My terrifying venture into Theodicy, part 1
A note: What I am about to write scares me. A lot. And I think it might scare you, too.
But I also think it is truth. I might not get all of it exactly right, but I will try and trust the grace of Jesus to keep the untruths out. So. Let’s begin.
“God is vulnerable.”
That is the thesis of today’s letter.
I can hear a dialogue in your head starting up around about now: “No. God is not vulnerable, that is blasphemous. He cannot be. God is omnipotent, he is sovereign, and therefore he cannot be vulnerable. We cannot make God fit into our little box*.”
It is true: we cannot fit God into our little boxes, limited by finite brains and matter. But that’s exactly it. God put himself into our little box. He stuffed all of his vast splendor and intellect and power into a frame of skin and skeleton and heartbeat and breath, in the person of Jesus.
Here is another truth: God invented the virtues. We were not the first to practice goodness, love, longsuffering…any of them. God did. And that goes for courage, too.
Remember what we said about courage in the first letter? To tell the story of who you are with your whole heart? To open your heart to someone with the knowledge that you. might. fail?
Author and Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, his brilliant exploration of the roots of Christian faith:
“Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.”
That’s what happened, isn’t it?
It happened to Jesus on the cross. He was tempted, tortured, and executed…yet he triumphed spiritually and physically over all of his trials, defeating death itself.
But it also happened at creation.
God demonstrated courage and vulnerability when he created us.
He did this when he gave us a choice to follow him or not follow him, when he gave us a choice to live in his gloriously perfect (the thriving, alive perfect) world or to shudder the balance and topple the beauty and the order like dominos down the generations?When he gave us the choice as to whether or not evil would exist on earth?
For what is evil but a straying from the way God created the world to be? A parasite of the good?
The fact is that the introduction of evil devastated God as much as it does us. In fact, it cost him everything.
But he took that risk. He put a tree in the garden, and said, “do not eat of it.”
There was no flaming sword yet. There was no fence around that famous tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (The world knowledge comes from the word experience or practice, by the way.)
“I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience,” said C.S. Lewis in his masterpiece, Perelandra,
“In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are his will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?”
Yes, he could have created us without a choice. But then we would not be made in the image of God. We would not have the capacity to give love to Him or to one another,because love by its very definition is a choosing of someone else’s needs over our own.
And we failed.
We chose ourselves over our Creator, and thus introduced darkness into our world.
But fortunately, there’s more to the story…
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*For those of you still wrestling with the word “vulnerable” and “God” in the same sentence, consider this:
“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:25)
LionCrash: A Courage Collective 