The off-duty God
I’ve been struggling to get any reading done in the last week or so. I put Spong’s book on hold to quickly knock out Donald Miller’s new book, and then came back to Spong. However, I’ve only managed one chapter in the last week. If you know much about John Shelby Spong’s work and about my own church background, you know there are some significant differences in the things he says and what I’ve heard most of my life.
In that chapter, in which he examines the relationship between ecology and theology, Spong discusses the elements of the theistic definition of God – that “God is a divine being who comes to us from outside this life”, that he rules from outside this world. One of the elements of this definition, he contends, is the idea that it speaks to people’s need for security. Believing in “a miracle worker in the sky who can come to our aid” is comforting.
He goes on to suggest, however, that this idea of God should have disappeared a long time ago. He says:
There is not a theistic God who exists to take care of you or me. There is no God who stands ready to set aside the laws by which this universe operates to come to our aid in time of need. There are no everlasting arms underneath us to catch us when we fall. Ask the people who were the hapless passengers of those hijacked airplanes as they were hurtling toward the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. No divine hand reached down to save them. Ask the families and friends of the crew on the spacecraft Challenger as it exploded shortly after lift-off in 1986. No protecting diety embraced them. Ask the children, spouses or parents of service personnel during the various Iraqi wars where this supernatural God was when they received the official message from their government which began, “We regret to inform you…” Ask the Jews where the God who could split the Red Sea was when they were being marched into Hitler’s crematoriums during the Holocaust. Ask the children who were born with the HIV virus or the parents of an only child who is killed by a drunk driver. The God that we presume lives above the sky, whose primary vocation is to watch over, guard and protect vulnerable human beings, somehow appears to be frequently off-duty.
The “off-duty God” has given me trouble for some time now. I’ve battled doubts related to all things spiritual for over ten years now and I’ve posted in my previous version of this blog about such things in the past (see Is Anybody out There? and Confessions for a couple of examples.) Sometimes it’s a battle over whether or not an interpretation is correct. Increasingly, it’s a battle over whether or not an idea is true at all.
Yet it’s the questions of “why” or “where was God when…” that continue to haunt me the most. At the risk of sounding like one of my kids, I want to shout “that’s not fair!” The well-known tragedies that Spong mentions are examples we all see, but there are so many more. When a couple loses their only child in an auto accident while he’s on a kindergarten field trip. What good comes of such an event? When a friend’s wife decides life is no longer worth living, leaving him and their two preschool daughters behind. Why do these girls have to grow up without their mother, and wonder what drove her to do such a thing? When a friend loses his dad and a relative says at the funeral that “God had a special job for him and needed him right now.” Really? What about his family? Did they no longer have a need for him? I doubt they would agree.
I wrote about David Bazan’s new album, recently, which is a chronicle of his own journey and the difficulties he has encountered with matters of God and faith. The album closer “In Stitches” contains the following lyric:
When Job asked you the question,
You responded, “Who are you
To challenge your Creator?”
Well if that one part is true,
It makes you sound defensive
Like you had not thought it through
enough to have an answer
or you might have bit off more than you could chew
The answer God gives Job, if you can call it an answer, sounds like “shut up, I’m in charge, and you can’t understand it anyway.” That may be true, but it doesn’t make it or other statements such as “his ways are higher than ours” or “we’ll understand it all by and by” any easier to swallow. Perhaps if he appeared to me in the same manner he supposedly did to Job, it would be. But for now, in this world, at this time, Spong’s suggestion that God is “frequently off-duty” does seem too often true. The definition of God that has him in control of everything is not necessarily comforting when it appears he either isn’t or chooses not to be.
Once again, as I’ve said before, this is not any type of declaration that I have abandoned faith (or that I will at some point in the future.) I’m only thinking out loud, I suppose, and my thoughts are no doubt incomplete. I believe I will be working through these types of things for a very long time, and I’ll likely post more about that journey here.
It’s the way I’m built, I believe; to want things to make more sense. I can’t help it, and when they don’t, it causes me to doubt and/or ask questions. Many things I’ve always believed seem to make less sense as the years go by and I ponder them more and more. In my post two years ago, I asked the question “how do I reconcile what I believe with what I see?” I may never resolve it in a way that will be sufficient in my own eyes, but I suspect I will always be trying to answer that question.
