In his book Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering, theologian Gregory A. Boyd challenges the “Blueprint Worldview” that says all things — bad included — happen according to God’s plan, or divine blueprint, and we should accept it all believing God is in total control. He thinks this view of life is pernicious and contrary to the revelation of God’s unfathomable love in Jesus Christ. In contrast Boyd argues for the “Warfare Worldview” in which the creation is a war zone where bad things happen contrary to God’s will, and there are casualties of war, but our loving Creator is actively engaged in the battle, working to bring good out of evil, sustaining believers in the fight, and ensuring the final triumph of the kingdom of God. I think Boyd works too hard to reconcile every verse in the Bible to his warfare worldview; I am okay with there being blueprint believers among the biblical writers. But having said this, I also think he makes a strong case for the warfare perspective as being in accord with the whole of scripture and with the portrait of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. He does well in exploring the factors that limit what an almighty Creator can do in creation’s context, as well as in locating the mystery of evil not in the Creator’s will but in the infinite complexity of creation itself. We can no more understand why one baby is born healthy and another dies at birth than we can understand why any event happens in one way and not another. There are an infinite number of factors at work, visible and invisible, in the deep complexity of God’s creation. We can trust, though, that the God shown on Jesus Christ loves us passionately, grieves the evil and suffering that afflict us, and is present with us to guide, support, and bring us to eternal life. This is truly an encouraging, enlightening, and provocative book.
…This trying to figure God out is HARD!…and when i add to this my trying to make sense of life and in particular MY LIFE,things just get even more confusing..The more i study about YHWH,the more i realize i dont know much of anything for certain anymore. Yesterday,I heard a Muslim explain that when Moses asked God what His name was (so he could tell the Israelites who gave him the mantle of authority) God purposefully answered him “I will be what i will be” and thats all anyone needs to know. Yeshua said “unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom”,my interpretation of this is,that we are given the CAPABILITY to know the mysteries,but to do so we must ever seek deeper revelation and keep knocking down ‘doors’.
Boyd says what we need to know about God is not hard to figure out since God’s loving character is clearly revealed in Christ. But what is hard to understand is the presence of evil and suffering in creation. Boyd goes farther than anyone I’ve read in offering a plausible way of understanding evil, suffering, and God’s relation to them.
“……God is not hard to figure out since God’s loving character is clearly revealed in Christ.”..Really?…I’ve never yet been able to reconcile the differences in the Old Testament God of the Hebrews with the God that Jesus proclaimed,their as opposite and differing in character as night and day are. ..imo
Don’t look at, say, the Book of Joshua to learn who God is. Look at the cross. Keep your eyes on Jesus… God’s amazing love is displayed there for you. For you, Mike. Peace
Indeed. A member of my church once said that the Bible is a dialog between God and His people. It’s a story of our own being in covenant with God, turning away, suffering, and coming back into covenant again. So yes, if one is to look at, say, the book of Joshua alone one would be dissapointed… because you’re only getting part of the story.
While C.S.Lewis (the PROBLEM OF PAIN) and Rabi Kerchner (sp?) (WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE) attempt to relate their understanding of why bad things happen, and why we experience evil, a more thorny problem exists: what is GOOD? When someone asked Jesus “Good Rabi, tell us-” he is interupted them and said “Why do you say I am good? Only God is good.” With this, we must ask ourselves is “Good” “What is comfortable/profitable/pleasant to me? What do we think of GOOD when we take ourselves out of the equation and leave control of GOOD to God alone? Is then a “Good Life” a pleasant, comfotable experience?
St Thomas Aquinas defined beauty in this way: “Beauty is that which pleases when seen.” The good and the beautiful are cousins, so I’d define good in a similar way.