Author Archives: Bo Grimes

Sinning Against Our Brothers (Late Commentary on Da Vinci)

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When I first heard about The Da Vinci Code, I said “That’s a straight-up rip-off of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”  It’s not a new idea or a very original one; it’s just plotted differently.  If you can’t succeed with “history” or literature (The Last Temptation of Christ) then pop culture is where you sow your seeds.  And the crop has been bumper, indeed!

At first, I thought that only people not very familiar with the Bible or Christian history and theology would be “troubled” by it, except for the honest and decent members of Opus Die, a very good organization, and the only reason I didn’t want to see the movie was that I want to financially support a movie that slanders my Lord and directly implies that the entire foundation of my faith–the Divinity of Christ and His death and resurrection– is a sham.  That’s still a good reason, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.

It makes of it merely a personal financial decision without seeing the dimensions of knowledge formation or responsibility to my brothers and sisters in Christ.  In recent conversations with Christians who’ve seen the movie, when I related the above argument to them, they, and others have said the same in print, replied that it was merely fiction, a novel, and good entertainment at that, nothing more, nothing to kick up a fuss over.

And Mein Kampf was “just a book,” right?  Few things force me to sit down and think through my positions like the claim that entertainment is merely entertainment.  It’s not mere fiction.  Ideas have consequences, a concept few in the West believe anymore.  Memes [1] get generated, seeds get planted and harvest are sowed, either for God or the Enemy.

It’s not the Christian I worry about here (I’ll get to them below); it’s the non-Christian.  Imagine a kid growing up in a non-Christian home, daily inundated with the ideas presented incessantly that Christianity is either a sham or a force of evil in the world or both.  The ideas are planted day after day year after year and that person isn’t exposed to any alternative.  When he or she gets older, the beliefs are hardened into clichés requiring no thought.  A worker in God’s vineyard sows seeds, but they are immediately chocked out by weeds.

We all “know” things that aren’t so.  Just look at the urban legends in e-mails. The entire premise behind advertising is that it influences.  Last year a study conducted by the University of Connecticut and published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that there was a 1% increase in the number of drinks consumed per month for each additional alcohol advertisement seen by teens.

The Prevention Research Center tells us that “”Young people have well developed beliefs about alcohol, even before they have experience with drinking.  Although parents, peers, and other environmental influences are important in shaping these beliefs, and ultimately drinking behaviors, alcohol advertising may also be a source through which children and adolescents learn about alcohol.”

“Young people have well developed beliefs…before they have experience,” that quote is true and telling.  It’s why our Scripture commands us: “teach [God’s law] to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up.” (Deut 11:19) The “meme” that orthodox Christianity is both a sham and an evil is ubiquitous these days. Combine it with the belief in mere entertainment and the belief that ideas don’t have consequences and the result is toxic.

When little or no attention or credit is given to the positive role Christianity has played in the development of the institutions and practices of a free society, when what little is written (like Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadance) is read by few, and mostly by those who already agree, when ideas go unchallenged, when the topics of greatest concern are gas prices or access to cheap broadband, then the enemy slips in “like a thief in the night.”

If something as banal as advertising wields influence, how much more so does fiction?  Fiction has been used for centuries to powerfully convey serious ideas (“If you prick us will we not bleed?”).  In fact, for those who don’t believe, the Bible itself is considered fiction.  Consider Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found where he argues that Job is part of wisdom literature in the same vein as Shapespeare and Homer.

There’s a  Revlon ad showing the back of a topless woman in bed, being photographed by the man in her bed, with the voice-over saying, “If you convince her the pictures are only for your personal collection, you’re a Mitchum man.”   Is that “just a commercial” or is it demeaning to women because it presents them as mere sex objects to be manipulated and lied to for a man’s pleasure?  Is the rap song that chants “face down, @ up, that’s the way I like to f__k” just entertainment, or has the whole hip-hop culture contributed to the sexualization of our children?  Is Mapplethorpe’s “Piss Christ” just art?  Is “Debbie Does Everyone and His Brother and Sister” just a movie?

I have no animus here, but I can not now or ever accept the argument that something which presents thoughts, concepts, ideas, theories, opinions, beliefs, practices, and moods is just entertainment.

The Eight would have made a better movie.  It was a better book.  The reason The Da Vinci Code was made into a movie was it had an easily recognizable and ready to use “controversy” to generate sales.  I am disappointed that so many people protesting the movie do not see that they are being used.  Hollywood loves a good controversy, making money by manipulating people go see it just to check out what all the fuss is about, but I also respect those challenging the movie for drawing a line and standing athwart cultural trends and yelling “Stop!”

Many of them  have presented thoughtful, well-reasoned challenges to The Da Vinci Code.  I think they’re worth reading, especially if you think that ideas are not at stake here.  In contrast, on the movies side you have unreflective, trite, voices like Ron Howard’s, who pulled out the classic cliche: “If they don’t want to see it, don’t go.”

Let me try that argument on a few other propositions.  If you don’t like smoking in a restaurant, don’t go to that restaurant.  There are others.  If you don’t like the fact that this business will not sell to blacks, don’t shop there.  There are other places.  Let the market work it out.  If you believe the ideas matter then you can’t just shrug it off and ignore it.

I don’t believe in banning (“All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful”), but I do believe in boycotts.  The protest of Da Vinci is illuminating in the wake of the violent reactions by Muslims to the Dutch cartoonist last year.  One again, as from earliest times, Christians are using peaceful, civic means to protest something that is way more demeaning to Christ then those cartoons were to Mohammad.

What troubles me most is the lack of goodwill between Christians.  On the one hand you have the Ban Its (BIs), and on the other hand the It’s Just Entertainmenters (IJEs).  In the media the IJEs are acting as if the BIs are just illiterate, fundamentalist, uncultured bumpkins.

Paul’s teaching on food offered to idols is very analogous here.  We are free to eat what we want, but if it offends our brother we are to abstain, lest we cause our brother to stumble.  (1 Cor 8, and 10:23-33).  If the consciences of literally tens of thousands of my brothers and sisters worldwide are offended by this movie, I will not be a source of their stumbling.  Rather than being united in Christian teachings about relationship even when we disagree about theology, we present a fractured and fragmented face to the world.

I humbly and sincerely think that if this particular entertainment is a stumbling block to so many in our Body, that we should be united against it for that reason; instead, most of those who disagree with them unite with the secularist.

  1. “a theoretical concept introduced in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, [which] refers to any unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice, idea or concept, which one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind” [↩]

Mapping God

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If you’ve been paying attention you can’t help but notice that there is currently a huge press by fundamentalist atheist to discredit the orthodox Christian view of God. I think one of the reasons that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (and others) are so successful lately is partly a reaction against President Bush. The writers mentioned above are reaping the success of a fairly simplistic emotional syllogism in the public at large: Bush is a idiot; Bush is a Christian; Christians are idiots.

Alister E. McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford, has both written a book, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, and given a lecture, available in both mp3 or mov format at Veritas, titled “The God Delusion: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the Meaning of Life” that convincingly challenges and refutes these arguments.

The national conversation in the Blogosphere has sparked some interesting approaches to theology. Andy at Sinning Boldly has written a post title “Richard Dawkins and a Personal God” in which he took a rather clever route of trying to map out the various approaches to defining God’s relationship to His creation. Rather than plotting transcendence and immanence in a linear way, he has proposed that there are actually two axes.

Author: Andy at Sinning Bodly, Used By Permission Used by Permission

It’s an interesting approach, but for me it’s never been an either/or. God is both transcendent and immanent; that is, to use Andy’s phrasing, He is both “wholly external” (a spin-off of Tillich’s “Wholly Other” I imagine) and “organically present.”

Since Jesus is both wholly other and organically present and ontologically distinct one would have to have some non-Euclidean spherical and multi-dimensional axis in order to map Him, but that’s way beyond me. I don’t know much about the mathematical field known as topology, but it seems to me that mapping God would require some kind of Möbius strip in which God loops and bends back in on Himself, and even then we’d only see shadows of His real nature.

Just Imagine

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When I was a boy, I was most impressed with the power of God. “Wow,” I used to think, “My God can just speak and worlds are created.” I was often times like a little boy thinking “My father can whup your father.” And it’s true. Our God is an “awesome God.” He did create ex nihilo, out of nothing, but it was even more awesome than that.

One day, with boyhood years behind me, something hit me as I was taking a fall walk and praying. I was thanking God for the beauty of His creation, the changes of the seasons, the harvesting of crops… all the things I saw around me: the way the breeze came up, the smells of the ditch flowers, the sounds of birds and rustling leaves.

I was telling God not only how wonderful and beautiful it all was but how amazing it was the way all the diversity of nature was so intricately connected, the way it all worked in such incredible harmony. “And You brought this all into being by Your Word and will alone without even…”

Have you ever been surprised by your own thoughts? That is, when the words came out of your mouth or off your pen have you have just then realized the truth of what you said or wrote; the act of writing or speaking did more than express your thoughts, it actually seemed to create them as you spoke or wrote?

William Makepeace Thackeray once wrote that “There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.” I would include almost any form of art in that, and I would also include prayerful contemplation.

As I was praying that final line, when I got to ‘even’ my voice slowed down, and I listened in delighted surprise as I finished my sentence: “…without even a single frame of reference.” Then I said it again, excitedly: “And You brought this all into being by Your Word and will alone without even a single frame of reference.”

Now, maybe this is a commonplace idea, but it had never occurred to me before. Everything, and I mean every single thing, that human beings have ever created has been the product or amalgamation of what was already created. We know this as children when we give God credit for all we have. A child may say to her parents, “But God didn’t make this house, people did,” and the parents reply: “But God made the trees. He made the metal. He made all the things that people used to build the house.”

But, it applies to the Arts as well. Not one writer or filmmaker or artists or musician ever created something without a frame of reference, without combining what was already here. In fantasy, the griffin, the sphinx, and the dragon are all parts and pieces of other animals.

Forget for the moment that you could not actually create something from nothing because you don’t have the power, but try to imagine creating something even as simple as a daisy without ever having seen one. Try to imagine just imagining something if there was nothing, let alone imagining it and then creating it.

Imagination is hard work, maybe one of the hardest mental obligations we have, but it is an obligation. We can not practice Jesus’ commands without it. How can we do unto others as we would have them do unto us unless we can imagine ourselves in their place? But more than that: “Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of his beauty beautiful.” (John Piper)

Imagination is like a muscle that must be exercised. Far too often we let others do our imagining for us. There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology, but sometimes it makes us mentally lazy. The imagination suffers when we passively and uncritically absorb words and images and sounds.

I think it’s especially hard for adults, so I’d like to share with you a mental exercise that I imagined one day listening to a favorite song of mine. Kenny Loggins wrote a song titled “Return to Pooh Corner” about how as we age we wander much farther away than we should and “can’t seem to make [our] way back to the [hundred acres] woods.”

The second verse goes:

Winnie the Pooh doesn’t know what to do
Got a honey jar stuck on his nose
He came to me asking help and advice
And from here no one knows where he goes
So I sent him to ask of the Owl if he’s there
How to loosen a jar from the nose of a bear

So try this, I do. The next time you’re stressed out, frustrated, caught in the grind, and can’t seem to find your way back to the woods, stop what you’re doing, take a deep breath and try to imagine “how to loosen a jar from the nose of a bear.” And there it is! You just smiled, didn’t you?

So, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get “back to the house at Pooh Corner by one. You’d be surprised there’s so much to be done. Count all the bees in the hive; chase all the clouds from the sky…”

And when I arrive I’ll give thanks and praise to the God who imagined imagination itself, and I’ll remember that Loggins couldn’t have sung about Pooh if Milne hadn’t first imagined and created him , but that Milne couldn’t have created an imaginary bear named Pooh if my awesome God hadn’t first imagined and created a real bear.

Foucault’s Folly

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Unable to participate in national debates in any other way, I have participated in religion and politics discussion forums on the Internet for years. I have noticed that many of the exchanges are based on power. Discussions are frequently full of postmodern machinations designed to subvert any attempts at clear thinking.

It is an axiom of contemporary postmodern posturing to see everything as some Foucaultian power struggle for control of perceptual reality. Such po-mo chic argues that “everything is permitted; nothing is true.” (I for one wish that those who wish to affect such an ironic knowingness would just remain silent because each time they engage in a debate they indict the very foundation of their pose and saw the very branch upon which they sit out from under themselves.)

Instead of trying to discover as much as is possible about some specific, concrete historical event (real historical scholarship), be it Waco or the Holocaust, many would rather play relativistic games with rhetoric in order to manipulate opinion; history is ironically imperialized and treated as strategy. Just look at an old article in “The Atlantic” which describes a lawsuit in Great Britain as “putting the Holocaust on trial and making historical truth the defendant.” There a Holocaust denier was suing for libel because an American historian called him a “dangerous spokesperson for Holocaust denial.”

Truth is becoming a power struggle. Many in the national media, for example, try to discredit a source, or they slant a person’s motivation with endless interpretation and cries of partisanship. Rarely do they attempt to discuss the issues or debate matters of disputed fact.

Others will try to confuse people with assertions of truth’s relativity, but just because human knowledge may be more or less contingent does not mean that something specific, concrete and actual did not take place in a particular moment of history. That our knowledge of those events can only be partially known, and the fact that cries of partisanship are shouted, in no way changes that or precludes our responsibility to the truth.

It is the highest of human conceits to argue that historical reality, or any other reality, is somehow implicated by and entwined with human fallibility and finitude. Simply put: because human knowledge is subjective, to a more or less greater degree, in no way means that truth is relative.

Knowing the limits of reason, the contingency of human knowledge and the self-limiting nature of all conceptual frameworks, some people try to mitigate those limitations through an open, well-informed presentation of issues and points of factual dispute.

Others, however, use the above limitations to obfuscate: manipulating, mischaracterizing, dissembling and deconstructing in order to try and keep the discussion enmeshed in some meta-struggle for conceptual control of the public square. Turning discourse into “Thus Speak I” shouting matches and charges of partisanship, they attempt to manipulate perceptions with rhetoric so that they do not have to actually bring any evidence to bear on their assertions.

All one can do, I suppose, is attempt to rescue cogency from the grip of muddled reasoning one hipster doofus at a time.

The Slow Smokeless Burning of Decay: What Will We Leave On-line?

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As a boy I used to explore the miles and miles of woods behind my house. I grew up in rural North Carolina where I could have walked to the nearest town, which was five miles away, had I been allowed, and barely stepped foot on a road. Out the back door, into the woods, through the tobacco fields, over a fence or two, across a dirt road, back into the woods and out through fallow fields on the edge of town and into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.

I had no Sony Playstation, no VCR, no computer with an Internet connection, and sometimes no TV. My parents would always take a TV from one of their own parents when their parents bought a new one, and when ours would break that would be it until the grandparents bought another. Sometimes we went years without one, it seemed. Books and nature were my truest friends.

I remember many times when I was out exploring the woods and I would come across a sign of man from ages long gone. One of my favorites was an old wagon trail, the ruts grown over with underbrush, but still discernible. I got a tremor in my stomach the first time I found it. A little research much later in life led me believe (probably fancifully) that it was the trail used to settle the area a little less than two hundred years before. The settlers had followed the Neuse River over from New Bern.

Just like that I was in love with history. I still get that tingle in my stomach when I go into a library and research something, or visit an historic sight. I found old wood stoves, wooden barrels, tools and even fence posts from old settlements that the forest had reclaimed.

Americans hardly ever walk anywhere anymore. We are so attached to our cars, mini-vans and SUVs that few of us know what it’s like to go a walking through the woods and stumble over the remains of those who passed before us. Robert Frost knew.

In 1912, just before he made what he would call a “great leap forward,” Frost wrote a poem that was very special to him: “The Wood-Pile.” Just before his death almost fifty years later he would single this poem out to be used in his annual Christmas card.

In it the narrator is “Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day” when he stumbles across on old woodpile:

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

When in our journeys in life we stumble across the decay of previous generations, it can catch us by surprise, as if we suddenly see ourselves “in a slanting mirror.” Yet, if we pause and reflect upon who they were, what their lives must have been like and upon our own impermanence we can absorb them and be the stronger for the encounter.

I have to wonder what remains my children will find in their Playstations and TVs and pop culture. It doesn’t look good, and yet I hope. With all the trash littering the information superhighway, there are still a few gems to be found. Who knows what information will be left forgotten for dead out here in cyberspace?

Maybe “Somewhere ages and ages hence” my children’s children’s children will come along two roads diverging in the frozen swamp of cyberspace, and just maybe they will take the one less traveled by and find it warmed “With the slow smokeless burning of decay” of some lost “wood-pile” that you and I put on it today.

I hope it might “[make] all the difference.”

Late Night Thoughts on Limited Atonement

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In the quite of night-
a time I dread-
remembering times gone
and loved ones dead.
The grief so strong,
like a hammer’s blow.
I gasp out loud,
the tears flow.
How I loved them!
Did You love them too?
Will I see them again?
I wish I knew.
If alone You choose,
why limit the call?
Love without action
is not love at all.

I wrote this poem at a time when I was beginning to have grave doubts about predestination and God structuring our salvation in such a way that we are helpless in its decision. That was over 15 years ago, and I still haven’t worked it out. In the belief that “questions tell us more than answers ever do” (Michael Card), I frequently ask lots of questions that I don’t really propose to answer.

Below are some I wrote after writing the poem. I won’t try to answer them here. But 15 years later, I think my position is this: God predestines some, known to Him as the elect, to salvation, and He may predestine some to damnation. Of that I am less confident, and I tend to be more like Luther than Calvin. Aside from those, I think that God makes it possible (that is He somehow provides enough grace ) for others to accept Him.

In other words, some receive God’s grace like a dead person receives the air blown into his lungs. Others accept his gift the way we accept a compliment. In neither case is the one who is saved doing anything to earn salvation, it is a free gift of grace, but those predestined have no choice and those not do.

The questions that drove this poem:

I don’t mean to question the sovereignty of God, but does it have to be an either/or situation, either God ‘s grace or our choice? Could it be that God gives us sufficient grace to choose Him if we want? But then this opens up a whole can of worms implying that God’s grace can be resisted. If it can be resisted then He is not sovereign is He?

However, that aside, the thing that troubles me is that if God deliberately chooses those who are damned can He be said to love them? I realize that we are not worthy of being loved, that we rejected Him, but He says He loves us and sent His Son to die for us.

If limited atonement is true then God did not send His Son for all, and He does not will for all to be saved. This implies, to me, that people have no intrisic value at all. I believe in original sin, but I also believe that man has value to God-all men, because He created us. If He values us then His act of atonement would be for all to receive if we take up our cross and follow Him.

How cruel if someone is born amoung the unelect, and their family loves them, they live an admirable life of self-sacrifice, in human terms, genuinely care about other, make the world a better place, and die never having had a hope of eternal life. This seems to make it God’s choice and not their sin that condemns them. If God’s sovereign will to save me is based on His choice alone in spite of my sin then His sovereign will to damn another is based on His choice and not their sin.

This also seems to be contrary to the actions and some of the words of Christ. Christ acted as if all men had value to God. Was it just because He did not know who the elect were or is it because God loves and values all men? If He values all men then why limit atonement or the possibility of it?

Now, am I questioning Scripture? Predestination is certaintly there. Am I saying that Paul does not count what Christ said? I hope not, but where is the reconcilation?

Another thing, why was the language of predestination and Calvinism so believable to people in the 16 and 17 centuries and not so much today? Is it that knowledge of Scripture has declined or is it that the cultural context in which Christianity finds itself has an effect on it? Is it that words lose meaning and shift focus? Is it that at times God’s Holy Spirit emphasizes one aspect because it is being negelectd and then emphasizes another later on?

Do we need to find the language of our generation to express the gospel? I am not talking about watering down the gospel, only finding the right way to evangalize modern America. That’s another thing, what is the point of evangalizing? Is it like prayer, more impt for the practictioner that the one evangalized?

A Dream of Love

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I dreamed a dream of love,
and in that dream
there were long evening walks
and serenades;
we picked wild roses
while moonbeams played
through your hair,
enchantment everywhere.

In that dream we flew,
just me and you,
up to the stars,
and down below,
in soft starlight’s glow,
the world was light.

There was no fear,
unlike here.

Leftovers

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Did you blink and miss summer? I did. Every year I promise myself I am going to recapture those magical golden days of summer when time used to slow down. Why, in a single day I used to fit in a dozen games of horseshoes, an hour or so of cloud watching, a romp in the woods with my faithful dog, a good nap after an hour reading in the hottest part of the day, a game of kick-the-can with my sisters (played at dusk to maximize stealth), a bit of tire-swinging, and, of course, plenty of watermelon eating. And somehow, I managed to fit in the chores, too!

If you’re like me, you’re wondering where the summer went. You’re already back in the swing of full-blown stress-and-panic mode. How am I going to get the kids where they need to be, do my job, cook the meals, help with homework, clean, cut, fix, mend, shop, build [insert 400 other action verbs of your choice]… do you feel your chest tighten just reading this? Do you have 911 on your speed dial because three numbers requires too much time, time you just don’t have, and when the breakdown comes you have to call the ambulance, arrange a sitter and order take-out before you hit the floor?

Imagine if there were a way to multiply time. Would you believe me if I told you it’s possible? Maybe I should put it on cable in the early morning and offer it to you in three installments of $19.95, but only if you call in the next ten minutes, because those operators standing by? They have to get home to fix breakfast, start a load of laundry, drive the kids to school…

The Bible is full of lessons on different types of sacrifices to make to God: a “broken and contrite heart” (Ps 51), “a sacrifice of thanksgiving” (Ps 116), “of praise” (Heb. 13), our “bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12), and money, among others. In speaking of the monetary sacrifices, Paul said, of the “churches of Macedonia,” that “They gave themselves first to the Lord,” and somehow, then, were able to give “beyond their means, of their own free will, begging earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints” (2 Cor. 8:3-4). Wow!

Jesus has a knack of multiplying that which we first freely give to him for His service. Take the fish and loaves, for example. When I read that story in John 6, I have to stop and think “Only a child would have given his small lunch to Jesus to feed 5000 people.” Someone, probably more like Martha than Mary, had responsibly sent her son out with a small lunch. Which of us would have given it up? I’d have thought “Why should I go hungry so that everyone else can also go hungry, because if I give up this lunch you can be sure of one thing: None of us will be satisfied.”

Not that boy. He gave “first to the Lord,” and the Lord multiplied it, not just until everyone was satisfied, but until everyone was satisfied and there were leftovers to boot! In our frantic, panicked, stressed-out, overwhelmed lives do we dare to believe He can do it with time?

I think the answer is a resounding and emphatic “yes!” I firmly believe that God gives us more than enough time to do the work He’s given us to do, including time to worship, pray, study and fellowship. Sadly, we beg for enough time when He longs to give us leftovers.

Often times in our lives, when it all gets to be too much, the first thing we neglect is our relationship with God. Our personal devotions, our church attendance, and our participation in Sunday school and Bible study (that is, our personal and corporate worship and our Christian education) suffer. Our service is often maintained, because so much of our image is dependent upon it, but it’s often done with feelings of stress and frustration rather than joy and gladness. We forget where our fuel comes from and serve on empty.

Lord knows (and I say that literally without an ounce of irreverence) we need to rest. He knew it when he designed us; He knew it when He instituted the Sabbath; He knew it when He called us and when He commissioned us. We’re the ones who don’t seem to understand.

Christian discipleship has at its heart four action verbs: “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” (Matt. 11:29) “Abide in me.” (John 15:4) Come, friends, take, learn and abide “and you will find rest for your souls.”

If we plan on giving God our leftover time, we won’t have any, and we’ll be frazzled, hurried and stressed, but if we give “first to the Lord,” I bet we’ll suddenly find that we even have time leftover!

Providence, Sin and Prayer

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John Piper, a preacher and writer whom I deeply admire, recently wrote an article about the bridge that collapsed which prompted his ministry to ask its readers “Does God Cause Sin or Just Allow It? “If God is sovereign over evil,” the question asks, “can it be said that he causes it? Or does he just allow it? Is there really a difference?”

I have been struggling with just this question for several years now. Americans these days are fond of asserting that everything happens for a reason. Yes. But sometimes the reason is because sin and evil are real powers. I have decided that any theology of providence must begin with two axioms:

1) Sin is not perceptual.

2) Prayer is not purposeless.

Regarding 1, I believe that the “law of sin and death” is every bit as real as the laws of physics. Sin causes. It has real world consequences apart from our perception. In other words, sin won’t disappear if we just look at it differently. It’s true that sometimes what we perceive as sin isn’t. It’s also true, however, that Sin really exist.

Just as God is sovereign over the laws of nature, but does not often interfere with them (at least as far as we can tell), so the law of sin and death also operates as a real force in the natural world. God can and does intercede in nature with miracles, and He also intercedes in the law of sin and death through the redeeming work of His Son and transforming work of His Spirit.

However, just as He does not “cause” each “leaf to fall to the ground” (as Luther asserted)[1], so He does not cause each sin related event, such as abortion (which would make abortion part of His plan for the aborted child.)

Regarding 2, prayer is not without purpose. If God actively exercises His sovereignty over each and every event, that must include the speech/thought event of prayer, meaning that even what we pray is predetermined by Him. If true, this seems to make prayer powerless because we will only pray for what He has already foreordained us to pray for and He will only do what He already determined to do before the creation of the world.

Hebrews 11 tells us God is proud to be the God of people of faith. Why would He be proud of puppets who can not even choose what to pray for? Further, God relented when Moses prayed (Exodus 32). And the “prayer of faith” James writes about and Solomon’s prayer for wisdom are senseless if God’s chooses all events, including speech events. When Solomon prayed for wisdom, Scripture tells us that “It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this” (1 Kings 3: 10).

If God preordained that Solomon would pray this, and God is sovereign (with sovereign having the meaning, here, that Solomon could not refuse) then why would Solomon’s prayer please Him? Was God like a little child who suddenly realized he could really make the world respond to his wants and needs? I don’t think so. I don’t think ‘sovereign’ has to mean that God chooses each and every event in the space/time continuum.

I believe that it is within God’s sovereign power and choice to limit His choice. In Hebrews 6 we learn that God made a promise and swore by Himself, so that by “two unchangeable things” we have hope.

If God promised Himself that He would not interfere with the ordinary effects of both the laws of nature He created and the law of sin and death that we brought into the world, except when it came to His choice as to whom to call (justification) and when He chooses to answer the prayers of the faithful, then He could willingly limit His sovereignty without changing His character and nature.

This is why prayer is the most vital and important work of the Church, and must not be neglected. I believe God has chosen not to act sometimes until and unless we pray. This also is why God is still sovereign and not the author of evil.

  1. “[W]ith God there simply is no contingency, but it is only in our eyes.  For not even the leaf of a tree falls to the ground without the will of the Father.” Lectures on Romans, Works Vol. 25, p. 373 [↩]