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But the “religion” of Christianity, the “institution” of the church, is not itself Christian. Only people, not institutions, can be Christian. Thus, I want to sharply distinguish between the Christianity I’m defending and the “Christian church”: The two need not have anything more than a name in common. I wouldn’t dream of trying to defend all that’s been done under the label “Christianity.” Like you, I am enraged by a great deal of it.
xians vs. institutions
So why doesn’t God intervene every time someone is going to misuse his freedom and hurt another person? The answer, I believe, is found in the nature of freedom itself. A freedom which is prevented from being exercised whenever it was going to be misused simply wouldn’t be freedom.
looks like i will be tweeting through this book
If we have the potential to oppress or slay millions, it’s because we also have the potential to liberate and love millions.
human potential
Love is really the only reason worth creating! It’s not freedom for the sake of freedom that God values—it’s love. Freedom is simply the only possible means to this end.
freedom and love
On the cross of Calvary, God took upon Himself all the sin of the world, and all the pain and punishment that that sin produces. He didn’t have to. He did it out of love—because love is worth it. It’s worth dying for, even in God’s view.
he did for love
The future is not an eternally settled matter. Thus, for example, God frequently asks questions of people in the Bible, and occasionally even changes His own mind in the light of new circumstances. (See Ex. 32:14; 1 Sam. 15:11; Jer. 18:7–10; 26:19.) This would, of course, be impossible if He had a fixed blueprint of all events ahead of time.
I would never for a moment pretend to understand exactly how these demonic forces screw around with nature—the Bible is completely silent on this score. But it is my deepest conviction that all evil which can’t be accounted for by appealing to the necessary limitations of the world or the evil wills of people is due to the will of such beings as these. In the end, we are all more or less casualties of war.
In a similar vein, since God is yet in control of the cosmic scene, believing in God means having faith that all that God stands for—love, truth, justice, peace, etc.—will ultimately triumph. All of our basic moral convictions about how things should be will be answered. If this is not true, our moral aspirations are all ill-founded and result in futility. In this prelude period, evil may come to us from individuals that God does not control. But what God does control is the fact that this evil need not be the last word in our existence.
evil is short term
We humans instinctively assume that love is a reality, that it is the only ideal worth living for and dying for. But nature seems to be an indifferent, loveless, brute process of colliding chemicals—and so our ideals are reduced to reacting hormones.
is love real or just chemical reactions?
Only the gospel dares to proclaim that God enters smack-dab into the middle of the hell we create. Only the gospel dares to proclaim that God was born a baby in a bloody, crap-filled stable, that He lived a life befriending the prostitutes and lepers no one else would befriend, and that He suffered, firsthand, the hellish depth of all that is nightmarish in human existence. Only the gospel portrait of God makes sense of the contradictory fact that the world is at once so beautiful and so ugly.
jesus is the only god who enters our world via a crap-filled stable
The Gospels vary a good deal on what exactly Jesus said, and when exactly He said it. But this just shows that the writers were not 20th-century people concerned with the exact wording of things. They paraphrase Jesus in their own words to bring out the meaning which they feel their audience needs to hear.
Salvation is a matter of being related to Christ, not the Bible. In fact, believing the Bible to be inspired is, for me, simply a consequence (not the basis) of confessing Christ to be the Lord of my life.
jesus as god s word rather than bible
Jesus is, if you will, the first butterfly to come out of the cocoon. It seems implausible to us now only because we are yet entrapped inside our cocoons. But caterpillars are meant to fly!
caterpillars are meant to fly
And it was the resurrection of a man who never did henceforth die. If Jesus had later died, the whole thing would have fallen to pieces. But He didn’t. He ascended to heaven. (If this isn’t true, one must answer the questions of where Jesus was “hiding” during the entire period of the early church; why and how the disciples would lie, and then die for their fabrication; and why this lie was never exposed or even suspected by anyone.)
The bottom line is this: The evidence for the resurrection and the deity of Christ stands or falls together, and there is simply no legitimate rational basis to the notion that the conclusion this evidence points to is inherently impossible.
resurrection and deity
So God settles on a “middle-of-the-road” program. He is present enough so that those who want to experience Him can experience Him, but absent enough so that those who don’t want to experience Him aren’t forced to—and they’re actually in a sense justified in their complaint over God’s absence! God is obvious enough so that those who want to see Him can see Him, but hidden enough so that those who don’t want to see Him can avoid Him—and be in a sense justified in their complaint about His secrecy. Love requires both evidence and hiddenness.
why is god hidden?
The question is not only, “Do you rationally see why you should believe?” but also “Do you want to believe?” There’s plenty of solid evidence for anyone who wants to believe, but enough faith is required to still render it a moral choice and not a coerced decision. God desires faith because He seeks love from responsible people, not forced behavior from robots.
faith is love
Think of it this way: If Jesus willingly died for us to avoid it, hell must be one terrifying experience! The extremity of the cure shows the direness of the sickness.
