"Story behind this? Her dad was leaving on a 2 year deployment. She was crying, and wouldn’t let go of her dad’s hand, even when he stood in line, saluting. No one had the heart to break them apart."
Source: http://beautifulwhatsyourhurry.tumblr.com/
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8 comments:
So what's the oppressively joyful message here?
And where is God here?
Maybe God is hiding behind the guy with the gun?
Maybe God is indisposed and couldn't make it to the photo-op in time?
Maybe God is sleeping?
Hell, maybe God has been sleeping since Jesus left, which would explain a lot of wars, like the one where that fellow is going to go and maybe die or maybe come back and lose his family or maybe come back and kill his family or maybe come back and kill himself.
Of course, if these questions sound familiar, they should. I'm playing with the ways in which Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal. Because, of course, Elijah only believed in a God who acted in this world in meaningful ways -- not a God who is unknown and unknowable. Or maybe one of the things that changed after Jesus came (since you want to discount the prophets before Jesus), was that God actually became unknowable? Kind of a switch from the standard theological assertion that Jesus actually made God more knowable, but it seems that the position you want to take.
I'm not discounting the prophets before Jesus, I am stating that revelation is more complete through Jesus than it was before his advent. I don't think that's Marcionism.
During advent, we wait for the second coming of Christ, and yes, the sooner the better, as that horrible picture of the little girl makes abundandly clear.
The oppressively joyful message here is that a God who could get himself crucified is present in our disasters, and NOT asleep in heaven. Of course, there is also the minor item of news that our short years on earth are not all there is.
God did not bring peace on earth, but he came to live in the mess with us, until the end of times. Just because we can't always feel it doesn't make it any less real.
As for direct intervention by God, I don't think that's the way the universe works. I'm more into process theology these days (which makes me a full-on heretic right with the best of them, of course!).
Basically, you know at the end of Job, where God asks Job who made the heavens and the mountains and so on? At first I thought that God was being a bully, telling Job to shut up because God did not have to give Job an answer.
Now I'm wondering if there is not another message, if God is not asking Job if he realises how difficult it is to bring order our of chaos and what a monstrous job creation is.
And while God is still in travail trying to do that, God's not finished with creation. We are welcome to enter into this travail along with God and have a go at creating alongside him. So what I hear is "get cracking".
So basically, in the age-old question betwenn (1) ominpotence,
(2)omnibenevolence and (3) no God at all, I'm inclined to ditch the omnipotence.
But it seems as though you are contradicting yourself:
You speak of a God who is wholly unknown and unknowable, and then you speak of a God who is more fully revealed in Jesus, who "lives in the mess with us" and so on.
How do you resolve that? Perhaps God is known and knowable in a story book and in a liturgy but not in any of the experiences of our day to day life (because any encounter with God would be an act of divine intervention, wouldn't it)? That doesn't sound like a living God to me. That God sounds dead--sounds like the idols so consistently mocked in the Bible.
It seems to me that you want to hold onto some sort of faith in Jesus while denying the kind of faith in God that Jesus had.
So, basically, it seems to me that the age old options you reference don't really get to the crux of the matter. Unless you sacrifice omnipotence to such an extent that God can never or will never intervene in history... a hard argument to make based upon something like the Gospels which are all about divine intervention.
You keep misquoting me! I said in my comment that God that is ALMOST unknown and unknowable. There are things we do know, and all the more so because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
I heard a good sermon on this recently. Basically it says that Jesus is the light of the world, but he's not a floodlight. He's a small light which the darkness does not overcome. And on some days we wonder whether we might have been in contact with it, but even then cognitively we're not entirely sure.
Thus, my whole point was: don't teach that he's your best buddy, present to your cognition all the time because he's not and this expectation lets people down.
Regarding my views of God's direct intervention, or lack thereof, I think it also tied in with how we see the Bible. I see it as a collection of inklings that people have about God. And the inklings get a whole lot better when Jesus enters the picture, i.e. we know God a bit better.
Regarding all miracles O.T. or N.T. I think that they might just be fairy stories, invented so that people of that era would take the writings more seriously. At that time every other "god" was doing miracles so if you wanted attention you needed to show that yours did too and better ones.
Apparently, there is no archeological evidence of the hebrews ever having been slaves in Egypt at the period when they were supposed to have been there, while there is some evidence of their presence during other periods of exile. So even that key fundational myth might just have been entirely made up.
I have no idea what Jesus believed in as an observant Jew of his time. This does not stop me from basing my life upon the inklings about God that his life provides us with. As for resurrection, I think it was always part of the ordering of the universe.
In all this, I may be wrong of course, but I hope that I'm wrong in good faith.
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my whole point was: don't teach that he's your best buddy, present to your cognition all the time because he's not and this expectation lets people down.
I can agree with this, but my point is to raise the question as to what the heck God is or is not and how the heck God is or is not involved with the world, based particularly upon the claims made about God in the Bible. I'm not saying that God is or should be our best buddy, but I am saying that there seems to be a disconnect between our lived experiences and the claims made about God by the Bible (and by Jesus as he is presented in the Gospels). It is that disconnect that I want us to try and explore more honestly (if I can use the word... know what I mean?).
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