The Conjunction of Opposites

[Clare73]

I don't think child leukemia is an instance of the justice of God, if that's what you're getting at, no.

Child leukemia is the result of Adam's fallen nature which is the result of the justice of God on his disobedience.

 

[Colo Millz]

There is something in my view terribly amiss and extremely remote from the genuine theology of the New Testament in your simplistic predestinarianism. (I assume this is what you would call it).

Child leukemia exists on the level of secondary causality and in no manner is decreed by God as some kind of cosmic punishment.

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that every single thing whatsoever that occurs at the level of secondary causality — in nature or history — is governed not only by a transcendent providence but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things.

But one should consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of — but entirely by way of — every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines (and so on).

 

[Colo Millz]

Your exaggerated adoration of God’s sheer omnipotence can yield conclusions as foolish as Calvin’s assertion, in Book III of the Institutes, that God predestined the fall of man so as to show forth his greatness in both the salvation and the damnation of those he has eternally preordained to their several fates.

Were this so, God would be the author of and so entirely beyond both good and evil, or at once both and neither, or indeed merely evil (which power without justice always is).

The curious absurdity of all such doctrines is that, out of a pious anxiety to defend God’s transcendence against any scintilla of genuine creaturely freedom, they threaten effectively to collapse that transcendence into absolute identity — with the world, with us, with the devil.

For, unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God’s unadulterated power.

One wonders, indeed, if a kind of reverse Prometheanism does not lurk somewhere within such a theology, a refusal on the part of the theologian to be a creature, a desire rather to be dissolved into the infinite fiery flood of God’s solitary and arbitrary act of will.

In any event, such a God, being nothing but will willing itself, would be no more than an infinite tautology — the sovereignty of glory displaying itself in the glory of sovereignty — and so an infinite banality.

 

[Colo Millz]

In your view we are very, very far away from the view of transfiguring love which is the message of Easter.

 

[AV1611VET]

2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

 

[Clare73]

There is something in my view terribly amiss and extremely remote from the genuine theology of the New Testament in your simplistic predestinarianism. (I assume this is what you would call it).

I would call it what Paul calls it and reveals it to be.
And it falls to you to show the Biblical error of my understanding.

Child leukemia exists on the level of secondary causality and in no manner is decreed by God as some kind of cosmic punishment.

All this is not perfect as it was perfect in the Garden, is the result of the Fall and its consequences ordained by God.

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that every single thing whatsoever that occurs at the level of secondary causality — in nature or history — is governed not only by a transcendent providence but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things.

But one should consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of — but entirely by way of — every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines (and so on).

That comfort is neither purchased nor does it exist apart from the faith in God, which faith is the gift of the Holy Spirit (Php 1:29, 2 Pe 1:1, Ac 13:48, 18:27, Ro 12:3) not given to all.
And I have no doubt that you now this as well as I do.

 

[Thea2]

… So what? …

I know a bit about Daoism. The Dao De Jing has been a life long interest of mine and for the last 7 years I have been translating it from Chinese characters. That’s why I noticed you mentioning Jung.

 

[DamianWarS]

What do you make of the hard passages quoted above which indicate that God is responsible for evil, or at least, calamity?

Perspective is everything. if God is good, then everything from God inherits that goodness, regardless if we call it darkness or something else. Anything that is truly good is of God and anything truly evil is not of God as it goes against him. The Genesis creation account shows us a darkness that is transformed from disorder to order. in contrast, Revelation shows us a darkness destroyed, not transformed. One becomes a part of God's order through it's transformation, the other must be destroyed to maintain the order. thus 2 kinds of darkness, one of God, the other not.