I will not be checking comments here, so please move all discussion to the new address. Thanks!

It should be noted that this Standard Model of God is a model of the Christian God specifically. That being said, I agree with the authors about the view being “remarkably clear and consistent.” I agree with the dictionary definition, and the only clarification I want to make is with point #6.

There is widespread agreement on the fact that the Bible is uniquely inspired by God (literally God-breathed) and authoritative for doctrine (belief). However, the Bible says very little beyond that about the nature of its inspiration, and you will find the Christian community contains many different perspectives on the way in which the Bible is inspired and what that means for how we read it.

I can’t give an exhaustive account of the different views, but if anyone would like to read more I can send you some papers on the subject. Suffice to say, I believe the Bible is a reliable source of doctrine (and the primary authority against which doctrine is judged) when interpreted correctly, which includes taking the human authors’ intent, cultural context, literary genre, and other factors into account. This process is sometimes difficult and messy, and good people sometimes disagree. I believe the Bible is more clear on essential teachings and less clear on others.

I also believe that proper interpretation cannot happen apart from a community of believers led by the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures were entrusted to the church, and as a group we are better able to read them than can individuals on their own (this is true for any text, but even more so for a text that is designed to be the devotional reading for a community). We must have the Holy Spirit living inside of us in order for the Bible to “come fully alive” for us, and for us to able to understand it rightly. This is not to say that people who don’t believe can’t come to the Bible and get truth, just that the relate to it less fully than do those who have the Spirit.

For a brief article on the clarity of Scripture and a list of verses that talk about it, see here.

I agree with what the author(s) write(s) about prayer, and agree once again with the paradox: something is just not right about the death of Neva Winnecoup-Rogers, and the only tragedies that happen in our world.

As we established in the previous post, there is no way of proving that God completely ignored Neva Winnecoup-Rogers. Rather, what we know is that He did not stop Jeff Weise from killing her. We do not know what else He might have done that day, or how He might have been working within Neva’s heart and mind.

The question is a good one though: Why didn’t God protect Neva Winnecoup-Rogers’ life? And I am going to say right now that I have absolutely no idea. What I disagree with is not that this question isn’t troubling; I think it is deeply troubling and something we need to wrestle with both intellectually and emotionally. What I disagree with is the assertion that the honest wrestling with this question (call it intellectual integrity or rationality, if you like) makes disbelief in God the only viable option. That is the claim I will be disputing throughout.

The question of unanswered prayer (particularly in light of Jesus’ promises mentioned in this chapter) is troubling. I have personally seen God do some incredible things in response to prayer (remove a boil off a man’s leg overnight, cause a girl’s scars from self-mutilation to completely fade overnight, heal a waitress’ wrist so she could work without pain or a brace, heal my crossbite to the extent that I no longer require surgery, etc.) And yet, I have also seen many of my prayers go unanswered (healing for my wife’s chronic pain conditions, healing for a friend’s bum knee, good sleep for a friend suffering from insomnia, etc).

I have seen enough that cannot reasonably be considered coincidence or chance that I cannot rationally doubt that God is alive and active in this world. Even so, there have been enough times where God did not do what I thought He should do that I sometimes wrestle with whether or not God is all-powerful or perfectly good.

I do not fall into the camp that wants to use God’s “hidden will” as an excuse for unanswered prayer. Andrew Murray in his book “With Christ In The School of Prayer” does a fantastic job of showing that “God’s will” as it occurs in verses like 1st John 5:14 is not talking about God’s hidden will but His revealed will (i.e. what we know about His nature and character). Thus, we pray expectantly for God to heal amputees (or whatever) because it has been revealed that He is a God who delights in healing and restoration.

I do, however, want to understand Jesus’ promises in context. It is a basic principle of exegesis that we understand the part in reference to the whole (in this case, we understand Jesus’ promises in light of the Old and New Testaments). We also want to understand Jesus’ promises in light of everything else He says and does.  The Principle of Charity (see here) requires that we give Jesus (and everyone else!) the best reading possible, meaning we assume a logical consistency among everything He says and does unless there is no interpretation that allows us to do so. Finally, it is important to understand how early Christians interpreted Jesus’ promises, because they give us a big clue about how His audience would have understood Him.

With that in mind, I’d like to mention the following:

• The Old Testament is full of unanswered prayers and wrestling with the mystery/hiddenness of God.
• There’s an entire literary genre in the Old Testament (Psalms of Lament) devoted to this very thing.
• The Jews of Jesus’ time had been crying out for years and years to God for deliverance from the Romans with no apparent answer.
• Jesus, like most rabbis, used hyperbole as a rhetorical teaching device (Luke 14:26 is a clear example).
• Jesus says that true belief is necessary (Mark 11:24), and that the answered prayer must glorify the Father (John 14:12-14).
• Jesus had at least one of His prayers go unanswered (Luke 22:42).
• The New Testament talks regularly about the possibility of unanswered prayer.
• Unanswered prayer and miraculous answers to prayer were both part of the normal experience and teaching of early Christians. You’ll find no theologian or teacher (as best as I can tell) in the early church who understood Jesus to be saying that every prayer will be answered exactly how we want it to each and every time. (If there was someone who did, this was certainly not the dominant interpretation).

So, one cannot reasonably interpret Jesus’ promises as do the author(s) of the website. We only get this interpretation if we take the words at face value independent of context (this is often called the “literal” reading, though that’s a bit of a misnomer).  I understand this is an approach to the Bible that some Christians take, but it has always been the minority view and has little to no grounding in the interpretations of early Christians.

This leaves us with the question of what exactly Jesus is talking about. In light of Jesus’ Resurrection and the fact that we can be filled with the Holy Spirit, His promises seem to be an encouragement for believers to use the power and authority they have in Christ to pray for healing, deliverance/exorcism, etc. This would signal a change from the Old Testament, would line up with the totality of what Jesus said and did, and affirms the experience of the early church where miracles happened frequently (Athanasius’ “On The Incarnation” is a wonderful example of this).

Thus, both Christianity and atheism are logically consistent with the fact of unanswered prayer, but only some sort of theism can explain answered prayer (where it can’t reasonably be considered coincidence or chance). There are a great many times where what people claim are miracles could be explained by coincidence (which doesn’t mean it isn’t God – it just means we don’t know that it is). However, there seem to be times where that explanation won’t hold (in the case of the fading scars I mentioned earlier, for instance).

I realize that many aren’t convinced that there are such things as true miracles, and bemoan the fact that they haven’t seen one that is empirically-verifiable. The natural question is: If God is still in the business of miracles, why won’t He prove it (and Himself) in a way that would be accepted by all?

My answer to this question, in the end, will once again be, “I don’t know.” However, later I will get into the question of whether this is a reasonable expectation to have of God, and whether we need a proof of this kind to rationally justify belief in Him. The author(s) of the website go(es) into this in a later chapter, so I’ll save my thoughts for then.

As far as Steve’s miracle and the questions the author(s) ask(s), they are good ones. God could have easily saved all the houses, but He chose not to. Presumably He had a reason, but the best attempts we can muster all seem pretty . . . well, lacking (not logically, but emotionally). It’s clear Biblically that God is not the author of evil, but He seems to allow a lot of it to happen.

With the author(s) I ask, “Why is God so mysterious?”

The story that begins this chapter is powerful. It is detailed, perfectly scripted for the point of the chapter, and most importantly relevant (it actually happened and could easily happen again). However, the moves that come next, while rhetorically vital, are questionable at best (and let’s ignore, for the moment, the question of what God should do).

• What help has Jesus promised? If we look at the Biblical claims (which the website does later), a lot of the force of this point is lost. There is nothing that says God will help exactly how we want Him to each and every time we ask (though the author(s) of later chapters make that claim). However, it is right to say that Jesus promised God’s help.
• This kid (whose name was Jeff Weise) certainly isn’t pure evil. In all likelihood, this is a boy who has been wounded emotionally and perhaps physically. He has probably suffered at the hands of parents and/or authority. We know for a fact he suffered at the hands of his peers (see here). What he is doing is certainly evil, but he himself is more deserving of pity than hatred.
• Neva Winnecoup-Rogers’ exhibited tremendous courage and faith in the face of a great threat, knowingly risking her life. However, to make her the chief exemplar of faith and goodness is too much, as I’m sure she would attest if she could.
• It isn’t clear that God “completely ignore[d] the prayers”. The account says she prayed that God would be with them and help them. We have no way of knowing God wasn’t with them, and all we know is that He didn’t stop the shooting; we don’t know He didn’t “help” in other ways.

All that being said, this situation (and others like it) is deeply paradoxical, just as the author claims. And there must be a reason why, just as the author claims. The questions at the end of the chapter are important ones, ones that Christians and non-Christians alike need to take seriously. Unfortunately, too few people take the time to do so honestly and carefully. I hope to be one who does.

“What meets our eyes [in overall experience] denotes neither total absence or manifest presence of the divine, but the presence of a hidden God.”

Pascal, Pensées

If that’s right, maybe we need to change how we articulate faith and how we encourage people who struggle with whether or not God is good.

I don’t have time right now to interact with the material extensively, but I will later. For now I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts who takes the time to visit the site.

“Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”

This verse is the clearest example of Immanuel Hidden that I am aware of. That is, the author is talking with God about His hiddenness. The simplicity of it teaches a wonderful lesson: hiddenness is not so much a problem for God as it is for us.

What I mean is this. The common context for talking about divine hiddenness is apologetics. We take hiddenness to be something we must overcome to prove God’s existence, or at least to make faith in it reasonable. The unstated assumption is that hiddenness is a phenomenon outside of God and faith that exerts pressure on them.

I want to suggest that hiddenness is better conceived of as a problem within faith; the pressure it exerts comes from within, not from outside. Christianity provides a substantial place for divine hiddenness, so strictly speaking hiddenness isn’t evidence against the existence of the Christian God (it’s not even as if hiddenness is brought up ad hoc; it has had a substantial place since the beginning). Rather, it is the intellectual and existential crisis faced by those with a radical commitment to God who don’t understand how that meshes with the world being the way it is.

Ultimately hiddeness only makes complete sense – and only exerts its fullest pressure – within a framework of robust faith in God. It is our Savior who is (sometimes) hidden. This doesn’t make the struggle easier; in fact, it just may make it harder. However, it does mean that hiddenness does not compel us to the conclusions some think it does.

“God’s hiddenness… meets us in Christ, and finally and supremely in the crucified Christ; for where is God so hidden as here, and where is possibility of offense so great as here?”

The last part of the quote is really what gets me. People are truly offended by God’s hiddenness – not just perplexed, discouraged or irritated, but offended. And, as Barth notes, God’s hiddenness meets us, confronts us. God’s hiddenness does not stay hidden!

What’s interesting here is the presence of God in the Incarnation (literally “God with us”) is the vehicle for His hiddenness in the crucifixion. That is, in the very nature of who He is as proven by his preaching, teaching and miracles Christ is profoundly present to us. Indeed, even today there are an abundance of miraculous occurrences that testify to the existence of God. Yet, if Barth is right, all that is overshadowed (not negated, but awfully close) by the “testimony” of the crucifixion. That is, the crucifixion forced the same questions upon the disciples as profound suffering and injustice force upon us: where is God? why doesn’t He do anything? could we have been wrong about Him?

Paul calls this a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23). Could it be that suffering and injustice are our stumbling blocks? Could it be they that lead us to pronounce as foolish that which is not? I’m inclined to say yes, but I don’t know yet how to reveal it as such. Maybe that’s part of the struggle of faith (it’s definitely part of the struggle of this blog!).

I’m only familiar with bits and pieces of Barth’s theology. If someone reads this and knows more about him, I’d be interested to know how this theme works itself out in the rest of his theology.