{"id":26347,"date":"2020-03-12T11:32:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-12T18:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=26347"},"modified":"2020-03-14T13:12:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-14T20:12:00","slug":"confronting-the-goodness-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/confronting-the-goodness-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Confronting the Goodness of God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca McLaughlin\u2019s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World\u2019s Largest Religion<\/em> poses difficult enquiries for the Christian faith and offers thoughtful responses. Her hope is that skeptics would read it and be disarmed by the honest look at Christianity\u2019s greatest criticisms. She is unafraid of their closer consideration and wholeheartedly believes Christianity remains the best of the worldview options.<\/p>\n

I appreciate her project in part because of her backstory. She is well-educated and has worked in esteemed academic circles on the integration of Christian faith into a variety of disciplines. McLaughlin shares her own struggles, doubts and humanity. And yet she is unabashedly optimistic about how Christianity stacks up to humanism, secularism, Buddhism, and so on.<\/p>\n

Short of canceled services, I teach this weekend on the goodness of God. And I find it true (again) that learning, belief, conviction, and the sort, deepens when one gets to teach it. I want to persuade the audience even more of the goodness of God. The Scriptures refer to this trait frequently. But the longer I sit with it the more I wander to suffering. What of suffering? I was pleased McLaughlin confronts this lucidly in the last two chapters.<\/p>\n

Suffering is inescapable. This is not a popular message in some American churches, especially those that lean towards a prosperity theology but it is the reality. C. S. Lewis once remarked, \u201cWhat do people mean when they say that they\u2019re not afraid of God because they know that He is good? Have they never even been to the dentist?\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0I believe Lewis is referring to the potency of pain to spiritually form us. And our suffering does not negate the goodness of God. These are tensions that God’s people inhabit, like Taylor exhorts us.<\/p>\n

I have to get more comfortable with this tension – God is good and people experience suffering. I listened to a long sermon series on Job and suffering years ago as I was wrestling with this tension. One of the takeaways for me that I still consider is that God does not save us from<\/em> our suffering but that He saves us through<\/em> our suffering. I wonder where would my faith be without suffering, discomfort, disruption, which in all its small and big ways, has pointed me to Someone greater that surpasses this world’s brokenness.\u00a0We must keep our view of God high and live compassionately with our fellow human sufferers.<\/p>\n

While the goodness of God does not mean that things will always be good and feel good for however long my earthly life is, it does speak to His character and posture towards us. God will not leave us or turn His back on us. That is goodness indeed. And that no matter what will befall us in this world, God will ultimately redeem us. McLaughlin says it well:<\/p>\n

“From an atheist perspective, not only is there no hope of a better end to the story; there is no ultimate story. There is nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. From a Christian perspective, there is not only hope for a better end; there is intimacy now with the One whose resurrected hands still bear the scars of the nails that pinned him to his cross. Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ\u2019s name is stitched into our lives.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An application of this for my personal research interest could be to think through ministry expectations tempering. Without adopting a doomsday perspective (and integrating Pinker\u2019s challenge to me to remain positive and optimistic about our worldview of the Kingdom of God), perhaps a more robust theology (or doctrine, Digby?) of suffering would help preserve those in full-time ministry? I know of multiple people that went to work at churches with high ideals of how heavenly it would be, only to later resign jaded. Those tenured in ministry may find this too obvious to mention but how would we sober our inexperienced ministers without discouraging them?<\/p>\n

Suffering is a foremost stumbling block for skeptics. And I cannot blame them. And it is not just Christians that need to answer the question of suffering, but the secularists and Buddhists do as well. In a podcast interview with McLaughlin, the host proposed three basic choices to explain pain and suffering: chaos, Karma or Christ.[3]<\/a> I am more grateful than ever for the choice Christ offers.<\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a> C.S. Lewis, A Year with CS Lewis (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), chapter 9.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World\u2019s Largest Religion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), Loc. 4211-2, Kindle.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Speak Life, \u201cRebecca McLaughlin Interviewed About Confronting Christianity,\u201d interview by Glen Scrivener, May 6, 2019, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QIYL7R7yaIg&t=14s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca McLaughlin\u2019s Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World\u2019s Largest Religion poses difficult enquiries for the Christian faith and offers thoughtful responses. Her hope is that skeptics would read it and be disarmed by the honest look at Christianity\u2019s greatest criticisms. She is unafraid of their closer consideration and wholeheartedly believes Christianity remains the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1824,1825],"class_list":["post-26347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-confronting-christianity","tag-mclaughlin","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26347"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26371,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26347\/revisions\/26371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}