War

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 2

UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

AND THEIR OUTCOME

Study 2

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

WHY THEODICY IS AN ISSUE

Analysis and commentary upon the major problems in the world, nation, city, family or environment, can be heard daily on radio talkback segments across the globe. The blame, for our current or impending woes almost always rests with someone else. Cynicism abounds. Theology within the Christian church can all too easily become more a reflection of the popular, or dominant culture of the day, than a proclamation of the mind, and action of God – as revealed in Scripture. Only a thoroughly biblical theodicy can meet the world with the Word of grace, amidst dire judgments, as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness (Romans 1:18).

From Genesis 3 we hear that ever since the entrance of sin into the world, human beings have sought to place the blame for their circumstances upon someone else – mostly God, but also other people and other creatures. Guilt is deeply at work in every human heart, provoking a skewed view of the truth, globally. This is especially so, as God draws near:

They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Genesis 3:8-11)

The reflex response to God’s simple, but probing, existential question ‘Where are you?’ finds expression in the deflecting the blame onto another. The man quickly pointed to the woman as the leading cause of his present fear. He also blamed God – who gave the woman to be with him. The woman in turn, blamed the ancient serpent, the devil:

The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12-13)[1]

Human beings will view God very differently, depending upon whether they have a pure or an impure heart. Where a person has a pure heart, or cleansed heart, God reveals himself to be pure. Where genuine faith is not present, God’s wrath acts against the conscience of the guilty person, so that God appears to be unjust, unkind and wrong.

…with the pure you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you show yourself perverse (Psalm 18:26).

Sinful human beings frequently view the world by placing God in the Dock[2] in order that he may give account of himself. In our humanly devised, God-blaming kangaroo court, we human beings exercise the self-appointed role of prosecutor, and judge. If God is creator, we reason, then he must answer for the state of the world he has created! However, the Lord sits in the heavens and laughs (Psalm 2:4).

In his Foreword to our text, The Justification of God, Dean Carter exposes the heart of sinful humanity in asking erroneous questions. Dean writes – in brackets:

(after all, theodicy is only an issue where there is a rejection of the light).[3]

This comment reflects the teaching of Jesus, in John’s gospel, who said:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed (John 3:19-20).

Facing the plain truth concerning God, humanity and the world is terribly confronting, if ultimately gloriously liberating. In the day that you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall die. Yet, everyone who lives and believes in Jesus will never die.

MAN-CENTRED CULTURE INSTEAD OF GOD-CENTRED FAITH

Man-centred cultures and religions, rather than God-centred faith in Christ, seeking his Coming Kingdom, are at the heart of all human evil and mayhem. A world that ignores the redemptive gift and gracious will of the Living Father soon becomes addicted to the narcotic agendas of progress, technology, escalating wealth, cultural mysticism, religious escapism, substance and environmental abuse and a yearning desire for more power.

Everything has come to turn on man’s welfare instead of God’s worship, on man with God to help him and not on God with man to wait upon Him. The fundamental heresy of the day, now deep in Christian belief itself, is humanist.[4]

Humanism had a bitter outcome for those who had embraced it, in the years prior to and during World War 1, as Forsyth points out:

I say it is inevitable that world calamities should encourage the denials of those who denied before. Their shock also makes sceptics of many, whose belief had arisen and gone on only under conditions of fine weather, happy piety, humming progress…[5]

Elated by our modern mastery of nature and cult of genius, and ridden by the superstition of progress (now unseated), we came to start with that excellent creature, man, his wonderful resources, his broadening freedom, his widening heart, his conquest of creation, and his expanding career. And, as with man we begin, with man we really end. God is there but to promote and crown this development of man, if there be a God at all…. The Father is the banker of a spendthrift race. He is there to draw upon, to save man’s career at the points where it is most threatened.

He is Father in a sense that leaves no room for love’s severity, its searching judgment … He is Father only so long as He meets the instincts and aspirations of man’s heart.[6]

GOD ENTERS THE PULPIT AND CASTS US

UPON A GOD OF CRISIS

It takes enormous discomfort in order for humanity to come to grips with the necessity of the cross of Christ, and with the seriousness of the evil in our own human hearts, and the evil endemic among every nation. The sheer kindness and mercy of God, we so badly underestimate. Forsyth recounts something of the type of public conversation that took place prior to World War One. It sounds all too familiar. He says:

World calamity bears home to us the light way in which, through a long peace and insulation, we were coming to take the problem of the world, and especially its moral problem. ‘We do not now bother about sin’ was said with some satisfaction. The preachers protested in vain against that terrible statement – those of them that had not lost their Gospel in their culture. But they were damned with the charge of theology.[7]

He then goes on to include the war itself, as God’s way of dealing with the human race; it is the disaster that ends dainty and dreamy religion:

And now God enters the pulpit, and preaches in His own way by deeds. And His sermons are long and taxing, and they spoil dinner. Clearly God’s problem with the world is much more serious than we dreamed. We are having a revelation of the awful and desperate nature of evil.[8]

The task which the Cross has to meet is something much greater than a pacific, domestic, fraternal type of religion allows us to face. Disaster should end dainty and dreamy religion, and give some rest to the winsome Christ and the wooing note…. It is a much wickeder world than our good nature had come to imagine, or our prompt piety to fathom.[9]

We, who have known much of the grace of God in our personal lives, know that God has both spoken and enacted a great word of hope, for the nations of the world in the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is a great victory. It is a very great victory. It is The Victory. A godless world needs yet to hear this word, and respond. The church needs to rediscover not only the God of order, which Christendom has enjoyed, but also the God of crisis, who is God most chiefly in the chief tragedy of things.[10] He alone is the One who from the nettle of perdition plucks the flower of salvation.[11]

THE GLOBAL DIMENSIONS OF THE GOSPEL

It was World War One, which drew from Forsyth the rich insights he imparts. We too are faced with many a crisis, on a global scale. We are equipped with the same cross, and the same Christ, and the same gospel, to which we must make recourse. The gospel has always been of global proportions. We need a theodicy, which is adequate to the task. Let’s take Forsyth words slowly, again and tease out each of these important points:

We begin and end with a faith, not in Jesus simply but in His world work…[12]

We begin with the faith in which our own soul calls Him its Saviour from what seems an infinite and hopeless evil. He delivers us from a sin whose guilt lies on our small soul with a pressure from the reservoir of all the high wickedness of the world.[13]

It is not from our moral lapses nor from our individual taint that we are delivered, but from world sin, sin in dominion, sin solidary if not hereditary, yea, from sin which integrates us into a Satanic Kingdom … An event like war at least aids God’s purpose in this, that it shocks and rouses us into some due sense of what evil is, and what a Saviour’s task with it is.

While the Church cannot begin to measure the problem of evil, we need the assurance of its defeat in the cross. For evil affects and invades every area of human life, and the theology of the cross always applies as God’s Victory, and the only true victory:

Is the principle of the war very different from that of a general strike, which would bring society to its knees by sheer impatient force, and which so many avoid only as impolitic and not as immoral?[14] … It is impossible even to discuss the theodicy all pine for without the theology so many deride.[15]

[1] Rev. 12:9 … that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…

[2] C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, Eerdmans, 1970, is a book, which contains a series of short articles.

[3] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 4.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 24.

[5] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 24.

[6] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 25.

[7] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28.

[8] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28.

[9] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 28-29.

[10] Ibid. p. 30.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid. p. 30-31.

[14] Ibid. p. 34.

[15] Ibid. p. 37.

Theodicy: The Justification Of God – 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once opined that ‘The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible. Therefore the ‘question of why’ can always only be answered with the ‘that’, which burdens man completely. The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it asks for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world.’ (Creation and Fall, Temptation, 84-5). This is by way of introduction to the theme of the next few posts.

Trevor Faggotter is the pastor of Northwestern Community Church in Adelaide, South Australia. He recently gave a series of studies on Forsyth’s 1916 work, The Justification of God. This is a work that continues to speak volumes – perhaps more than ever – to a world as rife with war, suffering and evil as it was during that those years in which the ‘war to end all wars’ was fought out on the battlefields of Europe, and in the consciences of the men and women who lived and died under its smoke. Trevor has been kind enough to allow me to post his studies here, which I plan to do over the coming days. There are 11 studies altogether.

THEODICY: THE JUSTIFICATION OF GOD

Study 1

‘To justify God is the best and deepest way to fortify men’ – P. T. Forsyth[1]

A guest post by Trevor Faggotter

Prayer: Dear Father, we give you thanks for your great and amazing grace towards the human race, in Jesus Christ, our Lord. We praise you for the work of the Holy Spirit, deep in our hearts, revealing your nature, your love and your gift of redemption, through the Cross of Christ. We pray for a fresh hearing of the gospel, in our lives, in our day, and among the nations of the world, in Jesus name, Amen.

A STRANGE TITLE

Theodicy: The Justification of God! The title of this series of studies is unusual. Since the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit and Scripture, have given the human race a revelation of the grace of God, in the beauty of Jesus Christ, in his holy love and kindness towards us. For those of us who have come to know God, as Father – in and through his dear Son Jesus, the Messiah, we do now – in all our joy, as well as in our frailty and weakness – actually love God. We also love his world, his humanity. We love because he first loved us. We trust him concerning his plan for creation. We also seek to know God more and more, in all his ways – even his seemingly strange ways, in all his deeds and actions.

Many things, we barely understand. However, to a person stirred, gripped, moved and motivated by the grace of God, the very notion that God needs justification may now, in our renewed frame of mind, appear to be a foolish one. In many ways, it is. Just as it has been said: Defend Scripture? Defend a Lion! – it can also be said – Defend God? Defend the Lion! However, as responsible members of the human race, and of our present world, Christian people continue to wrestle with the difficult questions, which confront us – in order to more helpfully proclaim Christ, and all that he means to and for the world.

In the Foreword to the 1988 reprint of this book by P.T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, Dean Carter says: ‘God is justified in and by the crucified Christ’.[2] That is the premise, or basis, upon which the book proceeds, and concludes: ‘Christ crucified and risen is the final, eternal answer to the riddle of life’.[3]

The book is the gospel expounded – with a view to grasping something of the dynamics of evil, grace and holiness, outworking in human history. It has its roots deeply implanted in the Scripture, and is written amidst a time of global crisis.

THINK IN CENTURIES

Our studies are based upon the text of a book, which was first published in 1917. That is, it was written during World War One – ‘the war to end all wars’. It is important also to consider that New Creation Publications Incorporated reprinted this book in 1988, some 71 years later. If my maths is correct, the contents of this book are now 91 years old. A short comment once made by the author, P.T. Forsyth (in a different book), is prophetically coming to pass in our own day:

Theology simply means thinking in centuries.[4]

Forsyth thought deeply, and wrote works that have endured, and continue to speak to us today. It takes time to grasp his meaning, but it is well worth the effort. This is a difficult book. But I urge you to persist with its contents. For the reading of a book beyond our current ability can become a defining moment in the way of maturity.

Following the September 11th 2001 attack upon the New York World Trade Centre Twin Towers, like us all, I too needed steady insight. So, of all the possibilities open to me, I reached for this book. Apart from my own need, I was confronted once again, with:

  1. A shocking event – evil and terror
  2. The sudden death and suffering of everyday people – who seemed much like me,
  3. A barrage of political – and at times very shallow – media comment, and
  4. A pastorate, a community of people, and a world of nations that need wisdom.

I found here, valuable wisdom, which I have sought to share, as able. I trust others heard it too, and took heart.

WHAT IS THEODICY?

Our studies focus on the matter of Theodicy. That is, the attempt to justify God in the face of all the evil, misery, suffering and all injustice in the world. Theodicy seeks to answer the question: How can the justice of a sovereign God be defended in the face of evil – especially human suffering, particularly the suffering of the innocent? Our society and indeed all nations need to be equipped to grapple more fully with such questions. For our world is blessed with so many benefits of modern technology, and advanced medicine, that we have often become fixated upon the idea of endless ‘progress’ – as if that is all there is, and all that matters. When something like a Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, or a complex, volatile war, shatters the settled domestic lives of millions, and touches our own lives, we are easily prone to erroneous, foolish or unhelpful responses. We just react.

N.T. Wright identifies three things that characterise much of our current day inadequate approach to problem of evil:

Firstly, we ignore evil when it doesn’t hit us in the face. Second, we are surprised by evil when it does. Third, we react in immature and dangerous ways as a result.[5]

AN OUTLINE OF THE CHAPTERS

Foreword

Overture and Outline

I. The Expectations of Popular Religion and their Fate. Religion as centred on God and centred on Man

II. The Problems: Revelation and Teleology

III. Metaphysic and Redemption

IV. What is Redemption?

V. Salvation Theological but not Systematic

VI. The Failure of the Church as an International Authority

VII. Teleology Acute in Theodicy

VIII. Philosophical Theodicy

IX. The Eternal Cruciality of the Cross for Destiny

X. Saving Judgment

XI. History and Judgment

XII. The Conquest of Time by Eternity

Bibliography

P.T. FORSYTH – A WORD ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Taylor Forsyth was born in 1848, and studied at the universities of Aberdeen, Göttingen and New College, London. He served various Congregational Churches in England, and became Principal of Hackney Theological College, Hampstead – a position he retained until he died, in 1921. He was a member of the theological faculty of London University, and also a one-time chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. He wrote over 30 books and many other pamphlets and articles, championing in his writing, The Cruciality of the Cross. Reading Forsyth will undoubtedly deepen one’s understanding of God as holy love, and of the gospel as the power and weakness of God.

WHAT IS FORSYTH ON ABOUT?

Forsyth’s concern is for the nations, but his eyes are set upon Christ:

In many forms my belief will appear that the site of revelation and the solution of history it to be found, not in the moral order of the world, but in its moral crisis, tragedy, and great divine commedia; not even in the conscience. But in its Christ and His Cross. It seems quite certain that it is only a living faith in the right kind of unity, unity with power that can bring to the race public peace and concord.[6]

The focus of the race is moral, in the conscience. ‘Morality is the nature of things.’ Guilt is therefore the last problem of the race, its one central moral crisis; the Cross that destroys it is the race’s historic crisis and turning point. Were there no sin, there would be no war. Were there no world sin, there would be no world war. War makes at least one contribution to human salvation – it is sin’s apocalypse. It reveals the greatness and the awfulness of evil, and corrects that light and easy conception of it, which had come to mark culture and belittle redemption.[7]

This book is a coming to terms with the very fact of evil, and of its enormous effects and impact upon the world.[8] It comes to grips more closely with its remedy, its nemesis and doom, in the Man Jesus, the Lord Jesus. His triumphant Cross, we pray, will open to us in ways which will deepen us, and so bless our proclamation.

DEPTH NEEDED FOR OUR OWN DAY

Our own culture in Australia in 2008 has emerged from a mixture of many peoples, nations and historical factors, for good and for ill. We live this peaceful side of two world wars, and a strange war in Vietnam. We live amidst other global conflicts, which we witness nightly on our TV screens. We live this side of the rebellious 70’s where many values, foundations and institutions were questioned, challenged, rejected, replaced or ignored. However do we now have the wise insight we need to approach the future?

Many Christian people in our land laid excellent foundations in their love for Christ. We benefit from their good work. However, as churches today, we are prone to live by image, rather than substance. It won’t do. So many nations are such a long way away from the things of Christ, and his gospel. It is depth and substance that is needed, and not the creating of impressions and the projecting of images. Only a profound understanding of the depths of the cross can produce anything more than a shallow culture. And only the Spirit searches the deeps of God and reveals them to people like us. ‘… for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God (1Corinthians 2:10).

This being the case – and given that the Spirit comes to us – we can embark upon a deep and profound and difficult book, with great expectancy. God reveals himself through his Word, written, preached, expounded and imparted by his servants, such as Forsyth.

And so the first work before the Church is to set her own house in order, … to acquire that note of moral authority which gives practical power and historic weight to all her mystic insight and her sympathetic help. It is not help that either the Church or the world needs most. It is power. It is life. It is moral regeneration. If the greatest boon in the world is Christ’s Holy Father, the greatest curse in the world is man’s unfilial guilt. Whatever, therefore, undoes the guilt is the solution of the world. Everything will follow upon that peace and power.[9]

May the Spirit of the Lord impart to us, that which is most needful in our day, that we might share his gospel with others, with conviction.

[1] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, NCPI, 1988, p. 14.

[2] P. T. Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 4.

[3] Ibid.p. 221.

[4] P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, NCPI, 1993, p. 144.

[5] N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, SPCK, 2006, p. 8.

[6] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 16-17. As you might expect, many of our studies, will include a good sprinkling of quotations from Forsyth.

[7] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 19.

[8] For a biblical theodicy, see also Martin Bleby, Where Was God on September 11th 2001, NCPI, 2001.

[9] Forsyth, The Justification of God, p. 22.

‘Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century’: A Review

Alan P. F. Sell and Anthony R. Cross (eds.), Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2003). x + 398 pages. ISBN: 978 1 84227 221 3. Review copy courtesy of Paternoster/Authentic Books.

This book, edited by Alan Sell and Anthony Cross, is another worthy addition to what is an excellent series of Studies in Christian History and Thought, a series comprising monographs, revised dissertations, and collections of papers which explore the church’s witness through history. The series includes some important contributions to scholarship, among which is David Wright’s Infant Baptism In Historical Perspective, Byung Ho Moon’s Christ the Mediator of the Law: Calvin’s Christological Understanding of the Law as the Rule of Living and Life-giving, and David Bebbington’s brilliant 1998 Didsbury Lectures, Holiness In Nineteenth-Century England.

Protestant Nonconformity in the Twentieth Century is a collection of papers presented at the second conference of The Association of Denominational Historical Societies and Cognate Libraries, held at Westhill College, Birmingham, in July 2000. The result is twelve papers from scholars representing a number of Nonconformist traditions which invite reflection on Nonconformist contributions to biblical studies, theology, worship, evangelism, spirituality, and ecumenism during the twentieth century.

Sell’s own contribution, ‘The Theological Contribution of Protestant Nonconformists in the Twentieth Century: Some Soundings’, is an embryonic version of his 2006 Didsbury Lectures, published as Nonconformist Theology in the Twentieth Century and reviewed here (I wish I’d noticed this before I was near the end of the chapter, although it was great to read over this material again). He again reminds us that Nonconformists are nothing if not diverse. Employing Dale’s summary on the question of the final fate of the impenitent, Sell writes:

The twentieth century provided Nonconformist theologians with both inner-family and external stimuli to theological endeavour. As the century opened the Wesleyans were earnestly debating the question of eternal life. The particular question at issue was the final fate of the impenitent. Discussion of this topic had been rumbling on at least since the eighteenth century, and R.W. Dale had specified the options in 1877. There are, he said, those who cannot make up their minds on the subject: ‘They cannot warn men against eternal condemnation, because they are not sure that any man will be eternally condemned.’ There are those who hold that the impenitent are to be condemned to suffering, whilst hoping that ‘there may be some transcendent manifestation of the Divine grace in reserve, of which as yet we have no hint.’ There are those who believe that the Christ who came to seek and to save the lost will persist in this effort even though, because of the invincibility of human freedom, it cannot be affirmed that all will in fact be saved. There are those who believe that God’s love cannot finally be thwarted, and hence all will finally be saved; those who hold that the impenitent will nevertheless enjoy an eternal life on a lower plane than the saved; and those who deny that the impenitent can finally be restored. (p. 36)

While all the studies are certainly erudite and deserving of comment, I wish here to identify a few for special mention. Norman Wallwork’s piece, ‘Developments in Liturgy and Worship in Twentieth-Century Protestant Nonconformity’ is a helpful survey of the general issues and particular contributions that concern Nonconformist worship. The contributions of Unitarians, Free Catholics, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, the United Reformed Church, Congregational Federation, Baptists and are all attended too with care, and the Quakers, Methodists, Independent Methodists and Salvation Army are also considered. Wallwork writes:

Of all the Free Churches the Unitarians were the most given to textual revision of the Book of Common Prayer [no surprises here], but their demise included their destruction of the Trinitarian theology which undergirded the Anglican tradition. However, Martineau’s love of good liturgical language passed over into all the Free Churches not least into Congregationalism. The Free Church Catholic and ritualistic revival under Lloyd Thomas and Orchard was short-lived, but the prayers in Orchard’s Divine Service furnished other service books for over fifty years. The movement for liturgical renewal which hit the Free Churches in the 1960’s and created the Joint Liturgical Group produced some fine liturgical texts and created new service books centred on classical eucharistic texts, an increase in the frequency of communion, a shift to morning all-age celebrations, and a much greater emphasis on the Christian year. In the end, only the Methodists and the United Reformed Church would place a eucharistic rite in the hands of their congregations. In all the traditions worship leaders and preachers turned to a variety of available resources, often without the approval of any recognizable magisterium. The memory of revival songs from the Sankey and Moody era helped to secure a place for lively and spontaneous worship revived among the Free Churches, as in Anglicanism, by a new wave of charismatic prayer and praise and the new tradition of heavy ‘biblical teaching’ in Sunday worship. This movement had its strongest support among the Baptists and many of the original ‘Plymouth’ Brethren congregations who now renamed themselves ‘Evangelical Churches’. The influence of the High Genevan school of the English Reformed tradition was still seen in the liturgical texts of the United Reformed Church but much of its worship was dominated by the twin calls to inclusive all-age worship and to be relevant and engaged in issues of local and international justice. Several babies went out with the bath water. (pp. 130-1)

Other essays I particularly valued were David Bebbington’s, ‘Evangelism and Spirituality in Twentieth-Century Protestant Nonconformity’, and ‘Protestant Nonconformist Attitudes towards the First World War’, by Alan Ruston. Ruston, who is editor of the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, surveys how WWI witnessed Nonconformist churches becoming increasingly part of the establishment, particularly in attitude. They became, he writes, ‘an integral element within the political machine in almost the same terms as the established church. But flying into the sun in this way burnt their wings and like Icarus they fell to the sea. They did not drown like Icarus but the weakness engendered by the war remained with them for the rest of the century’ (p. 240). Ruston’s contribution to this volume is a powerful reminder of how voluntaryist assumptions about church, state and society inform Nonconformist contributions to religious, social and political life.

Those who identify themselves with the Nonconformist family, and those with an interest in (particularly early) Twentieth Century theology and history would be well served by reading this book.

Weekly Meanderings

‘Hundreds of demonstrators have defied the military junta in Burma to stage a rare protest march, despite the arrests of 13 leading pro-democracy activists.

Witnesses said 300 people staged an hour-long march then were dispersed by gangs of unidentified men, believed to be members of the regime-created Union Solidarity and Development Association (Usda).

There has been a series of midnight raids aimed at confronting the growing protests over rising fuel prices. Among those arrested were some of the country’s most important dissidents.’ Read on here.

Also, there’s a wee interview with Pat Dodson, Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Long and Bishop John Selby Spong here and, more interestingly, Clive James here. Also, there’s an interview here with an Iraq veteran speaking out against the war and media coverage of Iraq.

More MP3’s of interest include this one on Religious Toleration in an Age of Terrorism (at about 18 mins) and this one on Minority Religious Groups in Iraq, and The War For Children’s Minds.

I really enjoyed this wee piece by Brendon O’Connor entitled Just something about George or is an anti-American century likely? and this piece by George Williams on ‘Does Australia need a Charter of Rights?’

And finally there’s Robert Fisk, who is always worth reading, on The Iraqis don’t deserve us. So we betray them… and this shocker on Abu Ghraib abuse.

And after all that heavy reading and listening …

Violence and the Cross 2

Recently, Michael Jensen responded to my post on violence and the cross asking me to speculate on what Forsyth might say to Girard. After discerning that this Girard is different to this one I confessed that my only reading of Girard has been vicariously through Volf, and Hans Boersma’s book Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross. While I am reluctant to comment on work where I haven’t read the primary sources, and I don’t normally like to reproduce stuff that is already on my blog somewhere else, I thought that this might be of interest to some who would otherwise miss it in the comments section. Perhaps any discussion that arises will also mean that I can learn some more about Girard and maybe even feel inspired/challenged enough to actually go and read the guy’s stuff.

Boersma writes:


‘One of the main reasons that [Girard’s] theory continues to increase in popularity is that he helps Christians avoid the embarrassment of having to acknowledge that God is involved in violence, even as he expresses his most hospitable self on the cross. This gain carries the cost, however, of the denial of a good creation. Desire, as something underlying all cultural endeavor, is inherently mimetic and thus must lead to violence, Girard insists. But is it true that mimetic contagion explains all desire and that it accounts for all violence? Girard fails to acknowledge that we often desire certain objects because of their inherent value rather than simply because other models desire them. A theology of creation that affirms its inherent goodness will insist that desire can function in wholesome ways and stems not first of all from imitation but from the positive value of the created order. Girard’s atonement theology is built on an ontology of violence that leads to a negative view of culture and is thus unable to function as a solid foundation for a positive politics of hospitality. Not only does Girard regard violence as the basis of human culture, but he also finds much of the Old Testament unworthy of the nonviolent God that we have come to know in Jesus Christ. The continuity between the two Testaments gets stretched to the breaking point.’

My sense, regarding Forsyth’s response, is two fold.

Firstly, he would have never attacked Girard by name. He felt that when we we ought to expose error, we should expose the error and not attack the person. That’s the easy bit.

That said, Forsyth would see in Girard’s thinking a failure to understand not only the nature, scope and purpose of God’s atoning activity in Christ, but the nature and depth of sin and evil and the threat that sin poses not just to the world, but to God’s own being.

Whilst violence is the fruit of humanity’s angry rejection of the future intended for it by God, it also serves as part of the ‘tools’ that God uses to bring about his good purposes. So for example, Forsyth’s significant support of Britain’s role in WWI.

Forsyth insists that sin is so violent that it took the almost boisterous expression of violence (a clash of violence) to overcome it. Whenever grace and guilt collide, war it out, there will be violence – even in prayer. But it was not the violence of it that saved. It was the obedience in the midst of violence that did that. That said, Forsyth asserts that ‘it would have mattered a whole world if Jesus had met His death naturally, by accident or disease. Everything turns, not on His life having been taken from Him, but on its having been laid down. Everything, for His purpose, turns on the will to die. But, none the less, for that purpose, it had to be a death of moral violence (inflicted, that is, by human wickedness and the wresting of the law), to give its full force to both man’s sin and Christ’s blood. “Men of blood,” in the Old Testament, were not mere killers but murderers. So that we say it would have mattered a whole world if the death had not been violent and wicked, if Jesus had died of disease in His bed, or by accidental poison.’

He asserts that we feel the pain and disappointment of death as impugning the moral goodness of God. To us pain and death seem a moral outrage, a violent injustice done to the good. And it was moral outrage on God’s holiness that gave the sting and the mean misery of death for Christ. Only a great difference remains: The taste of death makes us think that it is a moral outrage on us – a tyranny; whereas Christ tasted it as the fruit of a moral outrage by us – a treason. ‘How prompt we are to accept Christ as a sympathizer with our oppressions’, he said, ‘and how slow to take Him as the accuser of our sins!’

Whether or not Girard sees more divine irony and inconsistency here than he can cope with, well I guess that that’s God’s problem – a problem that he has already taken up and answered violently in the obedience of Jesus Christ.

PS. Apologies to MJ for this being less than an ‘ideal blog entry’. See item 4 here. Learn to scroll … it’s not hard mate. You can do it. I know you can …

Torture, Suicide and Imprisonment: A Look Back at Five Years of Guantanamo

Today is the fifth anniversary of the first prisoners being sent to the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since then, more than 750 men and boys from 40 countries have been imprisoned there. Not one of them has been put on trial. Hundreds have been released without charge and sent home. Three have committed suicide at least 40 others have tried to do so. Just as well we are winning the war … what a scandal it would be otherwise :-). To listen/watch/read more click here. All this on the same day that the new U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated his conviction that the Guantanamo Bay should be shut down. For more on this see here.