward death and suffering remains embedded in the residual chaos of a world without form and void…”  (70-72)


 (2) Emanating the universe is like the sun emanating rays and the rays form creation.  Emanation does not fit Genesis.  However, it is not completely at odds with other scriptural view of creation (e.g., first chapter of John’s gospel – “In him was life and the light was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”  In Hebrew scripture, the glory of God fills the earth.)  In creation by emanation, Edwards sees “God’s presence as light, as being, as the creative force—not destruction.  But his emanation remains incomplete.” (73)


 (3) Giving birth to the universe, the image of God as parent.  This model, Edwards says, invites us to think of a Mother God giving birth to the cosmos, “a more helpful way of picturing God’s relationship with creation…Parents create their children.  But parents do not design and manufacture children to their own specifications…Even if a mother and father are good parents, their child may nonetheless suffer hardships.  Their child may rebel and do things quite contrary to their parents’ will.” (74)


 (4) Making room for the universe. This model of creation asks, “If God created the universe out of nothing, where was this nothing?  Where was the emptiness that was not filled with God?” (76)  In this explanation for creation, “God withdraws into Godself, pulling back to allow the space for creation…This way of imagining creation means God is to some degree absent and not in control of our world…God’s absence allows evil to operate…[I]f God were fully present, the world could not exist.  There would be no room for [God without] thinning out the divine presence.” (76-77)


Edwards believes that these models of creation “may be at least as helpful as the attempted explanations of evil in helping us understand why God permits suffering.  They are our first hint of how God is connected to this joy-grief of life we are given.” (78)


In Chapter 6, Edwards asks the question, “Then What Do We Say About God?”  Edwards recognizes that volumes have been written about God and decides to focus on just a few characteristics.


God is love.  The first characteristic Edwards chooses is love, to which he seems to give most importance.  St. John teaches us that God is love.  “Love, not power,” Edwards emphasizes is the defining essence of God, the very goodness of God…As long as we are in control, we do not really love things as they are.  We love rather the reflection of our own wills, the satisfaction of getting our own way…Once we realize that literal omnipotence and love are mutually exclusive, we have to make a choice.” (85-88)


God is beautiful.  Edwards says that scripture “attests to the beauty, the splendor and the glory of God…God redeems [suffering] by the power of Divine Beauty to attract, console, and heal rather than the power of domination. Desire is the tug of the infinitely beautiful vortex that is God.  Delight, the culmination of desire, is our foretaste of ultimate joy.”  Edwards says that the hope for healing in the “kindly light” does not justify the sacrifice of individual victims.  Rather God seeks the restoration of wholeness to the each victim such that it makes their life worthwhile.


God is everywhere.  Edwards argues that “wherever we are, in whatever circumstances, God is our foundation and our strength…There is can be no reality where God is not… God’s love weeps at suffering.  God’s beauty is present as a hope that the rainbow will come after the storm.  God’s justice cries out against oppression and demands the restoration of moral relationship. God is present at the gallows as compassion and hope and protest.” (92-93)


God is both near and far.  Edwards quotes Meister Eckhard who said that God is “nearer to you than you are to yourself…’Our Father’ is a name that says God is near to use, intimately related to us.” (imminence)  “In Heaven” reminds us that God is infinitely far above us.” (transcendence) (93)


God is personal.  “When we say God is ‘personal,’” Edwards explains, “we mean that God feels, wills, thinks, believes, remembers.  We also mean God is relational, that God lives in relationship, longs for relationship…If God were not personal, God would be less than we are.  A God who have no thoughts or feelings would be a lower being than a human being who is capable of thinking and feeling…God meets us personally at the point of our pain, and that is the beginning of our redemption.” (95-96)


God is eternal and unchanging. Edwards says “Eternity is at the heart of what we mean by the word ‘God.’ All things exist in time, and time exists within the context of eternity…God and Eternity have the same infinite dimensions…When we say ‘God’, we are saying…eternity is beautiful and beneficent…To say ‘God is Eternal’…is meaningful only if God is also unchanging...The better way to understand the idea that God is unchanging is in the Hebrew terms of steadfast, dependable, faithful, committed love. God is always the dynamic, personal love that constitutes the godhead, always compassionate, always creating, and always free to manifest in new ways…Suffering and death are not eternal.  Only God is eternal…[L]ove, beauty, personhood—all the defining characteristics of God—are eternal.  The eternity of God is the ground of our ultimate hope.” (97-98)


QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  1. What is your belief regarding God’s power/dominion?  Do you assume God has to be omnipotent to be God?  If something were perfectly good, true and beautiful, but not omnipotent, what would it be?


2.    If someone asked you to describe the process of creation, how would you respond?  Would you use any of the four models of creation described by Edwards?  How would your response reflect your understanding of God and how God is related to the world?  Using an example from your life, how would it have helped you explain evil and/or suffering to a victim?


3.    Another possible creatio ex nihilo model is based on the idea of co-creation:  In this understanding, God never intended creation in Genesis to be the final product.  It was a beginning, it was good, but “loose ends” remain, and creation is still evolving.  From the beginning, God intended to complete creation with our cooperation—we are invited to be co-creators with God while recognizing that God is the “general contractor.”  Jesus invites us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  St. Augustine is believed to have said, “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.” What does this model say about who God is and God’s intended relationship with us?  What help, if any, would it provide in answering question #2?


4.   When in your life have you experienced the presence of God?  When in your life have you experienced God as absent from the world?


5.    If God were to change so as to lose any of the characteristics described above would God still be God? Which characteristic(s) of God do you think best aids in responding meaningfully to human suffering?