What then can we actually expect God to do for us? From the
spiritual vantage point of St. John of the Cross, or the lofty philosophical
perspective of D. Z. Phillips, we must truthfully say that we are called to
love God for being God – not for anything God can do for us. However, we are
human and all too often in desperate need. Then the question of what God can
and will do for us cannot be brushed aside by either mysticism or philosophy.
We need to know what we can expect of God.
Moreover,
our longing for God to be a Savior and Redeemer is not inherently selfish.[i] Leave our personal needs out of the
equation. A child dies of poverty or a preventable disease every three seconds.
We expect God to do something about that, or at least want to do something
about that. If God is not responsive to the suffering of creation, then is this
God loveable? Setting our own needs aside, we still insist that God must be a
Savior and Redeemer in order to evoke our love. Indeed being a Savior and
Redeemer is part of the definition of divinity, a criterion of what we worship,
a key element of what we mean by the word “God.” God, in order to live up to
the name of God, must be willing and able to offer us hope.
Our Family
Trinity view of God gives rise to two distinct forms of hope – short-run hope for good to prevail here
and now in the affairs of this world and long-run
hope that in a future beyond our view all will be well. The short-run or
immediate hope is this: There is no
situation in which God is not active, working for peace, justice, and healing.[ii] That is part of what we mean by the
doctrine that God is everywhere, including right here with us. Because God is
present in every situation, there is always hope. Expecting miracles, as Robert Schuller prescribed, is naive.
Miracles are by definition what usually do not happen. You cannot expect
them. Hoping for miracles, however, is a natural expression of a
reasonable faith. We acknowledge that there are limits to what God can do in
our affairs, but we do not know what they are. Scripture and experience abound
with God’s surprises of saving and healing grace. There is always hope for something good.
Indeed, good things often happen. Sometimes glorious things happen,
occasionally miracles.
Our
ultimate hope, however, is in the long run. Christianity is a faith that offers
healing and reconciliation now, but on a partial and temporary basis. Everyone
Jesus healed eventually died. Our real hope is resurrection hope. Our ultimate
hope lies in a world to come.
What is the
ground of that hope? Although the universe has freedom to defy God, that
freedom does not put the universe and God on equal footing. God is still
creator and we are still creature. The difference between the Creator and the
creature is that God’s persistent love lasts for eternity. All that resists God
is mortal, and therefore ultimately futile. Human souls created in God’s image
are neither useless nor futile, but eternal and blessed. The forces that resist
God’s love, however, are futile. Those forces are such things as death,
disease, cruelty, injustice, and prejudice. God wins, not by force but by
persistence through eternity. That’s the meaning of God’s unchanging
faithfulness. Because God’s persistent love lasts for eternity, our ultimate
hope is assured. All God has to do in order to redeem the whole creation is
simply to remain God and wait.
Ocean
waters are swept along temporarily by waves, swells, and tides. But deeper
currents, like the Gulf Stream, determine the water's long-run course. God’s
faithful love for creation is the deep current in reality, the current which
will eventually carry us home. When we arrive home, we finally see God. “For
now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I
shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.”[iii] Marilyn McCord Adams defends this
hope in her argument that the beatific vision of God’s beauty will in eternity
redeem even the horrendous evils that can never be justified or explained.[iv]
If our
ultimate hope lies in God’s eternal persistence and in the final futility of
all that resists God, does this lead to universalism, the claim that God’s
salvation is not for a chosen group, but for all? Gregory of Nyssa’s answer was
“yes.”[v] While much Christian tradition
insists on a final division between good and evil, theologians such as Origen
as far back as the 3rd Century insisted that the nature of God
assured us of the final redemption of the entire creation.
love for us. However, when we have said God is present in all situations, that God is working
for our good, we have been rather vague. In the coming chapters, we will try to clarify how
God acts in the midst of our hardships. We will see that God reaches out to us in three
distinct ways to help us with suffering. The Job Description Trinity represents these three
fundamental ways in which God touches us and responds to human affliction.
[i] I am flatly disagreeing with D. Z. Phillips here. My
fundamental argument with D. Z. Phillips (the reason I side with Marilyn McCord
Adams instead) is this: Phillips is right that determining God’s connection
with evil depends on what we mean by “God.” But Phillips’ definition, limited
by Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis, is of a God who creates the universe
but is indifferent to it’s well-being.
Phillips’ God sits back waiting to be loved for who he is in his sublime indifference.
His is not the Triune God of the Christian tradition, not the God manifest in
Jesus, not the Holy Spirit moving with power in our midst. It is not even clear
that such a God is lovable.
[ii] Theologians differ as to the means by which God acts
in the world. Some emphasize God’s involvement through the action of natural
law, which is usually beneficent. Others, such as Thomas Aquinas, have spoken
of God’s action through “secondary causes.” Certainly when people do God’s
will, acting kindly and justly, we can be such secondary causes. Process
theologians emphasize God’s influence or persuasion. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
described God as a goal toward which evolutionary processes advanced. Alister
McGrath, pp. 186-291. Gordon Kaufman
adds the more mysterious factor of
creative serendipity. Gordon Kaufman, God In The Face Of Mystery (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993) pp. 264-280.
[iii] 1st Corinthians 13: 12.
[iv] Adams, p. 147.
[v] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty Of The Infinite, pp. 408-411.
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