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earthquake

trying to making sense of the miraculous

This is a re-post from a blog that I did at Homebrewed Christianity. I wanted to display here in preparation for a series of upcoming posts.  [ I have started putting posts with big words over there and more everyday stuff over here – it seems to be working]  Thank you all for your great feedback and thoughts!

In his book Process Theology: a basic introduction , C. Robert Mesle says:

“the miracle of birth” is a wise phrase, pointing us toward a healthy theology of miracles. Birth is not supernatural. It involves no intervention violating natural processes. We know a tremendous amount about reproduction and may one day be able to create life in laboratories. Yet for all that, we still feel, and speak of, the miracle of birth…
Miracles become problems when we think of them as demonstrating divine power to intervene in the world however God wishes. The problems are not merely scientific, but also theological and moral. Nothing challenges the goodness of God or the justice of the universe more than the stark randomness of such alleged “miracles”.

That is an interesting way to think about the subject, but I want to make an important distinction between supernatural and miraculous.  The Miraculous can be seen several ways – as something that surprises us, outside our expectations; as something that is amazing; like the miracle of birth, something that is statistically improbable , like landing a Airplane on the Hudson River; or religiously as something that only divine help could account for.

There are several reasons why I think that this topic is SO important:
I can not tell you how often someone says something about how God directed them to take a specific road or a route that avoided an accident.

  • Did god tell everyone and they just were not listening?
  • Did god only tell those whom love god?
  • Does god monitor all traffic patters and why would god be so concerned with getting you  home on time but so unconcerned with children being abused and people going hungry?

People often get defensive and say “In a worship service I saw/experienced  _____. Are you trying to tell me that did not happen?”  No. I absolutely believe you that it happened. What I am saying is that maybe the explanation provided in the worship service was not the whole story of why the phenomenon happened (people being slain in the spirit, etc).
I want to be clear about something: I believe in prophetic words. I have told people things that I could not have known in my own power – including twice that I have described pictures that hang in their homes, homes that I had never been to.
I absolutely believe that the Lord could ‘lead’ you to call someone who needs a call ‘at that exact moment”.

So keep that in mind when I say that we need to revisit our frameworks around the miraculous and we definitely need to abandon the whole ‘super’ natural worldview. It does not hold together under even the slightest examination in the 21st century. Continue reading “trying to making sense of the miraculous” →

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Humans: nipples, bellybuttons and the imago dei

3 themes continually emerge in my conversations these days – these 3 things about humans I have become convinced of:

Humans are mammals. The nipples and bellybuttons give it away. Some people will want to say that we are more than mammals, but we are not less than mammals. One can argue that we are exceptional mammals – but we are not exceptions to mammals.

Humans are social creatures. If biologically we are mammals then sociologically we are communal. We naturally break into families, clans, and tribes.

Humans are meaning making beings.  We have an inherent propensity to take any number of events or variables and assign them a narrative framework. Our minds long for reasons and explanation to tie together our experiences.

These three confessions have several deep implications. Continue reading “Humans: nipples, bellybuttons and the imago dei” →

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Earthquakes Hurricanes and Politics

Earlier this week, Michelle Bachmann said something stupid… or at least something that I regarded as such.  Later she said she was just joking. I posted it on Facebook and some people actually tried to defend her thinking that ‘god’ caused the earthquake and hurricane.

I have written before about how God does not direct tornadoes or punish the people of Haiti for some deal their ancestors made with the devil. I have said that Crucifying Job’s God” href=”https://bosanders.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/crucifying-jobs-god/” target=”_blank”>we need to update our concepts and adapt our frameworks (theological, philosophical, sociological, spiritual, etc.) to the realities of the 21st Century and not allow ourselves to get limited by what the ancients believed/understood in the first couple of centuries C.E.

What follows is an amalgamation of my comments in that Facebook conversation. I have modified some of them to account for responses by those in the conversation.

When I say that God did not cause these things, I am talking about  intervention, ‘an act of God’.
Do you believe that God intervened in the natural order to make the earthquake and the hurricane? Did God cause them as part of ‘his’ plan?

I do not.  But I also understand that those who want to believe like Bachmann that god does work this way and that scripture does not allow us to think otherwise … is certainly is one way to be a Christian. – a way I think made a lot more sense in the pre-modern world… but it is one way to be a christian.

That being said, it is not the way that I am looking for. I do not want to be limited to only the physics and meta-physics of the first centuries C.E. As christians, I want to incorporate modern realities, acknowledge scientific advancement and adjust to expanding knowledge. I want to grow up out of humanity’s infancy. This means we adapt and integrate to leave behind some of the previous ways of thinking.
Christianity is a perpetual maturing toward reality and moving from milk to meat.

In this rubric, the Bible is an inspired and authoritative record of God’s dealings with a part of humanity as interpreted and then represented by those individuals and communities in their understanding and capacity.

This is where ‘all or nothing’ thinking really fails us. I’m not saying to  “throw out” the teachings or worldview of those who wrote the Bible. I am saying that we need to integrate. You have to have something old to integrate the new into. Otherwise it is replacement. I just don’t want to be limited ONLY to first century meta-physics. I obviously don’t want to chuck everything Paul said.

Here is why this is so important: part of the good news that the church has to proclaim is that the world is God’s and that God by God’s spirit is present at at work in the world!!
My hesitation here is what you mean by ‘in charge’ because God is not an Caesar-Emperor with ‘thumbs up- thumbs down power’.

  • that conception of god is to miss that counter-narrative provided by Jesus. God is NOT like Caesar. Jesus shows us something different – that God is NOT like the powers of this world.
  • those who miss this counter-narrative, often also miss that the God revealed in Christ is at work in Holy Spirit at this is why we must be Spirit Christians and not Old Covenant Christians just getting out frameworks and word pictures from the days of Kings. Jesus provides a revision to that understanding and a counter trajectory to simply sticking with that previous understanding.

When we say that it is time to update some things we are NOT saying that the ancients knew nothing about physics or metaphysics. Let’s say that they were exactly as proficient in their day as we are in ours. That is all we can do – do the best we can do in our time as they did in theirs.

What I am 100% against is saying that they knew MORE than us and we need to stick with ONLY what they knew!

There is no other area other area of our life where we stick with the knowledge of the 1st century.

 

I wanted to add a link to “making sense of the miraculous” for those who are interested

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>the Bible is not about the End of the World

>I wrote this for something else but wanted to post here for discussion.

The minute the earthquake in Japan happened, I told several friends that two things were coming: 1) talk of the end of the world  2) talk of God punishing Japan

But I was not prepared for was the quality of the sample that was to come. This article details the prophetic take of Cindy Jacobs.  She is an authoritative leader in Intercession Prayer circles and someone that I am very familiar with and had even quoted during my college years (the mid- 90s).

    “In the early nineties, the Lord gave me a prophecy for Japan that it was a “sickle in the hand of the Lord” that will be used for great harvest. The physical geography of the islands look like a curved sickle with the handle being the island of Hokkaido in the north. One could also say that it looks like a curved sword. Where Japan has historically been a sword of war across Asia.”

    “On the other hand, if you look at it another way, this island, Hokkaido, looks like the head of a dragon with the body being the rest of Japan. The people of Asia have worshipped the dragon for 5,000 years. If one looks at the place where the earthquake took place, it looks like the soft underbelly of most vulnerable part of the dragon.”

Can you believe it? The reasoning is that it ‘looks like a sword’?  Are you serious?
Does that mean as seen from space… or on a map… or… wait – I’m looking at a map right now and I am not seeing a sword,  or a dragon for that matter.

Not that it matters. When you are being this imaginative and fantastical, I am not sure that the facts would be all that helpful.

I was making fun of this on Facebook and I referenced the best selling book by Harold Camping’s 1994 or Edgar C. Whisenant “88 reasons the Rapture will be in 1988”.  How corny right?

A week later I get a text message from someone listening to NPR that Harold Camping is on the radio saying that the end of the world will be next May 26th. It will happen at 6pm. It will make it’s way around the world time-zone by time-zone.

Wasn’t that how Y2K was suppose to happen?  Not that it matters…

Here is what I wish would happen: that we could make a deal as Evangelical-Conservative-Fundamentalist and Charismatic Protestants that IF this happens next May or even in 2012 at all – then those of us who doubt them will volunteer to go to hell.

BUT if it doesn’t happen then we will realize that nothing is going to happens like this – and stop doing this every time a natural disaster occurs.

Here is what I wish we would realize:

   1. human civilizations (brick and mortar) who live on fault lines and shore lines are impacted when the world does what it has always done – shift, evolve, and create.
   2. every generation can not imagine things continuing to progress beyond a point that they would find unrecognizable and thus they think ‘this must be the end’
   3. when we talk about the ‘eschatological hope’ of the resurrection we need to be careful to distinguish it from cooky dispensational “Left-Behind” mumbo-jumbo. We must distinguish because most people can’t tell the difference. In fact, sometimes I can’t tell the difference.

Background:

  • Most of what Jesus said that gets chalked up to ‘end times’ stuff – like his story about two people in a field or on a road and one is taken, or  how women will not want to be pregnant – he is talking about the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d.   All that ‘flight to the hills’ and sky/moon turning red and a loaf of bread costing a bag of gold is about something that happened “within that generation” (Matthew 24:33-35).  It is not about the end of the world.
  • The book of Revelation was a political commentary on Rome of the first centuries CE. It is written in apocalyptic language because of the Roman oppression of the first century. It is not about the end of the world.

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