Anabaptist Lite

I spent a couple years in a private college near Tampa, Florida — a small Christian college, the theological leanings of which could be roughly described as Anabaptist Lite.  It is influenced heavily (and operated almost exclusively) by heirs of the Restoration Movement (Stone-Campbell Movement) of the 18th and 19th centuries.  I attended this college because I was raised in this kind of church, as were my parents, my wife, her parents, and so on.  I mention this here because there are certain presuppositions that drive restoration theology, and these presuppositions have an impact on how one approaches the problem of evil.  And since I’m personally familiar with them, I’ll discuss them first.

 

Back in my restorationist days, if you were to ask me to explain how a good God could preside over a universe in which evil occurred, my answer would have been shallow.  Now this shallowness isn’t the fault of restoration theology — I just hadn’t thought through it as far as I should have.  However, what I’ve since discovered is that the only way I could remain restorationist in my thinking while continuing to affirm biblical attributes of God (omniscience, omnipotence, foreknowledge, etc.) was to stay in the shallow end of the good God/evil world question.  And that is a legitimate criticism of restoration theology.   Those who do drift into the deep end either end up denying some of the attributes of God, or abandoning some of the basic pillars of Anabaptist theology.  This is one reason why we have so many open-theists and pseudo-Calvinists running around.

Let me illustrate.  A drunk driver plows through a red light and t-bones a Geo Metro, killing the two-year-old baby girl inside.  Where is God?  Did He notice?  Did He even try to stop it?  What kind of God let’s little girls get killed?  These are all valid questions, and they do come up when something like this happens.  But for the purposes of our discussion now, the important question is this: Can the Anabaptist answer these questions in accordance with his fundamental theological presuppositions without denying one or more of the scriptural attributes of God (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, foreknowledge), and without denying the scriptural doctrine of creation ex nihilo?  I say no, he cannot, and in the next post I intend to show the math.

No Stops

I’ve recently encountered the argument that there are no stops between Calvinism and atheism, and I’d like to unpack some of the constituent parts of that here.  Since the argument is really couched in the question of the problem of evil, I’ll start there.  Basically, the problem is this: God is here, and so is evil.  Not really a big deal at this level, but the plot really thickens when we borrow attributes of God from orthodox Christianity and start plugging them into the equation: An omnipotent God is here, and so is evil.  An omniscient God is here, and so is evil.  A sovereign God is here, and so is evil.  

 

If God is all of those things (and He is), and He is also a good God (and He is), then certain questions naturally follow.  Why doesn’t God stop the evil from happening?  In our haste we may find ourselves unwilling to say He doesn’t stop it, and start coming up with thinly veiled ways to suggest that He can’t, although that one requires an artful touch so as to not sound like we’re really denying His omnipotence.  Of course we can’t deny God’s omnipotence, but on the other hand we also cannot have God be the author of evil, because scripture is clear on that as well.  The rabbit hole just goes and goes. 

 

There is of course a scriptural approach to this question.  Now this is not to say that there is an answer exactly, if by “answer” we mean “a schematic diagram of God’s eternal secret decrees.”  After all, that’s not what the bible is for.  It’s not an owners manual for the Creator — it’s much more like an instruction manual for the creation.  And as such scripture is sufficient to teach us how to approach the question, how not to approach it, and how to settle it comfortably into our faithful expectation of the resurrection.  What I’d like to do in the posts to follow is examine some of the more popular approaches to the problem of evil in light of scripture.  As I do this, it will be important to remember that any approach we take to this question will end up falling into one of two categories.  It will either be an eisegetical subordination of scripture to philosophical presuppositions, or else it will be an exegetical subordination of the mind to revelation.  In any case, how we settle the problem of evil has broad and fundamental implications on how we view the nature of God, and this fact cannot be allowed to escape unnoticed.

Take it

Thanksgiving.  Now there’s a holiday I can get into.  Food.  Fall.  Family and friends.  Food.  hunting season.  A week of the best leftovers you’ll have all year.  Day off.  Food.  C’mon Thursday!

Interesting thing about this holiday — it’s not nearly as theological as many on the liturgical calendar, yet it remains in many ways one of the most godly.  For some reason, it has managed to escape much of the commercial influence that has made such a mess of Christmas.  (Oh sure, a handfull of folks are making a killing on yams and farm-raised birds. But hey — that’s food, and the holiday is precisely about having enough food.  That  we’re blessed with an abundance of food doesn’t exactly spoil the mood now, does it?)  Of course, it helps that Thanksgiving doesn’t have the incriminating pseudo-history of being invented by pagans.  (Granted, pagans widely celebrate Thanksgiving, but I can’t remember ever hearing them talk about ”taking it back.”)  And somehow it’s stayed pretty much below the PC radar, which is remarkable, considering that when we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are upholding a tradition of giving thanks to God because He has so graciously sustained us.  All things considered, it’s a wonder that no one’s chompin’ at the bit to call it “X-giving,” or “Wellness Acknowledgement Day,” or some other neutered, commie-femi-nonsense. 

There’s something about the giving of thanks that is just good for a man.  For Christmas and birthdays we give expensive presents.  For Easter and Halloween we give candy.  For Valentines Day we give sappy cards and more candy.  But on Thanksgiving, the only thing we’re really giving is the acknowledgement that we have taken.  That’s hard for pride to do.  It humbles us, and we need that on a lot of levels.  Giving of thanks is centering, too — it doesn’t go well with humanistic chaos.  In a way, it’s not unlike eating at the Lord’s table — in both cases we are coming hungry to a full table, and we are being filled.  We are taking what has been given, we are acknowledging both that we are taking, and that what we are taking has been given by God, and God is making us better for it.  This doesn’t lend itself well to either commercialization or pride.

But there’s another thing which, in our piety-turned-pietism, we tend to lose sight of:  God desires for His children to actually enjoy the things He has given them.  In Deuteronomy chapter 14, God tells His people to do a really unpietistic thing: He tells them to have a party before Him.  “…take the money in your hand, and go to the place which the LORD your God chooses.  And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen, for sheep, for wine or strong drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household.”  Now if you didn’t know any better, you’d almost think God wanted them to buy whatever they wanted, eat it before Him, and rejoice as a family.  Hmph.  What about cholesterol?  The money? The inches?  The guilt?

 We’ve grown so accustomed to guilt that I think we’ve acquired a taste for it.  A sort of love/hate relationship has developed.  We desire to be free from it, yet we don’t truly know how to live our lives without it, and so it’s like this blankie that we’re still carrying around in 5th grade.  There’s a legitimate place for guilt — it belongs right up in your face when you rebel against your creator.  It is the means by which the  proud sinner is crumbled before his perfect Saviour.  (And it shouldbe felt by people who start playing nothing but cheese-ball Christmas music on the radio as early as November 1st.)  But for the child of God, there is no guilt inherent in the giving of thanks.  (If you think there is, chances are you’re only sorry you couldn’t do it all yourself.)  There is no guilt in the creature rejoicing in his Creator.  

So knock it off and eat.  Whatever your heart desires.  Eat before the Lord your God and be filled, you and your household.  Take what has been given, and embrace the humility that comes from the giving of thanks.  Rejoice in the Lord and in His immeasurable grace, by which we’re a lot better off than the guys who started this holiday.  God is good, and He gives joy.  Take it.

Hard to Contain

“In our pietism, though, we tend to insist that God is primarily Nice. Period. God is Nice and Nicer and Nicest. The chief end of God is to be Nice. I believe in God the Nice. Maker of Niceness. In heaven, we’ll all be Nice. Pilate wasn’t Nice. He was mean, and ‘mean people suck.’ This whole modern Christian litany is so tedious and tiny. Of course, other people—equally foolish—think the solution is to be rude and mean. Yeah, God isn’t nice; He’s rude. But Yahweh is neither Nice or Rude: He is dangerous and unpredictable. He is Trinity. He is Fire, and fire is hard to contain. Sometimes all the advanced firefighting technology gets overcome in a canyon by a storm of flames. Sometimes people freeze next to a tiny flame. Fire’s edges won’t stand still; its borders aren’t easily traced. ‘Our God is a consuming fire.’ God’s command for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac came right from the center of flame. As H. A. Williams notes, ‘Whatever God wants in our relationship with Him, it certainly isn’t respectability’” (Douglas Jones, Playing with Knives: God the Dangerous, Credenda Agenda, Volume 16, Issue 3: Thema).