God's Greatness vs. God's Goodness

Michael Wiltshire, our guest blogger for this series, will introduce "Get With This or Get With That" with the timeless issue of God's Goodness Vs. God's Greatness.

God: Great vs. Good

God is great, God is good: let us thank him for our food. Amen. As a kid, this little prayer was one of the quickest ways to get “saying grace” out of the way before a meal. I think most Christians have used it at some point to close-in on the time between them and their dinner. The idea of God being both great and good is a familiar one to most Christians as various hymns and prayers are constructed around it throughout church history. But have we missed an important distinction in our theology of God's love and glory?  

In his book, The Mosaic of Christian Belief, theologian Roger Olsen describes the church’s theological consensus on the matter by explaining, “Our God is both glorious beyond our understanding and perfectly good beyond any creaturely goodness.” God’s greatness is often attached to terms like sovereign, transcendent, and self-glorifying, while his goodness is communicated with words like self-sacrificial, compassionate, and loving.  Christians have sought to do justice in focusing on both descriptions of God by letting their theological framework be built in a way which can contain both sides. Their tendency to hastily join them together often ignores a critical distinction which must be made in order to truly understand and experience God’s greatness and goodness for what they really are.

In most cases, by lumping God’s greatness and goodness together, theologians and their followings have unnecessarily overemphasized one side over the other—and then sometimes tend to outright deny the other side altogether. When Luther saw a weakening of God’s greatness from the Catholic Church, he began to preach of a hidden God who is totally free of creation and may damn any man or women without reason. For Karl Barth, God was known as “he who loves in freedom” (Church Dogmatics 2/1) which would summarize his belief that God’s greatness and goodness are not at all in conflict with each other if we abandon all thoughts of projection. Maybe more recent evidence of the church’s failure to see this needed distinction is the evangelical uproar over Love Wins by Rob Bell—a book which in many ways suggests that part of God’s divine greatness eventually may mean that his goodness will win every human soul.

Here is our problematic struggle with making sense of a God both Great and Good: If a person begins and ends their theology with one aspect of God, they easily distort the other—and eventually even the one they began with—leading to a theological caricature of God. If one begins their theology with “God is great” they often envision God’s goodness to only be a manifestation of his greatness and vice versa. An outstanding example of this may be philosophical theism—a system of thought which popular Calvinist theologian Loraine Boettner (among Calvin and others) uses to assert that God purposefully predetermined every single event that would happen—including all acts of sin and evil—and continues to guide those events in order to maintain the fullest extent of his greatness. To many, such a God cannot truly be good whatsoever—and his greatness, in this light, becomes distorted as well.  Panentheism, on the other hand—which sees God in totally interdependent on the world—is another danger if the pendulum swings too far the in the opposite direction.

So how does one keep from overemphasizing one aspect of God? Again, there is a critical distinction to be made. God is equally Great and Good—but we cannot let those terms become fused to the point where they are totally interdependent on each other. In my opinion,we must begin to construct theology which allows both aspects to operate simultaneously and harmoniously.  This then requires letting God’s greatness and goodness remain in their paradoxical framework.  And while such a paradox may seem like sloppy theology to some, it is important to remember that speculation outside of what God has clearly revealed to us often may better lead to mysticism than poorly developed doctrine.  We must also see God as capable of self-limitation, if he chooses to do so. At the end of the day, our monotheism still requires distinction.

You Can Get With This or You Can Get With That

I'm excited to introduce the "This for Thas" series.  For some time, I've been fascinated by how ideas that have real consequences are used without understanding where they come from.

This series then comes out of a frustration with "distinctions" - real distinctions that make a ton of difference if they are heeded.

What the bugger am I talking about. Ideas that are meant to stand alone for very important reasons, many times will get lumped in with another idea and thereby lose their distinction. The problem with this, is well... I'd rather just get to it. To name a few...

Human Error vs. Human Brokenness

Holy vs. Sacred

The Gospel vs. Implications of the Gospel (with a video featuring Mark Driscoll)

Infirmities vs. Sin

Neo-Reformed vs. Neo-Puritanism (more recent)

Election to Salvation vs. Election to Service

Greatness of God vs. Love of God (Special Guest Bloggers on this one)

Simple vs. Simplicity

Tribes vs. Families


The hope for this series is to address the need to distinguish ideas that are usually lumped together.  By lumping these ideas together, we generally begin to define what one idea is (God's wrath) as more important and sometimes more defining than than its companion neighbor idea (God's love) is.  Hopefully the clarity we can achieve from this will help us approach our faith and other people with our faith more honestly and carefully. We can all agree that being careful is becoming more and more necessary in how we talk about God and others' beliefs in the public and private squares of our world.

Jesus ;) Religion - Why We Need All Three Vids (and a few more)

Youtube has lit up with Jeff Bethke's version of why he hates religion but loves Jesus.  His spoken word has stirred emotions, thoughts and not a few controversial convos and blog posts.  I hesitated to comment or even think about his performance but now that it is at over 15 million views within 10 days (uploaded on January 10th, 2012) and has been viewed by people all over the globe, I thought it was time.  I was also asked by a friend from South Africa what I thought - South Africa!  This video is a true example of how viral video works - amazing!  (Btw - I love the way the internet works)

I had hoped it would blow over and he would be an internet sensation which would lead us to the next one.  But this guy has staying power (10 days, I know, too early).  The reason I say that is that within a week and a half, two other prominent religious traditions have come out with their own responses done in a very similar fashion and with competent levels of quality.  I have enjoyed them all to one degree or another.

The First One - Jesus>Religion


I've generally been frustrated by the first film (Jeff Bethke's) that came out and didn't want to pay it too much attention - plus a lot of people liked it and if I said anything to critique it, I think it wouldn't do any good. What he says has so many merits, but it doesn't take into account God's choice of humanity and God's desire to work through human dynamics (i.e. religion) to accomplish his purposes. God doesn't hate religion, he enters more fully into it than we ever do and challenges its decrepitness and affirms its life giving elements thereby changing it into something even better.

Almost the entire O.T. Law and sacrificial system was borrowed from other "religious" structures present in the Ancient Near East cultures that surrounded Israel. If God hates religion, then he wouldn't embody it in order to redeem us. Does he hate religion void of intentionality, sincerity, and a heart for God - absolutely - but he doesn't hate religion de facto.

Isaiah 66 talks about how he detests their religious observances - the same religious observances that he gave for them to do and commanded them to do. Why did he reject them - because of the status of their hearts (which was evident in the deplorable actions that they displayed outside of the temple).

What this brother is hopefully trying to say is that religious observance as hypocrisy sucks, but it would be a mistake to say that religious observance itself sucks. I love religious observances and even when they take the place of my heart because I'm in a bad place or just rejecting my open invitations to encounter God, they keep me and for that I'm thankful.

Because as I continue to do them, that rhythm is usually the one thing that leads me back to a place of accepting the invitation of a real encounter with God. Religion will never be the problem - it is just a solution created by man that God accommodates and actually affirms but that doesn't always work. In the end, it is not meant to "work" - it is meant to keep us connected to life of God which is found in embodied and communal practices (=religion) as well as personal and sincere pursuances of the Divine Encounter (=Jesus).


The Second One - Jesus<3Religion


The second vid by Fr. Pontifex (Fr. Claude [Dusty] Burns) was surprising because Catholics are usually not that cool in their media distribution and yet PhatMass and Spirit Juice Studios are.  I agree a lot with what Pontifex presents in his explanation, but as a soft postmodern Christian with a profound trust in the goodness and sovereignty of God, I actually think we need all three vids in order to understand what God is saying and then a few more (which I'm sure are already forthcoming).


The Third One - Jesus>Religion: The Muslim Version

When it comes to the Muslim brother, the point about worshipping Jesus that he mentions more than once is actually true.

Richard Rohr, a catholic priest, says the same thing. There is so much about how he (the video dude) presents his ideas through this that is so well done and through provoking. At the same time, he's missing some obvious philosophical categories that could help his argument a lot. It was actually North African Muslim Intellectuals who helped us re-discover the great thinkers of Greece and the Ancient world. Christianity owes a lot to these Muslim thinkers. There was a time when they incorporated ancient philosophical thinkers into their understanding of the world and religion, but it seems they have stopped that. The Christian tradition picked it up from there and re-incorporated philosophy's categories back into our faith tradition which has allowed us to understand better the concepts like Trinity, sacrifice, etc...

God is not scared or bothered by any of these videos and I'm sure he enjoys the Spoken Word format. They are all required to encounter and understand who the Trinity really is, even the one from our Muslim brother. I don't follow Islam and can't agree with their conclusions about Christ, but I can still learn so much from watching his video that I need - though my filter will still be Scripture, the Church and its history, the narrative of God in my life and the extremely important life and words of Christ.


But yeah, in the end, I need all three of these vids and a few more.

When Paul Calls You a Saint?

He's referencing the Priestly class in the OT as now applying to the entire church rather than just to a clan of Israel. This may have been a shocker to hear in his letters as most of the people listening (Jew or Gentile) would understand that priests are a "special" class of people and not a title you hand out liberally. This could have made Paul's ongoing statement quite scandalous. My first thought is that it is somewhat of a rhetorical device, to call members of the church saints, to shock people out of their comfortable paradigms. That's just the rhetorical approach, but now some other considerations.


The first thing that comes to mind is that the priestly function was to, in a way, sacralize the world around them (make common things sacred). In the OT, there are three different classifications usually assigned to the "things" in the word - Holy, Common & Profane. 


The Holy was to be separated from the Common and protected from the Profane. 


The Common was to be kept from the Profane. Just because something was common or profane or holy didn't mean that its intrinsic value was in question or that it was necessarily intrinsically bad or good. It was a classification system that allowed the OT priests to uphold the Law. The priest's vocation was to uphold these categories and enforce them in the life of the Israelite community to maintain their fidelity and direction of worship towards Yahweh.

I can imagine that that role has been transferred to us in the NT church under the New Covenant because part of our role is to make everything "spiritual" and to be holy as he is holy. Now our being holy is not something that we depend upon another human being to do for us, other than Christ (our High Priest), but at the same time we are called into Christ's priestly role by co-priesting with him as we are also called to co-reign with him. Our priestly function is deep and complex in this world and takes a lifetime to discover and unpack as well as practice.

Making everything spiritual seems to be the function of "re-mythologizing" the world. C.S. Lewis did much of that in his works - to re-enchant the world with the enchantment that God meant for it to have. 


Sin has "dis-enchanted" the world from its original and potential beauty and potential towards flourishing. Our role as priests is re-sacralize the world and to give order to what has no order - to sacralize that which has been de-sacralized - to re-enchant a dis-enchanted world. This comes in forms of healing, renewal of all sorts, proper ordering of relationships, economics, social orders, systems, personal lives and communities, etc. 


When we talk about salvation and sanctification - we aren't just talking about getting saved and becoming a more moral person - we are talking about being re-ordered back into a way of being that we were meant for along with the rest of Creation and the Cosmos. It's all integrated. 


Romans 8 - creation groans in eager expectation for the revealing of the sons of God so that it can experience its redemption - because we are all connected - for good and bad. Once that process is begun in our lives, we are then called into a deeper participation in the life of God's re-ordering of the world as we are being re-ordered into the "image" we already bear.

Ordering the world to re-sacralize it is a macro-activity of the historic priestly role in the OT to order the world for the Israelites based upon the Law. Now the job is extended to the whole world through the NT church with the presence of the Holy Spirit and the power, authority and commission given to us by Christ in Matthew 28. 


So, what are we called to sacralize in the world around us and how should we attempt to do so carefully and respectfully?

Peter Rollins at the Brehm Center

Peter Rollins lecture at Fuller Seminary & the Brehm Center from Brehm Center on Vimeo.

Culture Redefined Away From A "Head" Start to an Embodied Start