Geese Are A--holes

A sweet

Spirit
Sister

Sings to me

Do not repent in
Ashes

She sings

Let the
Soft animal
Of your body

Love what it loves.

O sister

My soul sings
In sad ashen reply

Repent I must

For

The soft animal
Of my body

Loves nothing

I sing

Nothing In All
Creation more 

than

Power.

Repentance and Probability

As my reading of The God Who Risks continues, I'm finding myself leaping and skimming a bit.  Part of that, I think, comes from the tendency of Sanders to feel he has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that every last part of the Biblical narrative reinforces Open Theism.  So he goes, endlessly, exhaustively, through scripture. 

It doesn't, of course.  Open Theism continues to seem theologically inadequate.  Even while I grasp the good-hearted spiritual yearning that underlies it, its view of God is too narrow, to small, and too temporally bounded.  God is, for the Open Theists, aware of past and present, but can't predict what will come to pass.  In this, the God of Open Theism isn't so much a Deist Clockmaker as a parent who sends a woefully unprepared child down a double diamond ski-slope.

"Honey, bend your knees.  Look where you're going.  No.  NO!  LEFT!  GO LEFT!  LEEEEEFFFT!  LOOOK OUT FOR THAT...OOOOH!  AND THAT...   Oh.  My.  That'll make failblog for sure."

This is not the I Am That I Am, nor is it the God who lays it down for Job, nor is it the God Jesus called Father.  It's a minor and slightly bumbling demigod in the Canaanite pantheon.

Where there is theological weight to Sanders' arguments is in his exploration of the meaningfulness of repentance in the classical model of God's sovereignty.  If the universe is a single narrative stream, one linear sequence of events from the moment of creation to the moment things end, then there is no way to reconcile an omnipotent and omniscient Creator with the concept of repentance.

If everything is as God wills it, then we sin because God intended us to sin.  As Sanders puts it:

According to specific sovereignty nothing happens that God does not want to happen.  Every state of affairs, including my personal holiness, is precisely what God desires. (p. 251)

So if we sin, it is not that our volition is out of keeping with God's intent.  It can't be.  Nothing is out of keeping with God's intent.  God wills you to do that fifth shot.  God wills you to shake that thang.  If God didn't, then you couldn't do it.  Or so the argument goes.

That is equally true of repentance, which is as predetermined as just keepin' on sinnin.'  Given that it's all God, the meaningfulness of human response to God's grace is, under that system of thought, kinda questionable.  Resolving that tension has always been the challenge for thems of us who are Calvinish, and none of the deterministic responses laid out in the God Who Risks (pp. 252-254) are particularly strong conceptually.  If there is no probability that we will do what is not God's will, then we can be hardly be faulted for our actions, or rewarded from turning away from evil. 


That's not to say that what Sanders proposes is much better.  A weakly contingent God is hardly either optimal or theologically robust.


But if human will is part of the process of a dynamic multiverse creation, then the manifold providence of God includes our will, our acting, our doing, and our agency.  Our decisions matter, and govern the way in which we stand in relationship to our Creator in the time and space we have been graciously given.   Sin...turning away from love of God and love of neighbor...becomes a choice with deep weight.  It also becomes a choice, not just the turning of the cogs of destiny. 

As does repentance.  And without repentance, the Gospel has no meaning.

Repentance and the Death Penalty

As the twitterverse tweedle-de-deets impotently about the questionable execution of Troy Davis, I find myself reminded again of why capital punishment is so antithetical to any authentic follower of Jesus of Nazareth.  It's not just that there's the risk of ending the life of an innocent man, which should have unpleasant resonances for anyone who calls Christ their friend.

It's that you're also ending the life of those who are guilty.   Yes, the guilty.  I mean those human beings who are angry, selfish, bitter, and cruel.   I mean the racist, the homophobe, the thug, and the terrorist.

These are not nice people.  These are not the innocent, or the unjustly accused.  I'm talking about the monsters.  They have murdered, and raped, and brutalized.  They have violated the the fundamental norms of compassion and mercy that govern the lives of sentient beings.  Their existences are darkly radiant with the demons that drive humankind to do all manner of horrific things to itself.

I do not excuse such beings, or rationalize away their culpability for their crimes.  As they are, they have no place in human society.   They cannot be permitted to cause harm.

Thing is, once they've been stopped and incarcerated, they pose no further threat.   And when we as a society choose kill them, we are saying:

Nothing further can be done with this one.   They will never change.  They can never be different.  They must cease to be.

And that means we assume that repentance and redemption are no longer options.   For many, that might be true.  Sociopathy burrows its way deep into the minds of men, sometimes running so deep into a soul that rending it out would leave nothing remaining.    But for others, change can come, as time and age give new shape to a life.

For followers of Jesus, the default assumption is repentance.  It must be.  It is the central message of the Gospel.  Transformation is possible.

Is it always likely?  No.  Is it sometimes highly improbable?  Sure.

But a culture that executes cannot coherently call itself Christian, because it has rejected the core redemptive message of the Nazarene.  By ending a life, we either preclude repentance or...if it has already occurred...we assume it has no meaning.  There is no small irony that those who want America to be a "Christian Nation"  are those most eager to spill blood in the name of what they imagine to be justice.

It only shows that they understand neither the Gospel nor the Cross.

Forgiveness and Connections

Having wrapped up the Jewish High Holy Days with my wife and her family yesterday, I find myself thinking about the depth of connection between the message of Jesus and the core practices of modern Judaism. That connection goes well beyond my support services as a non-fasting and thus adequately caffeinated shabbas goy.

The essence of Christ's teaching in the synoptic Gospels (that's Mark/Matthew/Luke, kids) can be boiled down to one key phrase: "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at Hand." Most of the parables and teachings of Jesus are riffs around that core theme. We are to understand God's authority over us as present, right here, right now. We're asked to respond to God's sovereignty over our lives by turning away from those things that impede our living into a joyous relationship with God and neighbor. Jesus both taught that message and wrapped it up in flesh.

The call to set aside old brokenness, turn to God, and embrace a new commitment to a life lived in grace is the entire point of the most sacred period in the Jewish liturgical year. It's all about a repentant heart and seeking forgiveness and healing. The prayer book is called "Gates of Repentance." Every other prayer is asking for God's mercy and for the strength to do better.

As I sat through the Yom Kippur service yesterday, the parallels between this season and the season of Easter seemed unmistakable. Both seasons present a call to die to sin, and to live new into God's promise. To do that, we must both seek and offer forgiveness.

That ain't easy. Sometimes, the hurts we've experienced seem to go too deep, and tearing them out of ourselves feels impossible. We'd rather hold them close, and cherish the sharp bitter flavor they give our lives. But this is not how we were created to live. We were created to pour out the blessing of forgiveness into the world. Though our darkness snarls and struggles against it, we nonetheless need to open our hearts up and pour out whatever measure of grace God has given us.