Can God be Trusted?

Pursuant to a variety of recent blog posts, last night I read John Stackhouse's book Can God be Trusted?: Faith and the Challenge of Evil, a delightful, if roving, popular read on some of the issues at stake in the discussion.

What I appreciate most about the book is its popular but deeply sympathetic tone to the challenge of faith. It offers no ultimate answer, though does provide a reasonable outline for why belief in God might be consistent with the problem of evil. However, discussions like this often seem to intellectualize the very problem which is not - really - fundamentally intellectual. Stackhouse does not. He lets the reader continue to feel the heft of the existential problem of faith, and further to agree that faith is hard - it is no naturally easy thing to fall into, or to fix ourselves up with. And it is not, of course, something we can stir up in our own hearts with sufficient study and reflection.

Such faith, Stackhouse rightly notes, is moved and made within us by the Spirit of God, echoing my own oft repeated evening prayer: I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!

When it comes to the deep pain and problems of the age we are in, I can think of no other prayer by which to come to faith.

Sentimental Jesus

In response to Q Prentice asking tough questions about God, Job and the experience of brokenness in the world I wanted to share a personal worship experience from this past Sunday.

At my home church we make Lectio Devina a somewhat regular practice, something I have embraced personally now for a little more than four years. On this evening we read the story from Mark 4 of Jesus calming the storm. Afterward the congregation shared their reflections.

One of the pitfalls of Lectio is that it necessarily focuses on a very small story or section of Scripture (also one of its strengths!). The reflections that were shared after this story basically came to: Jesus cares about us, he's in the boat with us, and he will calm our storms if we ask him.

These comments come out of good Dutch-immigrant axiom's I grew up with: God never gives you a load your shoulders can't bear; He never gives you more than you can handle; it's all to make you stronger (etc). Thus emerges a picture of a loving, but stern Father God who allows pain because it benefits us - personally, in some future-unknown manner.

I don't know about this. I don't know about this at all. Our pastor asked us what kind of images occurred to us hearing this story. Maybe I have a little "glass-is-half-empty" syndrome, or I study the dark side of international politics too much, but the image that came to my mind was: walking along Atlantic coastal villages in Newfoundland, with good friends, reading the plaques and memorials of ships that went down, all hands lost, at sea. "Poor bastards", I thought. "They obviously didn't get a calm sea like Galilee that day in Mark 4". My experience of the world tells me pain and suffering doesn't always make me stronger, it doesn't always benefit me or allow me new important insights on life and God - sometimes it hurts like hell, it doesn't ever make sense, it breaks us, and we die.

This is a bigger discussion: about judgment, about evil, about suffering, about God. But I don't want to get lost in academic and theological jargon to lose the existential heft. There is a real intellectual and emotional effort to be made by Christians to confess that God is indeed omnipotent, indeed all-loving, but that doesn't necessarily mean He's my personal go-to guy who's never going to let bad things happen to me. Just because Jesus is in the passenger's seat, doesn't mean I won't rear-end that Volvo. I believe the Dutch axiom that covers this is: Trust God, but lock your doors.