Friday is for Friends: David Opderbeck

From the sadness, I find this positive reaction-
To blame God is to create an arbitrary, monster God and escape our personal responsibility.
To blame the devil is to blame God for letting it happen and another escape of our personal responsibility.
Likewise, to praise God for particulars of birth, fortune, and health is to mock those without and create an arbitrary, monster God and escape our responsibility.
Our responsibility is to be the eyes, the ears, the heart of God, and we can praise God for giving us this responsibility and pray to God that we may fulfill this role which Jesus taught and modelled- which we call the Jesus Creed.
Doug

"God of the mucky stable afterbirth, bearer of sharp-glassed leather on bare back, wearer of spit and thorns, whose arms were twisted at sharp angles fastened with nails, abandoned, god-forsaken Son with agonized cry for eternal perichoretic dance interrupted by Death's convulsions: how will you redeem this suffering? Do you hear Garret and Jaideep's cries?"

Beautifully powerful words, David. Thank you for giving voice to those who cry from a cross.

Hope and Love
surely love is the only thing left, for in the wake of such witness philosophy, theology, study, knowledge, certainty/ies and all other manner of way's to answer fail and fall to the way sides
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and all we are left with is a wisp of hope and the space for Love.
For God if he is here/there is Love and was love in way's we may never answer/imagine/understand but can only Hope

Thanks to Scot for the forum to express these thoughts. I'm very grateful for Garrett. Because he lacks words, he's amazingly expressive in other ways, which makes him one of the warmest and funniest kids you'll ever meet. What a gift! Of course, I wouldn't wish him to have to gain those gifts of warmth and humor through this mis-wiring of his brain, which limits him in so many ways. But I'm glad for this little window that opens in the face of closed doors.

Yet I really do struggle with my theology because of Garrett. I referenced Romans 10 in the post because it was a touchstone of the "four spiritual laws" soteriology I inherited: that salvation is all about substitutionary atonement and comes only in a discernible moment of individual conversion through hearing the gospel and appropriating its benefits.

Garrett cannot "hear" the gospel, because the wiring of his brain won't allow him to process linguistic narratives. I try to draw pictures and act out the gospel story for him, but I know he doesn't really "get" it. When we pray together at bedtime, he thinks "Jesus" is just another name on a list, along with mom, dad, mummum and papa.

Now, I still think the substitionary atonement is a crucial aspect (though only one aspect) of the cross, and that God calls everyone to respond personally to the gospel. But I suppose I have to relax my categories a bit when it comes to what it means for the gospel to be "preached" and for a person to "respond." If this broken little boy is God's gift to my family, I do not believe God gave us this gift for us to live in dread that his neurological confusion will ensure his eternal destruction.

And if this is what I must believe, what can I say about all the broken little boys and girls around the world, all the millions of Jaideeps whose bodies literally are thrown on the trash heaps of poverty every day? I will not presume to judge God's justice, nor will I deny the exclusivity of Jesus' claim to be Lord, his sole ability, as the incarnate God, to have defeated sin and death on the cross, or the unique power of his resurrection. But if I know him at all, I do not believe he gives the world the gift of all these forgotten children only for us to live in dread that the unfortunate circumstances of their birth ensure their eternal destruction. There must be more to the story if God loves Garrett and Jaideep as much as He has said and shown in Christ.