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Posts from the ‘The Problem of Evil’ Category

Oct 10

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Why (Not) Me?

As I mentioned in the previous post, our church is spending the month of October in the book of Job, looking at themes of suffering, lament, protest, repentance, and the motivations for faith. As it happens, Job was the subject of conversation on the most recent edition of “Tapestry,” the weekly spirituality program on CBC Radio. More particularly, the theme of the program was “coping” and explored the question: “How do we cope with the suffering that inevitably comes our way?” A number of appropriately diverse perspectives were explored (this is Canada, after all!), each of which contributed to what was a fascinating program. Read more

Oct 8

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“The World is More Precious Than We Can Possibly Imagine”

Among the lectionary readings for the month of October are selections from the book of Job. Having long been fascinated by this magnificent story, I decided back in summer that October’s sermons would be oriented around Job and themes of lament, suffering, repentance, the sovereignty of God, etc. Strangely, I never really clued in to the fact that the first Sunday in October would be Thanksgiving Sunday here in Canada, and that I would thus find myself in the somewhat awkward position of starting a series on the trials of Job on a Sunday normally devoted to giving thanks to God for the blessings we enjoy! It was an interesting experience, to say the least, trying to weave together themes of gratitude and grace, pain and promise, suffering and salvation, through the stories of Job, Jesus, and all of us who ponder the mysteries of joy and pain in their shadow. Read more

Oct 4

8 Comments

The Formula of Faith

I’ve been thinking a lot about carrots, sticks, and formulaic faith over the last little while. I spent a good chunk of last week wrestling with the well-known (and often abused) “pray and you will be healed” passage from James. Among the questions I explored were, Is there a one to one correspondence between (the correct kind of) prayer and the experience of healing/blessing? Is faith a kind of formula where the input of x leads to the output of y? And, of course, lurking behind these questions are even bigger ones: What is the motivation for our faith? Do we follow Jesus because of what we can get out of the deal? Is our faith contingent upon the experience of blessing/goodness? Read more

Sep 26

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Indicting the Cross

Last night was spent at a local theology reading group hosted by a philosophy professor from the university in town. It’s an eclectic mix—a few professors, a chaplain (who was gracious enough to invite me!), history and philosophy students, Mormons, atheists, agnostics, and a handful of other positions on the way to or from faith, no doubt. The discussion was freewheeling, lively, and very stimulating. I spend a lot of time in “churchy” circles where I am supposed to be some kind of “authority” or, ahem, “expert.” It was nice to take that hat off for an evening and just explore some interesting questions with others. Read more

Jul 20

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The Scratching of Itches

Regular readers of this blog will know that the subject of my masters thesis a few years ago was the rise of “The New Atheism” (the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett) and that I interpreted this phenomenon not as the inevitable triumph of scientific rationality over superstition (as many of the authors were fond of claiming) but as a form of protest atheism against the evil in the world and against a God that they expected better from.

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Jul 19

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“I Wish God Would Just Wipe it All Away”

Every morning on my way to work I drive past the local prison. It is a surprisingly picturesque facility—lots of big trees for shade and well-manicured green grass, a nice lake beside it with all kinds of birds, a baseball diamond and basketball courts visible from the road. Nonetheless, the barbed wire and the chain fence around the perimeter leave little doubt about the purpose of this place. The jail on the side of the road has been a regular source of interest for my kids ever since we moved back to Alberta. They often ask if the inmates are allowed to read or watch TV, or about what kind of food they get to eat, or how often they get to play outside. A few weeks ago we happened to drive by while a baseball game was going on. The kids were very pleased. Read more

May 26

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On “Moral Injury”

A few things I’ve read over the last 24 hours or so have me thinking on a quiet Saturday morning…

Yesterday, I came across a term I had never heard before via someone in the world of counselling: “moral injury.” In this case, the term was located in the context of a conversation about how to treat soldiers returning home from war, but it could obviously be used more broadly as well. Here’s how the term was being used: Read more

May 24

6 Comments

You Say You Want a Revolution?

I’ve been a part of a number of interesting and often painful conversations over the last few days, many of which relate—directly or indirectly—to the problem of evil and whether or not there is a coherent way to think about and respond to this from a Christian perspective. These subjects of these conversations have covered a head-spinningly wide range—from  the reality of war and poverty to systemic injustices to painful realities of everyday life and relationships. In every conversation, old, old questions lurk in the shadows: “How can God allow this? How can I believe that God is good and loves his children in light of ____? What am I supposed to do, as a person of faith, in light of all this evil?” Read more

Feb 7

9 Comments

If You Could Change One Thing…

This morning, as my son and I shivered together in my frozen little Jetta on the way to morning basketball practice, he asked me the following question: “Dad, if you could change anything about the world, what would it be?“

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Dec 16

23 Comments

A Labour of Vision

This morning, I read of Christopher Hitchens’ passing and felt very sad.

I did not know the man personally, of course, nor did I share many of his convictions about the world. Indeed, Hitchens spent a good deal of time and energy (articulately and entertainingly) attacking some of the things most important to me. But today’s news really hit me. It was kind of like hearing that a friend had died—or at least a distant cousin that you once stayed up late into the night having an intense conversation where you both got really worked up and ended up simply having to agree to disagree!   Read more

Dec 6

13 Comments

Rejoice Always

Last night, I was sitting on the sofa after dinner looking over the lectionary texts for the coming Sunday, trying to decide which passage or combination of passages I could preach on. When my wife wandered over and inquired as to what I was doing, I immediately solicited her advice in choice of texts. She read them over, hummed and hawed noncommittally, then took a deep, trepidation-filled breath, and said, “Can I make a suggestion? Do you think this week’s sermon could, you know, maybe focus a bit less on the negative?” Read more

Aug 2

2 Comments

Good News… Please

The church of Christ is in the business of proclaiming good news, in word and deed. This is our reason for being. Somehow, we believe that the good news concerning Jesus of Nazareth has changed, continues to change, and will one day finally change things in our lives and in our world. Good news changes things.

This is what we say.

And yet there are moments when it all seems so unbelievable. Read more

May 11

33 Comments

Everything Seems to Be Broken

It is an odd thing, I have discovered during my nearly three years as a pastor, to be entrusted with people’s pain. 

It’s not an everyday occurrence, but today pain came calling.  Two conversations with two people, both carrying crippling burdens of hurt and despair, sorrow and longing, both dealing with the complex cocktails of physical, spiritual, mental, and relational pain that characterize so many lives, both searching desperately for a word of hope, comfort, or encouragement. Read more

May 2

11 Comments

The Servant God

The conversation taking place on my previous post—specifically the comment referring to open theism—has got me thinking about some of my writing and reflection I did on the topic during my university days. I spent an entire undergraduate thesis under the supervision of a self-described “atheistic Jew who is angry with God” advocating open theism as a response to the problem of evil. Read more

Apr 27

34 Comments

God, Risk, and Evil

Last night, we had a drama group performing at our church (unenviably, on the same night as game seven of the Canucks/Blackhawks series!). Through a series of sketches, the group skillfully and humorously walked us through the basic contours of the biblical narrative—creation, fall, redemption—climaxing, of course, with the resurrection and the hope of new creation. One of the ideas that stood out to me during the dialogue in an early scene which depicted God deliberating with one of his angels about what and how to create, was that in creating human beings, God took a risk. Read more

Mar 30

23 Comments

Silence

I couldn’t help but grimace as I read the headline from Douglas Todd’s recent article in the Vancouver Sun (“Evangelicals Mostly Alone in Believing God Punishes with Earthquakes“).  It highlighted, once again, the lengths we will go to to find (or manufacture) moral meaning in times of chaos and suffering. Combined with news of some painful things happening in the lives of various people in the various domains of my life and work, I have been thinking a lot about the silence of God these days, and how we are to live and think and speak about God as people of faith in a broken world. Read more

Mar 11

22 Comments

Thinking and Praying

A post from 2009 called “Our Thoughts Are With You” has been getting an unusual amount of traffic today due, I can only assume, to people’s wrestling with how to think and respond to the unfolding tragedy in Japan. I have received a few emails today loosely related to the question of how (if at all) we are to talk about suffering, whether from the perspective of belief in a providential God or not. Do we attempt to “explain” or are all such attempts offensive by definition? Do we say we are praying? Thinking? Do our hearts go out to those affected? Our minds? Our hands and feet? Our wallets? We see images and hear stories like the ones coming out of Japan, and feel we must have something to say. So… what?

To be sure, it is always somewhat perilous to force words into the context of suffering (I think of Job’s “miserable comforters“), but I thought I would re-post an edited version of the original today. Read more

Feb 25

17 Comments

Evil Will Have Nothing to Say

Two of my projects this week have been working on an article on suffering and the sovereignty of God, and preparing a class for this Sunday on the varieties of approaches to the problem of evil. Consequently, I’ve been raiding the bookshelf over the last few weeks in order to reacquaint myself with some of the authors and ideas that I leaned on more heavily during my university and grad school days. Read more

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