Thanks, try to keep a postive vibe going on. Kind of like hippies on weed, but I'm not on weed--hippie, let that to you to decide
. Anyway, strange comparison aside, I think you bring up some interesting points.
Still, I'm not exactly convinced I catch your train of thought. I imagine that you are referencing those that don't join in eternal salvation. If that is the case, I don't see a failed plan--I see a loving creator who weeps and who longs for those who reject him (note the difference here between rejecting and not choosing--major difference). I'm not sure i would call it lack of a plan or even a failed plan.
There is a mystery to redemption. The idea that the "wages of sin is death but the gift of God eternal life." This mystery of eternal life and God himself "giving his only son" to die to take our place--that's love, that's change. The only catch to the whole deal is this "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." So the only condition is that we need accept Christ when we have the knowledge to do so. If no one ever has the oppurrtunity to accept, if they never have the mental capacity, if they reject a form of God (the god I see in much of the Western churches might count) that isn't really what God is (believe me, I've rejected that hell fire and brimstone, condemning thing they sell)--God understands. He has the knowledge, he has the love and the power. God is the one who decides.
You and I have a lot in common in our views on the mercilessness of much of the way hell is taught and the ideas of redemption and grace and what not. I think one area we take a different track is that God is hurt by those who reject him. Yet his mercy has to allow them to meet their chosen fate ("the wages of sin is death;" at this point they've rejected his gift of eternal life, that's a group that has been offered and turned down knowingly--a difference between not choosing). This is pain. NT Wright wrote a fine book exposing the ways in which we've westernized an "eastern religion," if you will, christanity. We've lost the shattering, the transforming, the rebelious, the poetic and religion busting message of one of the greatest peace-makers of all time. Ghandi once said that if it weren't for Christians, the whole world would be Christian. We've lost the thread. Yet NT Wright made the remarks that maybe the reason mortals can't look at God's face in his divinity is not because it overpowers us, but because that face is so broken and overcome with grief and sadness and pain for his creation gone astray. That's love, that's acceptance.
When I think of truth, I think of a mystery. It's something we're never fully going to comprehend. Something we never can with our mortal minds. We may think we have it down with christian creed and adventist doctrine--but truth is a mystery of God. He wants us t think things out, he want's us to "reason together" with him. But we cannot get all the anwers. Truth is such a mysterious concrete, yet abstract, concept that we cannot can spend lives contemplating. It's the poetry of the spiritual realm, the controversy of scholars, and the stuff of conversation between you and I.
PEACE
