Editorials. Does God Love the World?

Transcription

1 164 dialog: A Journal of Theology Volume 40, Number 3 Fall 2001 Does God Love the World? Take a look at that cat, said Swami G. I was sitting in the living room of Nitya Chaitanya Yati, a Vedanta philosopher whose ashram is located in the small mountain town of Ooty in southern India. The cat was walking across the room toward the door. Swami continued: Now sometime today that cat will catch a mouse. He will sink his teeth into the helpless rodent. Anticipating what is coming the mouse will be terrorized and filled with fear. When caught the mouse will squirm and fight and writhe with pain as the cat chews its body. Now do you think God pays attention to this? My mind went straight to his question. Yes, of course, I said to myself silently. But the swami was asking a rhetorical question. So he went on, No, of course not. This is a law of nature. It is the nature of the cat to kill and the nature of the mouse to suffer. This is just the way things are. Certainly God cannot concern himself with such. This was the third day of our Hindu-Christian dialogue. Up until this point I had been delighted to find so very many points of agreement between us. We had agreed on the value of mystical insights. We had agreed on the respect a student should have for the teacher. We had agreed on the importance of ecological ethics. But now, I had to ask myself, were we disagreeing on a very fundamental point, namely, how God relates to the world? Was he saying that God is divorced from the struggles and passions of the humble creatures? I suppose from the human point of view that little mouse does not count for much. And certainly the cat does not have any sympathy for it. And certainly the God of the great big universe has big things to attend to. Nevertheless, I sat there reminding myself of the words of Jesus: Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten by God ( Luke 12:6). Could what Jesus said about sparrows apply to the mouse? Sitting in conversation with the swami, I also reminded myself of John 3:16: God so loved the world... In fact, God so loved the world that he entered it. The divine entered the mundane and took the nature of nature up into himself. The anxiety and suffering and death we experience is now part of the divine life itself. Our experience is now God s experience. This is what we mean by incarnation. Now, how do systematic theologians think about this? This brings me to observe that currently a fertile battle--better, a dialogue--is taking place in American evangelical circles over the openness of God. Those calling themselves open theists who argue for the openness of God contend, against classical theists, that, because God loves us creatures, God enters into reciprocal relations with the world. Some divine actions are contingent upon our requests and actions. God is influenced by what we pray and what we do. God responds. This means, among other things, that God cannot know a future that is yet to be decided partially by the creation. By exercising general providence rather than meticulous providence, God allows space for us to operate freely; and then God responds to our operations. Those calling themselves classical theists defend God s immutability; God does not change through time. They also defend divine omniscience, God s knowledge without limitation, meaning that God knows what events will happen before they happen. God does not have to learn something in time that God already knows from the perspective of eternity. Because God is unchanging, divine love has the power to save us from the viscissitudes of temporal passage

2 165 with its decay and death. Lutherans have run into this before, although the domain of discussion has been the second rather than the first person of the Trinity. The question of divine openness arises in discussions of the communicatio ideomatum, the exchange of properties in the two natures of Christ. In the incarnation, God takes on the properties of humanity, of the creature. We, in turn, are given what is divine. Martin Luther compares this exchange with that of a marriage in which bride and bridegroom Christ and the human soul come to share everything. He says, Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul s ( Freedom of a Christian, 1519). Note that this exchange takes place between Christ and the human soul. Is the eternal God similarly affected? Does God in Godself experience our sin, death, and damnation? This raises the question of patripassionism. All seem to agree that Jesus, Christ in his human nature, suffers and dies. Jesus was temporal, historical, subject to contingency. But, we ask, was the eternal suprahistorical God the Father affected by what happened to Jesus and, similarly, by what happens to us? Classical theism will say no, that by restricting suffering and death to Christ s human nature we can protect Christ s divine nature and, thereby, protect the eternal nature of God the Father. Yet, recent theologians wonder if this is adequate. If God loves, and if one indellible quality of love is empathy or sharing in the pain of the beloved, then is there not at least some sense in which the divine lover must suffer? So, some theologians are acknowledging that God the Father must suffer in at least the minimal sense of suffering with Jesus as a Father would suffer if his child were in pain. What no Christian wants to surrender is the assertion that God loves; so the question is just how God s love is manifest and what effect it has on God. The neo-classical theists of the Whiteheadian process school have claimed patent rights on divine mutability. God, as the fellow sufferer who understands according to Whitehead, receives all the pain of the world in the divine consequent nature. To provide what they believe to be an adequate conceptual picture, process theologians adopt panentheism, so that the world becomes God s body. Just as our minds cannot but help interact with our bodies, God cannot help but interact with the world. This interaction is described as love. Here, loving the world becomes a form of divine self-love. The love relation to the world is constitutive; it s ontological. The contrast of panentheism with both classical theism and open theism is significant. For the two latter schools of thought, God s love for the world is freely chosen. God loves the world as other. For process theologians, in contrast, God loves the world by ontological necessity because God is inescapably stuck in the world. God s love for the world in classical theism and open theism is much more dramatic, much more agapaic. What is healthy about all three schools of thought classical theism, open theism, and process panentheism is that God s love for the world is front and center. If we systematic theologians are going to earn an honest living, we need to help provide a way to understand such a thing as divine love. Well, whether we understand it or not, we do need to testify to it. Regardless of our school of thought, it seems to me we must acknowledge that there is no event in nature or history that goes unobserved by its creator. Or more, there is no experience of suffering that is not shared by the God who loves this world. No matter how small or apparently insignificant a dying mouse may appear to us, that mouse does not die alone. God dies with it. And after its death, it is by no means forgotten by the everlasting God of the resurrection. -Ted Peters Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary Metaphors and Grieving The recent trial and execution of Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, included a great deal of media attention given to the relatives of the victims of that tragedy. The press wanted to know how this

3 166 dialog: A Journal of Theology Volume 40, Number 3 Fall 2001 traumatic experience was affecting these folks. I was struck by the way in which, again and again, certain metaphors came to the surface which I think reflect some of the wrong understandings we have in our culture of the grieving process. For example, these folks were trying to put this tragedy behind them and get on with their lives. Too, they mentioned often needing closure --something they hoped the execution would bring them. And they talked about McVeigh paying with his life for the lives he d taken six years ago. All too often, I think, we use metaphorical expressions without thinking. They guide us in directions we perhaps shouldn t go. 1 In the case of the three metaphorical expressions just named, for example, I d judge them to be quite misleading, as far as grieving is concerned. Let me take them in turn. The first metaphor has really two parts. Something terrible is to be put behind us, and we re supposed to resume our forward movement. Take the second part first. The main metaphor here is this: LIFE IS A JOURNEY. We picture ourselves as having been traveling along a path and then this event happens that brings us to a halt. Normally, life is a forward movement punctuated by frequent stops for such things as vacations and illnesses. But traumatic losses like a death in the family force us to stop in such a radical way that we may well have trouble starting again. In many cultures it seems to be recognized that we often have trouble starting up again after a serious personal loss. Periods of mourning in traditional East Asian cultures are long and memorial services for the departed frequent. But more often than not, in our modern culture we re expected to come back to work after just a few days and move forward at full speed. But that s often unwise. Returning into the mainstream of life after a death in the family is not like returning from a weekend s diversions. It isn t even like returning from most illnesses. Grief counselors warn us that in our culture we dangerously misunderstand the severity of loss traumas, so we can t appreciate how hard it is for some grievers to start up their lives again. What is it like, then? I m beginning to think that we need first to learn to recognize the metaphors we use in our everyday thinking and speaking, and then to be critical enough of them so that we eliminate the features we find in them that are not salient, and also creatively search them for features that may be new sources of help for us. Here s what might be done with this LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor when applied to the grieving process. After a severe trauma of losing a close loved one, we perhaps should give up the idea that we return to exactly the same path in life we were traveling before, that now it will be a new one. Our loved one will not be on this one. Also, we might picture this new path as being on an upwards incline--at least for a time. That s why it s slower going than before, and more difficult to move. We can do the same with the other part of our first metaphor, the one that says we should put this loss behind us. Putting something behind you is a way of saying we should forget it, no longer be aware of it. But does this actually happen in the case of departed loved ones? Grief counselors tell us no; quite common is what Nancy Cobb calls experiences of grief ambush, when suddenly memories of the lost one and all the loss-emotions related to that person come flooding in over us. 2 Dreams of the departed person can also be expected, sometimes nightmares. And all of this is normal, of course, yet few seem to know this. Once again, learning to see this metaphor as something that can be critically analyzed and corrected is something we need to do. Surely, the dead will not be with us as they were before? Of course not! One traditional society gives an interesting twist to the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor. They say that our departed when they die jump onto our backs. Isn t that really truer to our experience? Our loved ones are still very much with us, even something of a burden in some cases, and yet they need not get in our way. Another image somewhat similar is one that visualizes our loved ones watching us attentively from above, or surrounding us like fans at a ballgame, cheering us on. The latter, in fact, is a biblical image; it is found in Hebrews 11. There we read that as we run our race in life we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Now to our second metaphor, which is getting closure on the tragedy of losing a loved one. This one too can be misleading and needs to be critically reshaped. Can we truly ever get closure on our seri-

4 167 ous personal losses? Various images come to mind here, all leading back to the conceptual metaphor, LIFE IS A CONTAINER. Something normally is closed up, or one whole piece. Then suddenly it is opened up, ripped, or torn. So grieving here is understood to be a kind of closing-up, as when a wound heals, or repairing of the torn garment. The danger here is that we can--wrongly--expect that serious losses can be easily, quickly, and completely closed up and repaired, when most often this is not the case. Our culture, again, being dangerously death-denying as it is, can be expected to minimize the seriousness of such ruptures and feel that once the repairs are made, we will be as good as new. Of course, this is simply not usually the case. Our social fabric will continue to show its tear and our skin its scars. So here too we want to encourage a creative approach to the metaphor. For example, we might say that now our lives will simply have a different structure than before, and that the tears and scars will continue to be a part of them. Finally, our last metaphor, one that has become so well-entrenched in our thinking that we no longer see its metaphorical structure, is this: PUNISHMENT IS PAYING BACK A DEBT. This one, of course, is mentioned in the Bible; it is the principle of vengeance, an eye for an eye. When someone does something bad to us, they steal from us something that is ours, and this needs to be repaid. This is actually an economic model and it underlies our whole understanding of justice. So when we say that McVeigh paid for his crime with his life, we ve used concepts borrowed from the marketplace. And those who lost loved ones supposedly got satisfaction from seeing the execution or at least from knowing that it had been accomplished. Some relatives were glad when the whole thing was over because now they could find peace, and they felt that their departed loved one could also find peace. But the kind of peace they were really talking about was the peace that comes when someone has been indebted to you and they pay you back. Once again, this metaphor also has its drawbacks, as rich and as powerful as it is. Many times we heard the question asked, Can McVeigh s one life be payment enough for the lives of innocents he took? Of course not. Other more profound thinkers have pointed out that actually executing McVeigh did him a favor by making him a martyr; he experienced, really, a good death because, in his warped world view, he was fighting an evil monster that one day would be destroyed--the U.S. government, and this pleased him to be a part of the crusade to kill off this evil monster. Much better it would have been to keep him alive and over the years to hopefully break down his world view, and then, probably, he would begin to feel remorse for what he had done and suffer for it that way. These three metaphors, then, exemplify I think our need to begin critically assessing the metaphors with which we think, and then go on to use them more creatively. In the case of grieving the loss of a loved one, this would prove to be especially valuable. Because what, exactly is grieving? Do any of these metaphors really grasp its totality, its depth? Or is it really as such inexplicable, so that any metaphors we can thinking of all partly fall short? Might this be what Job learns, not only that God is inexplicable, but that suffering is as well? The Sufi poet, Rumi, too, once said: Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field; I ll meet you there. 3 Applied to what we ve been saying, this is what we can learn: our grieving lies out beyond all the metaphors and images we can create to make sense of it; Lord, help us to meet there our fellow grievers! ENDNOTES - John Benson 1. For more in this view of metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, A book on grieving is Nancy Cobb s In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living. (New York: Pantheon Books), In many cities, counselors who specialize in grief recovery can be found listed in the yellow pages. An example in St. Paul, Minnesota, is the Center for Grief, Hamline Park Plaza, 570 Asbury Street, Suite 202, Phone: Cobb, Op. Cit. 4. The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 36.

5 168 dialog: A Journal of Theology Volume 40, Number 3 Fall 2001