PeaceBang

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1. a. I think for certain you should breathin’ some words at your conference

   and
   b. you will be wonderful with said 2 and 3 year old nephews. have an amazing time.

   Comment by karla — July 15, 2007 #

2. ’m thinking, but hey, brilliant white Christian professor who speaks eleven languages

   I’m going to have to stop reading blogs quickly. I thought you said he spoke elven languages.

   And I thought that was pretty nifty.

   Comment by Peregrinato — July 15, 2007 #

3. Thanks for Dramatic Prairie Dog. Now I have something to do on my day off. Gotta love the remixes. Duh Duh Duuuuhhhh

   Comment by God Guurrll — July 16, 2007 #

4. I just flipped through O magazine and this month has an article about a UU minister who was ordained after her state trooper husband was killed. She now is a chaplain in law enforcement. I’ve just skimmed it, but it looks like good–if unlikely, given the source–relief reading amid your theodicy seminar!

   Comment by Madgebaby — July 16, 2007 #

5. My God is still my God even when stuff happens to people who have never heard of him. And when that stuff happens, I ask myself about my God — why would he let that happen? Even if it happened Over There and not Right Here. And when I ask those questions I use the language I have for my God and my understanding of God and I delve into the scriptures that I believe tell me something about his nature and being.

   Isn’t that what the elven professor is doing?

   Comment by Peter B — July 17, 2007 #

6. I have not read it yet, but Anglican theologian NT Wright has a new book out on the problem of evil. I have studied the issue myself from both the atheist complaint and the Christian theist retort. For years it was a nagging problem, and then philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued the free will defense.

   Anyway, as you know, it is no simple topic. I would add for your thoughts, that since God allows evil God has a purpose for it. And that purpose may not be culturally contingent or defined.

   But it is one of the biggies!

   Comment by Patrick — July 17, 2007 #

7. Madge, read it, loved it.

   Comment by PeaceBang — July 18, 2007 #

8. Peter B is right on here. When we wonder how/why an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving God could allow terrible suffering (especially of natural causes) why should it matter whether those suffering are Christian, white, etc.? It seems incredibly parochial to think that it does. An examined faith needs to make some intellectual sense of this. It’s not exactly a practical/ethical concern, but one of the coherence of our deepest commitments. If we can’t make sense of it, then something needs to give.

   Comment by Dunno — July 18, 2007 #

9. I read it three times: I skimmed it once and posted, read it closely and sobbed (my dear husband is a financial type, but he travels and the third time for theological content. Good on all fronts.

   I hope your conference will be fodder for further posts. I took a theodicy seminar in div school that was very disappointing on an academic level, but has been very fruitful personally for reasons too complicated to explain here.

   Comment by Madgebaby — July 18, 2007 #

10. @Peter and Dunno: As it turns out, the colloquy never once acknowledged a theodicy that wasn’t grounded in God’s saving works through Jesus Christ. Only in a side conversation with someone in the parking lot did I dare to ask: “well, what about the huge portion of the world that doesn’t live in the Christian worldview? Does it still work that way for them?”
    Dunno, I don’t think you get what I am asking. I am not asking about those who suffer but about those who attempt to make meaning on behalf of non-Christian brothers and sisters who suffer, and who may very well not appreciate our Christian explanation for what’s going on in the cosmos.

    Comment by PeaceBang — July 19, 2007 #

11. “well, what about the huge portion of the world that doesn’t live in the Christian worldview? Does it still work that way for them?”

    An evangelical pastor of my acquaintance, with pronounced universalist leanings, named (of all the possibilities, wouldn’t you know) Rev. Vikki, says of Christ’s work on behalf of those who aren’t in any way Christian: “What matters is not that we know his name, but that he knows ours.” If you draw her out, she’ll usually back it up with quotes from the Book of Jonah about God’s mercy toward the Ninevites.

    Not sure that I would frame it the same way as she does, but from her POV it works. I think from a non-Christian POV it works too, at least if you stipulate the identity underlying differing apprehensions of the divine essence. And I think it’s perfectly consistent with what was the traditional theology of the Universalist half of our house.

    Comment by fausto — July 20, 2007 #

12. I’m still struggling with this. If Christianity wasn’t historically an exclusivist religion — and if such horrific amounts of violence hadn’t been committed in the name of bringing people to Christ — I could much more easily appreciate the loving instinct that leads Christians to extend Christ’s saving function to non-Christians. My Christian self gets it. But as a woman of Jewish heritage, I remain fairly cool to the notion that Christian theodicy can “work,” if you will, for non-Christians without their explicit permission and invitation.

    I think of all the centuries of exiled and murdered Jews and Muslims being told in Eternity that their sufferings have been explained by earnest Christians. I imagine the great roar of laughter that would go up from the heavens.

    Comment by PeaceBang — July 20, 2007 #

13. If Christianity wasn’t historically an exclusivist religion — and if such horrific amounts of violence hadn’t been committed in the name of bringing people to Christ — I could much more easily appreciate the loving instinct that leads Christians to extend Christ’s saving function to non-Christians. My Christian self gets it. But as a woman of Jewish heritage, I remain fairly cool to the notion that Christian theodicy can “work,” if you will, for non-Christians without their explicit permission and invitation.

    I assume by “their” you mean non-Christians, not Christians.

    I think you’re focusing too much on what a certain type of Protestant scornfully calls “the traditions of men” rather than the unconditionality and universal availablitity of grace. Just about any sincere, devout Christian would tell you that the power of grace, around which Christian theodicy revolves, belongs not to Christians or their tarnished history or institutions, but only to God. Universalists in particular would say that “accepting Christ” or any other such formula is not a condition to being open to grace or being transformed by grace, even though from a Christian frame of reference Christ is the means of grace.

    All religious language is in a sense figurative. It only makes sense within a specific figurative frame of reference. But the underlying meaning to which the figures of speech point can remain true beyond the narrow frame of reference of the specific language. I think the willingness of UUs to explore and integrate religious language and religious understanding from outside our Christian origins, and our widely shared sense that the deepest truths of the world’s great religions are the ones that appear in all of them, are a strong testimony to the broader applicability of even very narrowly framed Christian teachings.

    If when you say that Christian theodicy can’t “work” for non-Christians without their invitation, you mean that the specifically Christian vocabulary and frame of reference doesn’t necessarily make sense to others, okay, I can see that. But theodicy does not attempt to explain why Christians have in the past acted evilly toward non-Christians, it attempts to explain why evil exists and is always present. If you mean non-Christians can’t or don’t recognize the existence of evil as a necessary condition without which the human conscience cannot choose good instead, I have a harder time seeing that. Non-Christians (Stoics and Buddhists are examples that come quickly to mind) may express the idea in different figures and words, but all the fingers seem to me to point to the same moon.

    Is it perhaps the case that what you’re really struggling with is whether some Christians’ exclusivist premise that Christianity is the One True Faith, and/or the evils that Christians have committed in defense of that permise, conflict with the more universalist sympathies of recent inquirers into theodicy?

    Comment by fausto — July 20, 2007 #

14. Fausto, thanks for the thoughts. I think what I have a problem with is when Christians get together with all good intent to “solve the problem” of theodicy intellectually without acknowledging their own context when they do the work. Even the most globally-minded, diversity-appreciating Christians, when they get together, seem unable to think outside the strictly God-in-Christ framework and I think that’s a weakness. It’s a weakness to me because while it professes a great humility before the inscrutability of God’s ways (with a faith that God works toward just ends), it actually presumes to know a whole lot about God’s ways. This just goes against my mystical grain, I guess. I’ll write more about that.

    I was very uncomfortable that several members of the colloquy preferred to define theodicy as “God’s justice.” I know that by that they meant no harm, but it still offended my spirit and Jewish memory.

    I have to disagree with you that many of the world’s peoples understand the presence of evil as a “necessary” pre-condition without which human free will would not be possible. I think that’s a very Western idea and would be completely nonsensical to lots of indigenous peoples, not to mention Hindus.

    I wish you had been at the colloquy. We could have talked for days about this.

    Comment by PeaceBang — July 21, 2007 #

15. I think that there’s a substantial problem with the doctrine of “anonymous Christianity”– it continues to give Christianity special standing. Of course Christians aren’t Christians because we think it’s “false”– but there’s no reason why thinking we’re right must mean thinking that others are wrong. (Rock on, Kurt Gödel!)

    If, instead, we relinquish our own infallibility, then we humbly present ourselves, as well as accepting others, as finite yet loving creatures trying to understand and be in relationship with an infinite and overwhelming love.

    As for theodicy, I understand many of the things people say about its problems as expressions of feeling, but I have great difficulty in seeing what are presented as unescapable, watertight arguments posing The Dilemma as very water-tight….

    Comment by Mary Ann — July 21, 2007 #

16. PeaceBang, it’s too bad you didn’t raise these questions during your seminar!

    Comment by fausto — July 21, 2007 #

17. Even the most globally-minded, diversity-appreciating Christians, when they get together, seem unable to think outside the strictly God-in-Christ framework and I think that’s a weakness.

    Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute! I thought “the most globally-minded, diversity-appreciating Christians” were supposed to be us Unitarians. And Unitarians always were “outside the strictly God-in-Christ framework”.

    I’m not aware what thoughts the old-fashioned Unitarians may have had on theodicity. However, Charles Hartshorne was a UU, and I’ve seen discussions of theodicy based in a process-theology paradigm of a God who is less than omnipotent that don’t particularly involve Christology one way or the other.

    Comment by fausto — July 21, 2007 #

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