(Some days I play the role of advice mallard.  So, hang with me as I dish.)

I want to give you permission to pursue your doubts about your faith.

In some faith communities and religious families, the doubters are ostracized.  Doubting isn’t just seen as questioning; it’s viewed as something that’s underpinned by rebellion, by sin.  The prevailing idea is that, “You’re doubting the faith, so you can leave the faith; and by leaving the faith, you are leaving our family.”

To stave off being ostracized by family and friends, many doubters keep their questions about God to themselves.  And, to a degree, it’s okay, except when that doubt is part of your grief.

Doubt and grief are directly correlated.  Kenneth Doka suggests that “one of the most significant tasks in grief is to reconstruct faith or philosophical systems, now challenged by the loss” (Loss of the Assumptive World; 49).  All forms of grief, normal, complicated and especially traumatic grief produce doubts about one’s faith.

Goodness is sucked away in grief; and many of us base our faith off the presumed goodness of God.  When that goodness is sucked into the darkness of grief, the foundation of God’s goodness begins to shake; our faith trembles and sometimes it shatters.

Faithquake.

The dilemma that results is this: we need our family and friends during grief … to share our grief with, to remember and to receive acceptance; yet, we’re afraid we will be ostracized by our family and friends if we express our doubt.  Do we: 1. Pursue our grief induced doubts at the expense of our community and at the expense of experiencing the grief within the community; or, 2. Do we pursue our community at the expense of our personal faith searching?

We do both.  You need both.  You need to accept your doubts and find acceptance in community.  And it might be nearly impossibility.

If you are experiencing doubt in a faith community during your grief, tell someone you trust something like this:

“I need to talk and I need you to just hear me and accept me right now.  I know your faith is strong and I respect you for your faith, but my faith has taken a hit since ____’s death.  Instead of forcing my faith, I’m processing my doubt.  _____’s death is changing me.”

If they can listen, you need to talk it through with them.  It’s healthy to express your grief within the community of grievers; and if your grief includes doubt, sharing will only help diminish your pain and clarify your outlook. 

On the other hand, I want to give you permission to pursue the faith you’ve never had.

Grief can also enliven a newfound belief in God.  All of a sudden your darkness sees a light and now – in your community of “unbelievers” – you’re the religious nut.

And you need to say the same thing to your community:

“I need to talk and I need you to just hear me and accept me.  I know we aren’t very religious and I respect you and how you live life.  But, I’m pursing faith since _____‘s death.  I don’t want to convert you, but I want you to know I’m changing.”

The grief that can produce doubt can also enliven faith.  And both are okay.  And both need to be done in our communities.

Accept your grief.  Accept your enlivened faith.  And, to the best you can, do so in your community.

Sometimes our weak attempts of denial break apart.  Our necessary lies that we tell ourselves to keep the evil at bay are hit by the truth.  The comforting catch phrases we were told crumble under the weight of reality.  And those lies, those attempts at denial, those catch phrases are usually religious in nature.

God is in control.

God means everything for good.

Or

God is punishing us.

God has a plan.

God had a higher purpose.

And then Newtown happens.  Crash.  Bang.  The God of our creation – created for our comfort, for our solace in troubled times – begins to break apart.  This perfect God who exists upon a pedestal comes crashing down.

Our God of all-power, of all-knowledge, of omnipresence, of all-love is no longer sustainable.  The iconoclasm of evil has struck again.  And we pause for a moment and question, “Is there something wrong with my God?”  We scramble for justifications, and we slowly piece God back together with glue and duct tape, only to have him rendered weaker, uglier and more susceptible than before.  We become fearful of doubts, fearful that this one or the next will be the final break that renders our perfect God unfixable, and thus our ability to cope with the world impossible.

Before you rush off to grab your glue, let the perfect God lay.  Maybe some of those pieces don’t belong.

Like omnipotence.  If there’s ever a time to reconsider the power of God it’s right now, after Newtown and during the Advent.

This from Greg Boyd via Twitter: God becomes a baby, demonstrating that his way of conquering evil is not through force, but through the power of humble, innocent love.

The power of the advent story is the utter weakness of God.

The power of the advent story is that God isn’t who we thought he was.

The power of the advent story is that God is susceptible to mankind.

God as child.

God as weak.

God as suffering.

God experiencing death.  Awful death.

Let the perfect God break to pieces today.  Let it shatter.  God in a manger has replaced God omnipotent.

It didn’t take me long to find out.

He was heading about five miles west of our modest town of Parkesburg to Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania,to the site of the Amish School Shootings.  I, along with the rest of the world, watched the TV in disgust that night as we learned the details of how the killer had lined 10 Amish girls along the wall and shot them execution style, killing five and wounding the rest before eventually killing himself.[1]

This all happened six years ago yesterday.

*****

Some of the survivors testify that the killer, Roberts, seconds before he opened fire mumbled that he was going to give up and was even about ready to walk out the door.  Yet, for some reason, he stuck to his intentions and, seconds before he pulled the trigger, stated to the Amish children, “I’m angry at God and I need to punish some Christian girls to get even with Him.”[2]

Unknown to most of us, one of Robert’s children, a daughter, had died at birth, an event he believed God could have stopped, yet didn’t.  Roberts, like most of us as we face death, had probably run to God like a frightened child, and after years of searching, instead of finding a warm, strong embrace, concluded that God was an absentee father.

On Monday, October 2, 2006 at 10:45 a.m., Roberts “got even” with God in his attempt to confront the looming question that lead, for Roberts, to bitterness, hatred and eventual tragedy.

*****

I’m not suggesting that Roberts was sane; nor am I suggesting that you must be insane to become absolutely hateful and embittered at God.

I’ve often said that it’s easier to become an atheist than to believe in an evil God … Robert took the harder route and became just like his Father.

But all this would have, could have been forestalled had Roberts done something that is both very Christian and very unChristian all at once. Roberts may have found peace had he found the ability to forgive.

The forgiveness he needed to offer was the same forgiveness I imagine many of us (who both believe in God’s omnipotence and have lived through inordinate, unexplained pain) need to offer.  A forgiveness that can’t be prompted by any amount of lessons in theodicy.  A forgiveness that is precipitated with Jesus’ cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The cry that kicked off Holy Saturday.  And the cry that — like Jesus’ cry — had no response. The cry that leads to the crossroads of destruction or forgiveness.  But not any forgiveness.  This is the cry that eventually asks us to forgive God.

*****

“Forgiving God” smacks against the core of what so many of us believe about God: namely, that He is good and that He’s love.  Believing that God needs forgiveness — as though He’s done something wrong — is so far away from our conception about God that we simply don’t talk about it.  We won’t acknowledge that even Jesus struggled with God’s goodness … we won’t acknowledge Jesus’ struggle, nor will we acknowledge our own struggle.

And whether God actually needs the forgiveness isn’t what I’m talking about here.  Whether or not God needs it is a moot point.  The fact is, many of us need to extend it.

As many books have rightly said about the Amish School Shootings: This whole story is about forgiveness.  And by that they mean the forgiveness of the Amish people towards Roberts.  But, this story would have never begun had Roberts been Christ-like as well.

And so, as a practical exercise, I’ll ask you: and by “you”, I’m speaking to a few.  I’m not speaking to the many who have lived decent lives, unencumbered by evil, unhindered by the fog of intense pain. I’m speaking to the downcast, the trampled few who only have one explanation for their current situation … and the explanation is both as harrowing as it is unbelievable … that God has forsaken them.  I’m speaking to you … the forsaken.

Have you forgiven God?

[2]Quoted from the book Amish Grace; page 25.

As many of you know, in addition to being a funeral director, I moonlight as a youth leader for at-risk youth.  Just the other day I spoke with a teenage girl who had been repeatedly raped by her father when she was only twelve.

While we believe that God is always good, where was God when the twelve year olds trust was betrayed by her father as his hand silenced her screams and his carnal desires ruined her future?  Couldn’t God have simply defended this innocent child … like you and I would have?  Hell, if I saw any kind of rape, yet alone the ravaging of a child, I would be thrown into an infuriating rage.  But God – the good God you believe in – sat sidelined, unmoved to action; then, and even now throughout the world, the cries of the innocent fail to move the divine.

How do we interpret this problem?  Do we jettison God’s omnipotence by emphasizing the freedom of man?  And how much of God’s power can we jettison before He is just a god?

Most, in response to the above situation, would say, “God has voluntarily limited himself by creating humanity with freedom.”  Yet, even though that seems to exonerate the goodness of God by placing the blame on man, there’s an assumption that God could – if he wished – unlimit himself and override our freedom through coercion, a phenomenon we often call “providence.”

“God could, if he had so desired, stopped the holocaust” we say.  And my response is simply, “Then why didn’t He?”  If God could override the freedom of man, why doesn’t he?  Why doesn’t he spare the children?  Or the rape victims?

Dr. Thomas Oord

Dr. Thomas Jay Oord echoes this sentiment.  He writes,

“When we are victims of senseless crimes, when our children or friends are raped or killed, or when atrocious evils occur, it is hard if not impossible to avoid thinking, “Why doesn’t God stop this?”  It is difficult if not impossible to worship wholeheartedly the God who could have prevented these evil(s)” but doesn’t.

In “The Nature of Love: A Theology”, Dr. Oord proposes a seminal idea that he calls “essential kenosis.”

In some sense, essential kenosis is a synthesis of open theism and process theism.  Open theism has made great advances in deconstructing and peeling away Hellenistic assumptions about God’s ontology while attempting to stay faithful to the biblical witness.  They’ve questioned the nature of God’s immutability, passibility and — most notably — omniscience and proposed innovative reconstructions.  Yet, the open theists have yet to produce any convincing answer to the question, “Why doesn’t God override or circumvent humanity’s evil more often?”

The redefinition of God’s omnipotence has been accomplished – convincingly or not — by process theologians who believe that God can NEVER use coercion, but can only persuade; a conclusion that they arrive to based off the idea of panentheism.

Michael Brierley notes,

Panentheism is the result of conceiving “being” in terms of relationship or relatedness. This is why process theism is a type of panentheism, for “process” asserts that “entities” are inseparably interrelated, and thus that relationship, rather than substance, is “of the essence.” (9).

With relationship as essence, God becomes much less Greek and much more Hebrew, which means the “I AM” is interrelatedness, persuasion, influence, while coercion, force and, yes, many forms of providence are intrinsically NOT apart of the “I AM.”  According to Charles Hartshorne, panentheism is ʺthe view that all things are within the being of God, who yet is not merely the whole of actual things.”

This relatedness ontology makes persuasion God’s only means of influence.  But, this relatedness ontology also prompts process theologians to view miracles and even the resurrection with great skepticism.

Oord states, in recognition of the failures of both process and open theism, that “essential Kenosis … overcomes the problem of evil and presents God as steadfastly loving.  Essential Kenosis offers a way of understanding God’s power, while affirming the occurrence of miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, hope for a final victory at the end of history, and a biblically supported doctrine of creation” (100).

“Essential Kenosis” is Oord’s seminal attempt to both acknowledge the more positive points of Process Theology’s ontology while attempting to remain faithful to the witness of scripture.

And if you want to find out how Oord’s “Essential Kenosis” attempts that synthesis, buy his book, “The Nature of Love”!

As one who works (and moonlights) while witnessing the problem of evil, let me say “The Nature of Love” is well worth your effort to both read it and understand it.

Bio: Robert Martin spends his days as a computer software tester for a company in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA.  When he is not commuting back and forth, he spends time with his wife and kids and as the Christian Education Chairman for Bally Mennonite Church.  As of right now, he is finishing a Master’s of Arts in Missional Ministry from Biblical Seminary.  From there, when asked what he’s going to do with the degree, his standard answer is, “God hasn’t shown me that far yet.”

Mother’s Day, 2007, my world was turned upside down when my mother fell ill. Three months later, it wasn’t just turned upside down, it was shaken, rattled, and destroyed to utter rubble when her diagnosis turned terminal.

As we as a family grieved, there is one phrase that I’m so glad no one decided they needed to tell us.

“It’s all in God’s plan.”

That is not a statement that someone going through this kind of situation needs to hear, nor is it helpful, as true as it might be.

But we can’t say that for sure. We are not necessarily privy to all of God’s plans. For that matter, can we say that it is God’s plan for someone to experience the pain and grief of such a loss? To say so is too simplistic, I think.

I think the evil, pain, and loss that comes from living in this broken world is never part of God’s ultimate plan (if so, why would the final new Creation be a place of no tears?). The world is broken, so broken things happen. What IS in God’s plan is redemption, taking broken things and using them to bring about good, like the hope of a new life, or the ability to speak love, hope, and compassion into the lives of people who have experienced a similar kind of loss.

The good that happens after, that is certainly God’s plan, but the event that caused the pain? Not sure…

Now, Christ’s death…yes, God planned that. But in his ultimate plan, did he ever want to have to do that? From the beginning, his intention was for us to live in communion with him.

Christ’s sacrifice was a broken thing that had to happen as part of a broken world and the choices of broken people, but God used that brokenness for a wonderful thing to give us hope that such brokenness is only temporary. That’s the beauty of Easter. That the pain is only for a time as there is something more to come that will blow our socks off…

For me, my mother’s death was one that struck me to the core. We prayed…and prayed…and prayed FERVENTLY that she would be healed. In the midst of the ICU we prayed. On the road back and forth from Hershey and Chambersburg I prayed. Every night during that horrible 3 months I prayed, “God, heal my mother. I know you can. Don’t take her from me.”

And she died anyways.

Over a gall stone.

How absolutely stupid, non-sensical… Seriously?!?! A GALL STONE KILLED MY MOM!

God, how could you?

Was the sad thing that happened to me part of God’s plan? Or was it simply a matter of the fact that we live in a world that is cracked, broken, damaged by centuries of sin and that her death was just one in a whole litany of lives taken that should never have been lost?

God’s plan… we like to say that nice little “pat” answer “Oh, it’s all in God’s plan.”

What a load of crap.

The broken world around us was never part of God’s plan.

But God is bigger, stronger, better, and wiser than that. He takes even something as stupid and horrible as my mother’s slow fade into morphine-steeped oblivion and turned it around into a passion and a fire in my soul as I saw her life reflected in the lives of others and realized how significant one life lived passionately for God could be.

Her death was never part of God’s big plan. But my life is.

And this is what we must remember: what is important is not figuring out why the sad thing had to happen, but what is our reaction to it. Are we going to continue living in that brokenness? Or are we going to live a redeemed life?

For me, as Joshua said, and my house…we’ll serve God, even in the midst of brokenness.

****

Robert blogs at Abnormal Anabaptist.  You can follow him on twitter @tristaanogre.

Dr. John Piper, who apparently believes the guy behind the hoodie is God himself.

The following is taken from one of John Piper’s sermons:

It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.

God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God’s hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs.

So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.

If I were to drop dead right now, or a suicide bomber downstairs were to blow this building up and I were blown into smithereens, God would have done me no wrong. He does no wrong to anybody when he takes their life, whether at 2 weeks or at age 92.

Before we can analyse Piper’s logic, I want to take a step back and look at the wider picture … specifically, the problem of evil.

*****

This is the basic dilemma presented by the problem of evil:

When confronted with the practical reality of the problem problem, believers who don’t use the God of gaps often do one of two things:

They jettison their faith.

Or, they attempt to “grab the bull by the horns.”  In other words, they attempt to redefine the premise of the problem … they attempt to redefine “God”.

The attempt to redefine God usually goes in one of these three trajectories:

1.) Arminianism attempts to uphold the understanding of God’s goodness at the expense of omnipotence by asserting the ability of man to limit God’s power.

2.)  Open theology attempts to build on Arminianism and redefine not only omnipotence but the omniscience aspect of God by asserting that man’s freedom somewhat redefines God’s future plans.

3.)  Reformed theology upholds God’s omnipotence and omniscience by attempting to redefine the goodness aspect of God, emphasizing the glory of God in relation to the sinfulness of man.

With John Piper’s statement and his background in Reformed theology in mind, we now turn to defining love.

*****

When defining love, we should probably start with a basic philosophical question that was asked in Plato’s “Euthyphro”. And the question is essentially this:

Does God desire an object because the object is good?

Or

Does God’s desire for an object make it good?

Let’s make this practical by quickly moving from the philosophical questions to the ethical questions:

Does God hate murder because it’s wrong in and of itself?

Or

Does God’s hatred of murder make it wrong?

In other words, let’s say — hypothetically — that God’s hatred of murder makes it wrong.  After all, he is God and can do anything he wants.  Can he, therefore, decide that it is morally acceptable to murder?  Can God make murder … good? John Piper’s theological assumptions allow him to look at the Old Testament and conclude, “Yes.  If God wanted to make murder ethical, he could do it because God can do anything he wants.”

In other words — following Piper’s logic — the “evil” that you perceive as wrong in the world, may actually be for the greater good … for God’s glory!

Now, let’s go from the ethical discussion to the theological discussion.

Do ethics serve to control our doctrine/understanding of God?

Or

Does our doctrine of God serve to define our ethics?

Let’s say — hypothetically — that our ethics control our doctrine. Let’s say that the way we defined “love” enabled us to say that not only is eternal hell unloving, but hell itself is unloving (according to our ethics) and so God must save everyone in order for Him to be a God of love.  That “love wins!”

Let’s say — on the other hand — that our doctrine of God’s sovereignty controlled our ethics. Let’s say that God’s infinite worth (his glory) justified Him enacting the harshest punishment possible for anyone who offends that glory.  And let’s say that that harshest punishment possible was for him to send all offenders to eternal hell.  In this scenario – doctrine serving ethics — God’s glory justifies ANYTHING.

And this line of logic, where our doctrine controls our ethics is how John Piper arrived at his above quote.

In the same manner, the idea that ethics can control our doctrine, is how Rob Bell has moved in the trajectory of “Love Wins.”

*****

For arguments sake, it’s often helpful to put massive issues in either/or categories, and while this discussion isn’t necessarily “either/or”, it is helpful to ask, “WHICH SIDE DO YOU TAKE?”  And, “WHY?”

*****

This is the last part in my series on the Problem of Evil.  Here are links to my other entries:  1. “Discarding God”; 2. “My Problem with ‘God’”; 3. “Is It All God’s Will?”; 4.“Open Theism and the Problem of Evil” and 5. “So You Think You Have Free Will?”.

The more I read Tom Oord’s work, the more I appreciate his perspective, specifically as it relates to his understanding of God, love and evil.

Death and evil are siblings who share more than the same heritage.  Often, we cannot talk about the one without considering the other; we can’t be touched by one without also being touched by the other.  Even if evil spares us of physical death, it takes of our life, lessening life’s quality.  Death, somehow or another, is evil’s product; and, yet, seems to be able to reproduce it’s progenitor, begging the question, “What comes first … evil or death?”

When you bring God into the conversation of evil and death, the whole thing get’s even more messy.

Here’s a small clip by Oord called, “Why Doesn’t God Prevent Genuine Evil in the World?”.

(from The Work Of The People)

Aside from Tom wearing some of the coolest nuclear holocaust proof glasses I’ve ever seen, he also drops some powerful thoughts.

For instance, he says,

I think it’s time for Christians to take seriously the idea that God’s love makes it the case that God can’t do some things.

And …

… we need to think more seriously about what kind of power God has.

Finally, what do you think about Oord’s conclusion that because of our freedom God can’t prevent evil?

*****

A House Keeping Note: About two months ago I promised a six part series on the problem of evil that only had enough gas to make it to part five (1. “Discarding God”; 2. “My Problem with ‘God’”; 3. “Is It All God’s Will?”; 4.“Open Theism and the Problem of Evil” and 5. “So You Think You Have Free Will?”.

I have the gas for part six.  Look for it on Monday.

*****

Joy Bennett

I’ve always pictured time as a line, with me an unchanging dot moving from moment to moment from birth on one end to death at the other. I have an almost visceral reaction to thinking of time, and myself within it, like this. In this model, I am static. The dot that is me remains unchanged as it moves through each moment. And at points of loss, the vision of me moving relentlessly farther and farther away from the person lost aches to my core.

I read something recently that describes time as a spiral. The spiral illustrates how then is very much a part of now and it all influences what’s next. It describes how dynamic and alive we are as we move through life.

I think time-as-spiral is a better model. It recognizes that we are more than a static pile of cells.  We are constantly being shaped by the interaction of our individual characteristics and choices, our past (the full spectrum of joys and pains we’ve experienced), and our future (our goals and plans and dreams).

I am the person I am today because of my past experiences, my joys and pains, and the quirks that make me me. You are the person you are today because of what makes you you, what you’ve experienced already, and what you hope to do in the future.

I am fascinated by the ways each person’s experiences shapes them, and how much they control that shaping. A lack of depth of experience renders a person less developed but less scarred. A wide and deep range of emotional experience can ripen a person into a rooted maturity, or it can singe them into a scarred, cynical shell.

My own life experience was relatively unremarkable before the birth of our first child. I overcame a handful of hurdles growing up: a few small heart-breaks, the deaths of two grandfathers, a cross-country move, the crucible of working as a resident assistant in a conservative Baptist college’s dormitory. (Two words: not fun.) Engagement, wedding planning, and the first year of marriage were mostly euphoric, with a few requisite lows, some tears, and a lot of talking things out. I remember sensing that life had been too calm and that something big was coming.

Then Elli arrived. We were catapulted into what seemed like an alternate universe. Hearing words like, “I wish I could say, ‘but the good news is ___,’ but I can’t” fires depth charges into your soul.Kissing your infant goodbye before surgery, knowing that the odds are 1 in 5 that she’ll survive for you to kiss her again, is one of the darkest paths one can tread. The sleepless nights caring for a child too sick to catch a breath or stop coughing or who just can’t sleep confronts you with darkness that you never dreamed lurked inside yourself.

That alternate universe wasn’t all dark desperation, though. We uncovered the pure delight of watching a child learn how to laugh, discovering how to make her smile, and celebrating each hard-won milestone. She redefined what was important and what was worth our energy.

Elli carved the raw material of us and left a distinct contour on everyone who met her. She’s been gone nearly three years, but the mark she made on each of us is permanent. We are now faced with what we do with it — how to move forward. What we choose each day is shaping us.

We all leave marks on the people with whom we interact. Whether those interactions provoke dark valleys or euphoric highs is often out of our control, but we can determine how it shapes us.

But how? How can the things which wound and scar us so deeply become the very things that strengthen us and equip us to help others?

Jesus.

This is one of the many beautiful themes we find the Bible. Terrible things happen. I will not say that God causes tragedy, but I will declare that God is not thwarted by it. God can take natural disasters and the evil schemes of people and make those things produce good, in spite of themselves. This is what happened when Jesus was killed — people murdered God’s Son and yet, that very thing that was meant for evil became the greatest good ever accomplished on earth.  In the worst betrayal ever recorded, Jesus defeated death and made peace with God for us. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him and meant to do him harm when they sold him as a slave. But God used it to save Joseph’s family and preserve the nation of Israel through them. We see it in nature, in the rejuvenation of a forest ravaged by fire. Over and over, we see God redeeming tragedy.

When I remember this, when I trust God to bring something beautiful out of my pain (even if takes years), I grow stronger. When I forget it, when I’m overcome by the circumstances and see only myself and what was lost or damaged, the pain burns and scars and my heart withdraws into a cynical bitter shell. (And as one who has hidden in my turtle shell and licked my wounds many times, hope is never lost. God can redeem even that, and he can transform the most recalcitrant turtle.)

How do you think about time and yourself in it? Who and what has shaped you? How are you responding to it?

*****

Here’s Joy’s bio: “I am a writer, thinker, asker of questions, mother, wife, bereaved parent, walking by faith, still in process. I’ve blogged since 2005, writing on faith and doubt, family life (which is always humorous even with the medical spin), grief, and the depression that I only recognized a year after our oldest died at the age of 8. Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of me yesterday.”

Send your love and likes her way on Facebook, add yourself to her Twitter tribe and check out Joy’s incredible blog!

This will be my last post on the problem of evil.  I think I’m ready to go back to less boring, less mysterious and less dark topics … topics more warm and fuzzy and enjoyable … topics like death and funerals and caskets and stuff.

*****

The philosophical-ish answer that most Christians have to the problem of evil is this: in order for love to be possible, God had to give us freedom of the will (cause love has to be in freedom); instead of using our freedom to love God, we abused that freedom in rebellion against God and so all the evil in the world is a result of our collective sin.

And, I, for the most part, agree with that logic.  But, I don’t buy it entirely because I think it gives us too much credit.  And here’s why I don’t fully buy it:

Part of the fear among Reformed Theologians is that once we say humans are absolutely free, we can say that humanity can do nearly anything without God … and we therefore begin to develop a humanistic approach to life, instead of a Christ centered approach.

The basic fear of Reformed Theologians is Pelagianism … the belief that humanity can reach salvation by our own choice, by our own power … that we’re all basically good.  On the other end (which has been adopted by Reformed theologians) is the Augustinian version … that humanity is entirely sinful … in fact, we’re sinful by nature, unable to move in the right direction save by the irresistible grace of God.

I used to say that I believe in a semi-Pelagianism … meaning that I don’t necessarily see the two positions as diametrically opposed … that we don’t have a sinful nature that causes us to do evil all the time, but we still need the Lord’s grace to be saved.  In fact, I believe that God himself is salvation so that it’s simply impossible to say we can be what we’re supposed to be without Him.

But I’ve refined that position.  I still hold to a semi view, and I still deny that our nature is inherently sinful, but I simply see free will as very limited.  I now believe more so in a semi-Augustianism.

My move to semi-Augustianism isn’t because I’ve lost faith in humanity, but because I’ve seen over and over again how desperately humanity needs God’s practical, empowering love coupled with the discipline of the Holy Spirit and the accountability of His Church.

And I’ve matured.  I’ve realized that the will is limited and/or less restricted by:

Culture

Depravity

Mental capacity

Access to technology \ science

Family Heritage

Biology

Education

Political freedom

Ethnicity

Financial capacity

Ideological strongholds

So we aren’t just free to respond, there’s levels of respond-ability, so that the “free” part of will is often relative.

It’s too easy for us to assert that free will means that we can just somehow do what we want.  And, especially as white, middle to upper class Americans, that assertion is somewhat true.

I like calling that “I can do what I want”, semi-Pelagianism type of free will a strong volitionalism.  Where as the view I’m leaning towards is a weak volitionalism.

And I do believe that God’s grace enables us in such a way that “nothing is impossible”, but those possible and impossible things we do are somehow related to the practical grace/love/power of God in our lives . . . even if we don’t recognize his presence in our lives.

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With a weakened view of the will, I simply don’t see the whole problem of evil as simply a product of humanity’s rebellion.  The majority of the problem may be due to our rebellion … but it’s more complex than that.  There are other forces at play than simply man’s sin.  To say that the whole problem of evil is simply because of a misuse of man’s will is to giving us a little too much credit … a little too much power … a little too much will.

It’s simply a complex issue, one that hopefully makes us look inward, makes us look at the cross, makes us look outward and then makes us repeat the whole process again.

And, honestly, when the rubber meets the road, and a newly young widow is weeping over the tramatic loss of her husband, I think its too simplistic and cold for pastors to resond to her “why”s with the nice, easy, pat answer: “its all because of sin.”

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How you handle the philosophical side of the problem of evil boils down to how you answer these two questions:

1.) Does logic apply to God?

2.) Does morality apply to God?

If you answer “yes” to both, the problem of evil is going to change / has already changed your whole view of God.

If you answer, “mostly yes and sometimes no”, you should probably be writing this post instead of me.

If you answer “no”, you’ll have a lot of trouble with questions like “Can God create a rock so big you can’t lift it?” or, “Can God do absolutely anything he wants, like kill children, and still be considered a loving God?”

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Once you answer, “Can we apply logic to God?”, the following question needs to be asked about God’s knowledge of the future:

if God is limited by the possible (ex. he can’t exist and not exist at the same time), than how can he know with absolute certainty the future actions of a free person?  How can He know exactly what you’ll do if you’re free to do otherwise?

Most Arminians believe that God has both absolute foreknowledge AND that man has free will.  And while John Calvin and Open Theists would probably disagree on almost everything, they both agree that Arminians are flat out wrong … that God cannot know with certainty the future actions of free persons.

Calvin writes,

“But seeing He (God) therefore foreknows all things that will come to pass, because he has decreed they shall come to pass, it is vain to contend about foreknowledge, since it is plain all things come to pass by God’s positive decree”

God knows the future because God decrees the future.

While agreeing with Arminians on most points, Open Theists depart from the compatibalism.  Gordon Olson, one of the seminal thinkers in Open Theism, writes:

that if God foreknows every future event, then every future event must come to pass according to God’s foreknowledge, for if one should ever choose differently, God’s foreknowledge would be in error. If man must so choose, then only a single course of action is possible to him in every given instance. This means the will is not free to choose between two or more possibilities, and therefore is not free at all.

At this point, compatibalist Arminians (who believe God knows the future actions of humanity with absolute certainty and that humanity is totally free) would play the mystery card.

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Or they play the “God is outside time” card. And the “outside time” card is a very difficult one to play.  I agree that God experiences time differently than we do, but — at least from a Christians perspective — as soon as we start playing that card we have to claim that every time the Bible speaks about God’s actions in the past tense, or present tense, it’s anthropomorphizing His actions … because there never is past tense, a present or a future with God … it’s all now for Him (since he’s outside of time).

This position is historically called the “Eternal Now.”

“Can’t God move in and out of time?” you might ask.  And here we have to define time.  Suffice it to say that time isn’t a “thing” that can be traveled, or warped or removed, but it’s simply the process of relationships … that as long as God is connected to us in actual relationship, he experiences time.

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Open theists don’t believe that God’s view of the future is as limited as ours; rather, that it’s not seen in certainties, but in possibilities, with varying degrees of probabilities.  Farther, open theists would argue that God’s omniscience stays intact as he still knows everything that’s possible to know (assuming it’s impossible to know with certainty the future actions of a free being).  Instead of knowing everything as a certainty — he knows all possibilities in the future as actual possibilities and all certainties as certainties.

But, why even argue against absolute foreknowledge?  And how does it apply to the problem of evil?

Not only do open theists believe their position is biblical, and free from Hellenistic influence, they also believe that if God absolutely foreknew all the evil in the world, he also — to one degree or another — planned all the evil.  They agree with Calvin.  That the reason God foreknows all is because He (to one degree or another) decrees all.

But all this talk about an open future rests on a very huge assumption: that humanity possess free will … an assumption I’ll question on Friday.