God Be In Us

 Fourteenth Wednesday after Pentecost

Thanks to Chris for his kind comment and for the gracious email I received from another one of you.

Wednesday is theology day on the blog. Where is God in the midst of all that is going on now? Why doesn't God intervene and end the Coronavirus? Why doesn't God soften the voices of the world's leaders and politicians? We live in the strangest period of my lifetime. Other than during the Vietnam War, I think this is the most divisive period for our nation in my lifetime. I won't get into the politics of it all, but I do want to take a shot at the theology of it all, 

Twenty-five years ago or so, I was at a speech given by my old friend, the New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. Bart, agnostic then, has since become atheist. I remember at one point in Bart's speech his saying, "Why doesn't God intervene?" He then said words to the effect that, if God were to clearly and visibly intervene in something here on earth now, as God is said to have done in the Bible, then he, Bart, could believe in God. 

I wondering whether we simply don't have the entire model wrong. Christians and atheists are essentially working from the same model. We know of God's existence through God's interventions in the world and in our lives. While I don't want to deny anybody these interventions, perhaps we would do well to take a look at God from a different perspective.

 

The prevalent model is of a God in God's heaven, who occasionally gives us fleeting glimpses of the divine, who occasionally intervenes in human affairs, but mostly leaves us alone. I think I have articulated something along that line in a previous Wednesday blog.

 

In Paul's speech on the Areopagus in Athens he refers to God as "in him we live and move and have our  being" (Acts 17:28). A couple of time in Ephesians we read that Christ "fills all in all"(Eph. 1:21, 4:10). Or how about this one,  "I pray that you may be able to comprehend,with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph. 3:18-19).

 

The better model may be a God who is with us and in us, who accompanies us at every moment, who suffers with us, who heals us, who guides us, who is not someone or something totally other than us, but who is in us as a part of us through the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we need not look further out for God but dig deeper down.

I realize that what I'm saying here is nothing new. Many theologians have written along this line--but many have not. I think that if I'm going to blog once a week on theology, I need to read more theologians, I'll start on it this week. The first book I think I'm going to read is Doxology by the late Geoffrey Wainwright. Some of you at University UMC may remember him. He and his wife attended there during his last years. Providentially enough, he was there at the last sermon I preached, which was at Carolina Meadows retirement village. 

Faithfully,

Christian