AbeLog

My wife and I have been trying to have children for the past three to four years after our first miscarriage. I went through a period of questioning: What kind of God is my God? I had just entered into full-time ministry service and why did God allow me to go through such a painful experience? I tried to rationalize and even ‘spiritualize’ my experience as ordination from God to make me into a better person. But deep down within me, I can honestly say that I feel that God had treated me unfairly.

I was diagnosed later with slip-disc condition and my wife also has a  condition that does not allow us to conceive easily. In another word, that pregnancy we had was a miracle and thereafter, we simply could not have another pregnancy. We keep trying and keep waiting, and I was still trying to figure out how to grapple with the way I understand God and the reality of my personal experience. On one hand, I know that God is sovereign and His will is good, He is almighty and He can do all and more than we can ask for. On the other hand, I wonder why God does not grant me and my wife our desire to have children and why did He take away my unborn child? Can I hate God? Is it alright for me to think that there are things that are beyond the control of God? Can I assume that His love for me is conditional? Or am I just a pawn on His chessboard and I just have to submit to the sovereignty of God?

As I read what John Sanders wrote in his book, The God who risks[1], I tend to like his idea and understanding of God. It allows me to continue to be a God believing Christian and I do not need to hold God accountable to all the evil and suffering of world, especially those that happened on me. After all, God does not know everything; He is waiting for us to interact with Him as the world progress.

Sanders’ personal experience in life was the driving force for him to write this book. He was trying to find a way to explain why God allows his brother to have such a tragedy death. He could not reconcile with the answers provided by other Christian that ‘God would have ordained [his] brother’s death’[2]. In his book, he was dealing with how God will deal with world He had created. Does He have total control over everything that happens in the world and take no risk, or does He allow His creation to influence how the world would turn out to be and take the risk in ‘bringing about this particular type of world’[3]? His view is that God is a God who risk because Sanders basically holds to relational theism – God genuinely relates with His creation so much so that He allows His creation to influence His action and plan.

In the conclusion of his book, Sanders states the core of relational theism includes the following four major points:

1.      God loves us and desires for us to enter into reciprocal relations of love with him and with our fellow creatures.[4]

2.      God has sovereignly decided to make some of his actions contingent on our requests and actions.[5]

3.      God chooses to exercise general rather than meticulous providence, allowing space for us to operate and for God to be creative and resourceful in working with us.[6]

4.      God ahs granted us the libertarian freedom necessary for a truly personal relationship of love to develop.[7]

Therefore, this book is about how Sanders understands God has freely enters into a genuine give-and-take relations with His creations and takes the risk of us letting Him down.[8]

In his book, Sanders begins with a personal tragedy experience to stir up the emotion of his readers to examine the providence of God in his introduction chapter. He goes on to set his methodology of explaining his theology by claiming that ‘[s]peaking of God with human language (anthropomorphically) is legitimate if we have a proper understanding of where we stand in order to talk about God.’[9] With this, Sanders examines materials from the Scriptures, both the Old and New Testaments to support his relational view of providence by taking the passages at its “face value” or literally. He also tries to extract supports from Christian tradition that seemingly have the idea of divine relationality.

Then Sanders goes on to further develop how the risk view of God matches His divine character and states the nature of divine sovereignty to highlight that the freewill of human could ‘overrule’ God’s will. And finally, he also explains with how his view of providence deals with the issue of salvation, grace, evil, prayer and divine guidance.

For Sanders, his view of relational theism or open theism, ‘aims to rescue our understanding of God’s relationship with his creatures from traditional theism.’[10] It is because traditional theism has overemphasized God’s immutability and transcendence[11], which makes God unapproachable, impersonal and uninvolved. But Erickson explains that ‘[w]hile the Bible does not picture God as involved with the world, it also pictures him as antedating the creation and having an independent status.’[12]

On one hand, I do not want to throw out the desire of open theism ‘to uphold the real relationship that exists between God and others.’[13] On the other hand, when the attributes of God like His immutability, His sovereignty and His foreknowledge are being challenged, I will not be able to accept that, because it undermines God’s wisdom[14], according to Bruce A. Ware, and J. I. Packer’s book, Knowing God, examines and informs us that God is unchanging[15].

Sanders and other Open Theists ‘propose that the “straightforward” or “literal” or “face value” meaning of these passages is the correct meaning.’[16] By doing so, the proponents of Open Theism, including Sanders, have ignored the cultural context and the biblical authorial intent for writing anthropomorphically. While Sanders states that ‘just about everyone takes biblical references to the “eyes”, “arms” and “mouth”  of God as metaphors for divine actions, not assertions that God has literal body parts’[17], it is inconsistence of him to insist that passage like Genesis 22:12 as God do not have foreknowledge of how Abraham will response to God’s testing of sacrificing Isaac.[18] Therefore, I have much reservation about Sanders hermeneutical method of interpreting Scripture and to take his conclusion from his study of the Scripture to support his open theism view.

Firstly, I really appreciate the work of open theist to emerge this issue of my understanding of God. As I stated earlier in my introduction, I am struggling with the sovereignty of God over my life. I wonder does God really care and hear my prayers and desires. I have been in debate with my wife about how to understand God when we don’t seem to receive what we ask for in our prayer. My wife believes that God will answer our prayers if we pray persistently; she has greater faith in God than I do. I have reservation if God cares or even bother to answer my prayer unless it is according to His divine will. I have sort of resigned to fatalism. My prayers are only religious rituals to reflect my intellectual understanding and hypocritical spirituality. And deep within me, I am still hurting because of the pain of losing my unborn child.

Is God to be blame? Can I or should I hold Him responsible to my pain? I have no good answer for past few years. Sometime, I tend to think that God is the puppeteer and I am just his puppet. Sometime, I imagine that God is a loving father and He understands how I feel, but not going to do anything, until He is pleased to do so. Sometime, I just have to buy in that the purpose of man is to glorify God, it does not matter how I am doing. God is there, but far away.

After reading Sanders and a few other books, I begin to change how I feel about God. I may not be able to fully comprehend and understand why He allows suffering in this world, and causing a deep pain in me. I have come to realize that this is reality. On one hand, I know that God is sovereign, He is still in control, He is unchangeable, He is all knowing and He is good and faithful to His people. On the other hand, I also know that He is genuinely in relationship with His people, He listens and answers to His people’s prayers, He intervenes and acts justice when there is injustice, and He actively responding and interacting with His people by His lovingkindness. God is here and there. He is near and afar. He is love and just. He is who He is.

This time, it is not a matter of my mind trying to keep these two ranges of portrayals of God in tension within my intellect; but it is about my heart to be now able to response to His love through His sovereignty now. I still do not know about my tomorrow, but at least I know the One who holds the future in His hand.

I thank God for the opportunity to deal with such an important issue of life; especially I am preparing myself to be a servant of God. I think this will help me to understand my relationship with God better and deeper, not intellectually, but relationally. Relationship with God is about learning to trust God for the things that I do not understand and trusting God for who He is. As I am anxiously waiting for the test result to see if my wife is pregnant, it is a test for me if I trust God for whatever the result will be. If she is pregnant, of course I can praise God. If she is not, I have to learn to continue to trust God. Even if she is pregnant and miscarriage again later, I still have to trust Him for He is the only unchangeable One. Everything in the world changes, if I cannot hold on the God who is unchangeable, I think that my life will not be worth living, or a life without hope.

I remember as I was reading Sanders, listening to the lectures, and reading others books in response to open theism, this hymn, I know Who holds tomorrow[19], rings in my mind. I can continue to debate and argue about what God had done and all His other attributes, but at the end of the day, my confident as a Christian lays in the One who holds my future. I rather put my trust in a God who knows and holds my future, than a God who is still waiting for my input. How can a fallen being like me brings about any good and hope to my future? Only a God who holds the future can do it, for me and the entire creation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Religion and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.