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Questions of Faith and Practice

Introduction

Let us pray. –
Direct us, O Lord, in all our doings by your most gracious favor, and further us with your continual help; that in all our works, begun, continued, and ended in you, we may glorify your· your holy Name and, finally, by your mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

...

I should also say that, since my written answers to the questions discussed last year are conveniently available at the church's website, I advise consulting it to any of you feeling the need for more of a response to some of the questions before us this evening than I shall take time to give in my initial

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answers here. More than that, a couple of questions submitted this year are close enough to some asked last year that I shall say very little in responding to them here and simply refer the questioners as well as the rest of you to my earlier responses. If any of you needs or wants access to my written answers otherwise than electronically, let me know, and I'll arrange to send you a hard copy.

Finally, I stress that the purpose of my initial response to any of the questions is solely and simply to focus our discussion, by setting forth at least one possible answer that can be responsibly given to it, which we can then all critically appropriate – both directly, by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of my answer, and indirectly, by suggesting and considering other, arguably more adequate answers that can and possibly should be given to the question.

1. Where is God in tough times?

In answering this question, I simply assume, for reasons I've just given, first, that by "God" is to be understood the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so the One implied by "the greatest and first commandment," which reads, according to the formulation of Jesus' teaching in Mt 22:37 f., "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." God is to be understood, in other words, as the all-worshipful One, the one reality worthy of unreserved trust and unqualified loyalty, and hence the allsurpassing, unsurpassable reality, "than which – in Anselm's words – none greater can be conceived." And I assume, second, that by "tough times" is to be understood times that, for anyone trying to lead a human life, and for causes either more generally natural or more specifically historical, happen to be bad times rather than good, unfortunate rather than fortunate, and therefore troubling or demanding times, hard or difficult to live through.

My answer to the question, then, summarily is: God is where God is in all times, tough or not tough – doing what God unfailingly does in every time. I shall now briefly unpack this summary answer. God unfailingly does mainly two things. First, God makes whatever comes to be really possible, in fact as well as in principle; and, second, God

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makes whatever comes to be both really real and abidingly significant. In doing the first thing, God may be said to create and emancipate, or providentially order, all things; and in doing the second thing, God may be said to redeem and consummate all things. Because, in both cases, God's doing extends to all things, God is rightly said to be, in the one case, the Creator, and, in the other case, the Consummator-all other things being, in their myriad different ways, also creators and consummators, although always only of some things, never of all.

But if God in tough times is where God is in all times, doing what God alone unfailingly does in every time, two implications follow necessarily.

First, there is no more reason, logically, to ask where God is in tough times than in any other times, there being no logical connection whatever between the times of our lives, tough or otherwise, and the whereabouts of God. This is true, at any rate, if God is to be understood as we assumed at the outset, i.e., as the all-worshipful One of "the greatest and first commandment," and thus as the unsurpassable One, "than which none greater can be conceived." To worship is to trust and to be loyal-ideally, to trust unreservedly and to be loyal unqualifiedly. But worship in this sense is authorized as a proper response only if the object of worship, of trust and loyalty, is worshipful-ideally, all-worshipful. And this the object of worship can be only if it is unsurpassable: absolutely unsurpassable, or unsurpassable by itself as well as all others, in all the respects in which anything can be so; and relatively unsurpassable, or unsurpassable by all others, although not by itself, in all other respects. Although, for any believer in God conceived as all-worshipful and therefore unsurpassable in these senses, good times are rightly accepted as tokens or signs of God's reality and favor, they are in no way evidence, logically, of God's existence and activity and may not be taken, logically, to "prove" them. By the same token, bad times, or tough times, are in no way evidence logically of God's nonexistence or inactivity and "disprove" absolutely nothing that Christian witness and theology have any stake in affirming.

As for the so-called problem of evil, understood as being in some way a disproof of God as Christian faith understands God, it is, in point of fact, a pseudo-problem. It arises from a conception of God's "omnipotence" that is self-contradictory and therefore a pseudo-conception only, altogether apart from the

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fact, or the extent, of evil in the world. Moreover, the only God about whose whereabouts the reality of evil could logically raise even the least problem, anyhow, is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, not the God of "the greatest and first commandment," but an idol, a fetish, a non-God, or, what Paul dismisses as a "so-called god."

It follows, second, then, that our possibility as human beings before God is exactly the same in tough times as in any other times. Because God remains present and active in every time, we have the same possibility in tough times as in any other times--the possibility that I speak of, following Paul, as obedient faith, which is to say, entrusting ourselves unreservedly to God's pure, unbounded love and then living in unqualified loyalty to the cause of God's love, loving God with the whole of our being by loving all whom God always already loves, to whom God is always already loyal-by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

I conclude by remarking that, if what I have said is at all correct, perhaps the most appropriate prayer for the present tough times, as for any other times, is

the so-called serenity prayer commonly attributed to the great American theologian of the last century, Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Amen.

On which I comment only that, if faith is what I've interpreted it to be-namely, the "obedient faith" of unreseved trust in God's love and unqualified loyalty toit-then it is, in its essence, submission to God as God. But if Niebuhr is right in assuming, as I judge him to be, that there are "things that should be changed" as well as "things that cannot be changed," then, clearly, to obey God, and thus to submit to God as God, cannot be singular, but only duaL To act courageously and loyally to change the things that should be changed is no less to obey God, and so to submit to God as God, than to act serenely and trustfully to accept thethings that cannot be changed.