(1) If God is omnipotent and loving, why does He or She "allow" suffering such as that resulting from the Tsumani, which might itself be described as "an act of God"?
(2) John 20, 9: "For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead". As Jesus' rising from the dead had been "predicted" in the scriptures, what's to say that the NT is not founded on what actually happened but is simply a document that restates what had been predicted, in order to sort of "save face".
Part of me hates raising these questions, but they are two issues that I am grappling with at the moment. I'd really be interested to read people's thoughts on them. (Hope I've worded them in a way that's clear).
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6 comments:
Despite my brother having a Masters Degree in Theology, my own knowledge is nil, so I'm not really qualified to comment. However, I've always had a sneaky suspicion that the Bible was created as a means of giving people in those times hope, faith, comfort or whatever and to impose some sort of control, an early form of law and order.
I am, ofcourse, a complete pleb though and my opinion is based on a whim rather than anything I have seen or read of importance. In fact, just a vivid imagination!
1. I know Christians who don't believe Godcan be both loving and omnipotent at the same time, for this very reason, and go for loving rather than omnipotent. The Tsunami is a difficult one because there's no real element of human sin to blame (apart from not settingup early warning systems due to cost, perhaps?) that I can see.
2. 20/20 hindsight? It does seem likely that things written after the event would be affected by the writers' knowledge of the event.
Erm, I don't really know what I think. But I wanted to share in your confusion.
Ruth,
My two penn'orth is as follows.
1) I think you know pretty much what I think about this one from the stuff I've written on my blog - that random tragedy is a necessary corollary of freedom to act independently. Also, though, it's worth repeating a couple of thoughts about suffering itself. First, suffering and death aren't the greatest evils. Second, without any suffering, we could never grow into mature adults; we'd remain children (mentally and spiritually) forever. And that's not a fate any loving parent wants for their children.
2) My take on this is twofold. First, there was undoubtedly an existing tradition of messianic expectation - a collection of signs by which the Messiah was to be identified. The tricky thing is that this tradition was twofold - there was expectation of a royal messiah, who would act physically and militarily to restore the nation of Israel, and there was the priestly messiah, who would suffer and die but would seal a new and perfect Covenant with God. And these two sets of signs didn't always overlap. Naturally, the early Church looked to see how Jesus matched that existing tradition - in some cases, there was an extremely close match. In others, less so, whether that's because the tradition misunderstood the prophecy or because it wasn't prophecy at all.
Second, lots of the messianic predictions are actually secondary prophecies. That is, they were primarily about something totally different and only later or secondarily seen as messianic. It often applied primarily to a prophet (especially the passages from the Psalms, which tend to refer primarily to the king or to Israel herself) and then applied to the Messiah as the one who would fulfil the prophets and personify Israel.
So, basically, most prophecy is only seen when looking back. Especially with such a broad tradition of messianic expectation, no one could fulfil it all. And Jesus followed the less popular pathway - not the triumphant king but the suffering servant. All the royal stuff is applied to him as well, of course, but not in the worldly sense that people expected - it's in terms of his victory over death and eternal kingship as firstborn from the dead, and that sort of thing.
Anyhow, I hope that helps a little!
pax et bonum
The answers to the questions have to come from within you for them to make any sense, but I can share my perspective.
1) My God allows suffering because He knows that He brings good out of everything. My God accepted suffering as part of His life with us on earth, and glorified it on Easter Sunday. He will do the same for every tear shed by us. Also, suffering teaches us that our time here on earth is temporary. We silly people tend to forget that we have an eternal life awaiting us, and many times we only learn to value what we have by losing it, or seeing someone else be stripped of it.
2) Actually, for me, the NT's value is based on the fact that it was written independently, at various times by various authors, and yet contains very similar stories of a person that existed in history. It's like asked 3 eye witnesses to describe a car accident. They will have some details that conflict, but all in all, the stories will be the same. The 4 gospels are only 4 out of the many gospels that were written, and are kept in the libary of the Vatican. Some of the gospels like the "Gospel of Peter", the "Gospel of Mary Magdelaine", and others are not contained in the books of the Bible, but are still authentic.
Supergroup7 has an important point there - for a Christian, we won't make much sense when we think about suffering unless we take the Incarnation seriously. We believe in a God who doesn't sit in serene splendour in heaven, divorced from this broken reality. No, we believe in a God who lived in it. And who still lives in it. Suffering isn't something that is outside God. It's part of God's own experience.
pax et bonum
following on from the last 2 comments, here's my take on the suffering question, which I thrashed around alot earlier this year....The Helen Waddell excerpt says it rather beautifully, to my mind
http://goodinparts.blogspot.com/2006/01/does-god-suffer.html
Thanks for your recent visit and comment on my blog...sounds as if there may be rather alot going on somewhere in your world. Do say if another ear or a praying person might come in handy at all
curate at stmarysck dot org dot uk
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