Discussed in this series: Christopher J. H Wright, The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

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Introduction

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Christopher Wright’s latest book, The God I Don’t Understand, is an exploration of some of the ‘tough questions’ that confront those who confess the Christian faith and affirm the Bible, along with the God portrayed therein. Four focal points are chosen: questions related to evil and suffering, questions related to the divinely sanctioned slaughter of the Canaanites, questions related to the cross of Jesus, and questions related to the ‘end of the world’.

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Within this post I will first review Wright’s introductory remarks. I will then post some of my own thoughts regarding what Wright has written. Finally, I will post some thoughts from my brother Judah, whom I have invited to participate in this dicussion, and he will respond to both Wright and myself. This will be the pattern employed for the entire series, except at the end, when I will also respond to the whole of Judah’s remarks, and then allow him to respond one more time and conclude the series (NB: Judah will only be responding to a reading of my summary and comments, and not to a reading of primary text).

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For those who do not know Judah, I have invited him to respond for several reasons. First of all, he is a thoughtful and compassionate fellow with experience in both the academy (he received a Master’s degree in Restorative Justice under the supervision of Howard Zehr and is teaching part-time at a University in Ontario) and in social services, where, amongst other things, he has spent some years working in support circles for perpetrators and survivors of sexual violence both within his local community and within Canadian prisons. Secondly, I have invited Judah to participate in this dialogue because, although he has previously identified as a Christian, he no longer professes the Christian faith. Therefore, I think that Judah brings a doubly valuable perspective to the questions before us. On the one hand, he brings an ‘outsider’ perspective to the discussion – one that is essential for a genuinely honest confrontation with the questions under discussion. After all, despite our best efforts to remain objective, Christians are all too easily influenced by the to vindicate their faith (and their God!) and it often takes an outsider perspective to demonstrate how superficial or self-serving even our best efforts can be. On the other hand, he also brings the perspective of a former ‘insider’, and is, therefore, able to easily follow the discussion without confusion related to the terms employed, the events described, the overview of the Christian faith, and so on. Thirdly, I have invited Judah to this dialogue because I am tired of listening about confrontations between so-called ‘militant atheists’ and so-called ‘Christian apologists’ (don’t be fooled – this is just an ideological term for militant theists!) that are, for the most part, lacking in acts of genuineness openness to the other (each party comes with foregone conclusions), charity (each party is bent on destroying the other), and affection (each party views the other as an opponent). Consequently, I hope that the dialogue between Judah and I will demonstrate that openness, charity, and affection do not not have to be absent in frank discussions related to core questions and fundamental disagreements.

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Okay, then, on to the book.

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Summary: Preface & Introduction

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What becomes immediately apparent when one enters into Wright’s book is the tone which he employs to address the matters at hand. While many other Christians have approached the ‘tough questions of faith’ with self-serving pat answers or some sort of bravado that refuses to either genuinely listen to contradictory voices or plumb the depths of the problem, Wright enters into the discussion with the intention of being both honest and humble, confessing that some, or all, of these questions might not actually have any clear-cut answers available to us here and now. This, then, explains the title of Wright’s book, which differs from a good many apologetic efforts in speaking of a God the author does not undestand… instead of speaking of a God that the author has got all figured out! Of course, Wright explores these themes as a confessing Christian, and as a person who claims to both know and trust the Christian God, but he recognises that ‘knowing and trusting does not necessarily add up to understanding’ (13).

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Significantly, Wright highlights the observation that his lack of understanding takes various forms. Thus, there are things that he does not understand about God that leave him angry and grieved (like the reality of evil), things that he does not understand about God that leave him morally disturbed (like the story of the conquest of Canaan), things he does not understand about God that leave him puzzled (like stories related to the so-called ‘end of the world’) and things that he does not understand about God that cause him to be filled with gratitude and hope (like the cross).

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While highlighting that this absence of understanding is one that is reflected back at the contemporary Christian – both in the bible and in a good many hymns – Wright ultimately takes Psalm 73 as his guide for how he approaches these issues. Wright notes that Psalm 73 ‘begins by affirming the essential faith of Israel’ and only after doing this goes on to express profound anguish over the apparent moral and spiritual inversion that the author (like us) can see all around him’ (22). However, even in this outcry, the psalmist does two things. First of all, he is cautious to not carelessly broadcast his concerns, lest he unsettle the faith of others (Wright refers to this as the establishment of a ‘proper pastoral limit to the voicing of protest, and he seeks not to transgress this limit). Secondly, the psalmist engages in his protest within the context of worship which, without changing the harsh realities of the present, does infuse worshippers with ‘a transforming expectation from the future that is both sobering and comforting’ (23). Thus, within this context, the psalmist moves from faith, through protest, to a renewed faith. Wright, then, tries to take the reader down a similar road. He writes:

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In seeking to be honest and realistic, I do not want to upset further the faith of those already disturbed. Rather, I want us to face up to the limitations of our understanding and to acknowledge the pain and grief this can often cause. But at the same time, I want us to be able to say, with this psalmist (73:28), “But that’s all right. God is ultimately in charge and I can trust him to put things right. Meanwhile I will stay near to God, make him my refuge, and go on telling of his deeds” (23).

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Thus, Wright notes how his faith, his location, and his pastoral concerns impact and limit what he does and does not say about the matters under discussion. However, his view of these limits is one that appears to be positive—they are portrayed as both necessary and appropriate.

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Dan’s Response

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There isn’t too much that I want to say in response at this point. I have already highlighted Wright’s humble tone and I am glad to see a Christian writer who is trying to encounter reality-as-it-is without immediately fleeing into comforting or self-serving obfuscations.

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That said, there are two issues I would like to raise. First, it is worth asking ourselves how Wright’s particular context and commitments – writing as he does as a Christian rooted within the community of faith, and operating with the a priori assumption that God is in control and will make everything right in the end – do or do not facilitate his encounter with reality-as-it-is. That is to say, while I do not want to take away from the importance the Christian community plays in the formation of a Christian’s identity and paradigms, I would also want to stress the importance of being rooted in other places, especially when it comes to the questions under discussion in this book. So, while Wright wishes to explore these questions within a community of god-worshipping people, I would suggest that there is great value to be found in exploring these questions within a community of (apparently) godforsaken people. Thus, for example, in exploring the crucifixion of Jesus, let us not only do so in the company of those who meditate upon the crucifix, let us also ensure that we do so in the company of those who are crucified today. Of course, one does not always need to choose between these various communities; rather, one should strive to be rooted in both places simultaneously. For, as much as being within a faith community can sharpen our vision, solely privileging our rootedness within that community can also warp our vision (if, for example, we lose track of the fact that our particular faith community is also a community of, say, conservative middle-class white folk – for every community is a combination of religious, economic, political, ethnic, and other factors that need to be explicated and often challenged).

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To return, then, to Wright’s particular context, commitments, and a priori assumptions, my concern becomes that Wright is limiting himself to a group that is, oddly enough, both too narrow and too vague. On the one hand, by writing as a Christian, with Christians, to Christians, the perspective on the topics under discussion risks becoming too narrow because it neglects the riches that are to be found when we begin to ask these questions in other places, and in solidarity with people with other commitments – say with Native Americans who survived the traumas of Christian residential schools, or say with the philosophy of a Sartre, the stories of a Camus, and so on. We must ask ourselves: when we a priori accept that God is in control, and that everything will work out in the end, how much are we capable of genuinely plumbing the depths of these questions? If we are responding to evil and suffering by saying, as Wright does, ‘But that’s all right…’ how much are we genuinely opening ourselves to the stark reality of these things? So, to be clear, my concern at this point is not that Wright is discussing these things from a Christian perspective – after all, I too am writing from a Christian perspective; rather, my concern is that Wright is too narrowly limited to only a Christian perspective.

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On the other hand, the approach taken by Wright is also too vague in that it fails to account for the ways in which our Christianity, and our responses to the questions at hand, are conditioned by the economic, ethnic, and socio-political factors mentioned above. Of course, having read some of Wright’s other works (notably, in this regard, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God), I know that he is aware of these factors and has engaged them in a way that I admire… it’s just that I would like to have seen these things dealt with more directly here as well.

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The second issue I would like to raise is Wright’s pastoral concern not to deeply unsettle the faith of others or ‘upset further the faith of those already disturbed’. Now, I’m no pastor, but on this point I find that I completely disagree with Wright. It seems to me that one of the grievous problems with Christianity in our context is precisely how settled and undisturbed it is both by the God of the bible and by the world around us. Consequently, I think that faith – if it is to be genuine, take root, and lead to action that anticipates God’s reconciling new creation of all things – needs to be unsettled, disturbed, and thrown into crisis. Thus, unlike Wright, I do not think we should place any limits upon our protests and our outcry. Indeed, unless we have been confronted with such a cry, I do not know how we can determine if our faith is real. After all, the unfiltered, unconstrained cry of another shatters all the is illusory about my faith, and reveals whether or not my faith has any reason to remain. So, for example, I may think that an appropriate conclusion regarding evil and suffering is ‘That’s all right, because God is in control…’ until I try to say this as a way of comforting a homeless girl who was recently gang-raped and she responds to these words with an unfiltered cry. Then I quickly realise that this is actually a horrible thing to say both because there is nothing ‘all right’ about gang-rape and because asserting that God is in control is a way of telling the survivor that God permitted her to be raped. Consequently, returning to Wright, I cannot help but wonder if his pastoral sensitivity simply ends up maintaining the sort of faith that is illusory and damaging to those who have been thrown into the depths of the cry. (Of course, to be fair to Wright, we have not yet explored what he has to say about evil and suffering, and the great sensitivity he demonstrates in that exploration, but it is worth highlighting this quotation because it reveals where Wright wishes to lead the reader, and the assumption out of which he is writing.)

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Judah’s Response

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Hey Everyone – I’ve finally made it onto Dan’s blog, as a writer. Look out! Here’s my chance! Dan, along with my other 2 brothers, is one of my favourite people. We did just recently have an alcohol-fueled argument that degenerated into name-calling (on my part), but we love each other all the more for it (right, Dan?). He’s younger than me yet in so many ways he is much older and wiser, having taken on a lot of shit at a young age and continuing to do so throughout his adult life.

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I did stop reading his blog for a while though. For a time, it started to feel like the same old fundamentalist bullshit, but instead of asking Jesus into my heart I had to ask the poor into my home. Both things I’m not really prepared to do. Especially the Jesus one. Anyhow, I’ve started to read it again in the past few months and think that Dan is starting to adopt a bit of a softer, more patient tone with people….according to me anyways.

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As to Wright’s writing, I haven’t read it but I have a few thoughts based on Dan’s summary and response.

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(1) I agree with Dan as to the ‘that’s all right I can trust God’ comment made by Wright. No, in my opinion suffering and evil is not all right and I wouldn’t be willing to attach that kind of a statement to it.

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(2) Secondly, I personally am not willing to trust or wait for a god to work things out. If there is a god – he, she, it (I’m very tired of most xian others referring to god as a man) – seems to be totally absent and uninterested in human suffering or doing anything about it. Human beings have the ability and potential to wreak a lot of havoc, but even more so, the capacity to take care of each other. So, rather than wait for ‘god’ I’d like to see humans – xians, jews, muslims, hindus, buddhists, satanists, secularists, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, etc, etc – band together more and do something about suffering and evil. I’m not willing to resign myself like Wright appears to suggest.

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(3) I also agree with Dan (this ain’t turning into too much of a debate) that his comment about being pastoral (when it comes to the ‘tough’ questions) is not healthy for Christians. Further, I would say it is condescending – as if he, or others like him, are the strong in the faith and they are the only ones who are allowed to truly wrestle with the most difficult questions. What’s he scared of?

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(4) I like his emphasis on not understanding…very refreshing!

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(5) This is fun – thanks for the invite Dan.

There have been a lot of memes thrown out there, but I thought I’d try something a little different.  In this meme, I invite any and everybody to share three doubts that they have, but try to hide or suppress.  So, even though this meme requires a little vulnerability, do feel free to add your own doubts to the comments section, or to your own blog.  Here are my three:
(1) Sometimes I doubt it all.  Sometimes I doubt what I have taken to be my prior and current encounters with God and wonder if they were something altogether different (manipulated experiences, emotional breakdowns, whatever).  Sometimes I wonder if I’m entirely wrong about this loving God person, because things are so horribly fucked and have been so horribly fucked for a long time.
(2) Sometimes I doubt the idea that any of us can ever be truly healed from our deepest wounds… at least here and now.  Sometimes I think that all we can do is learn to repress them, ignore them, and lie to ourselves about them… because even when I’ve thought my oldest and deepest wounds had covered over, I discover that they still split open at unexpected moments.  I’ve also witnessed this same thing in a lot of other people.
(3) Sometimes I doubt my ability to honestly encounter myself, let alone the world around me.  This, then ties into the last two doubts mentioned: (1) I might be wrong about it all, because I might be lying to myself about it all; (2) and I might be wrong about my wounds healing over, because I lie to myself about myself.  That is to say, sometimes I wonder if I have become so adept at deceiving others about myself, that I’ve lost track of the spots where I was being deceptive and the spots where I was being honest.  So, once you becomes encapsulated within an illusory projection of yourself, how do you get out?  Can you?  Sometimes I doubt it.

For some time, I’ve been thinking about writing a post arguing that the fundamental crisis of being, in our culture at this moment of history, is that of meaning.  Specifically, how we are no longer certain, and no longer know how to be certain, that anything, or any of us, have any fundamental meaning, significance, or value.
Tonight I sat down to write this post and let my mind dive into this crisis, seeking to face it personally (as it has been a crisis that has been weighing on me more and more over the last six months), while also trying to root it in it’s particular socio-historical context, and so on.  However, as I was writing, it struck me more and more powerfully as to how this crisis of meaning is related to one’s rootedness within the milieu of the bourgeois, the wealthy, the comfortable, and the privileged.  That is to say, for the vast majority of people in history, and even in the world today, the fundamental crisis of being isn’t meaning — it’s survival.  The crisis of being, for most members of humanity, is that one is unlikely to continue to be for much longer.  The crisis is not having any food to eat, not having clean water to drink, not having an immune system that functions properly, and so on and so forth.
Consequently, I became so ashamed of myself and my crisis of meaning, that I couldn’t bring myself to finish my original post.  Instead, I wrote this.

When all was said and done, what did we see?
A mother, tired and frightened and bloody and torn.  A baby in a stable reeking of piss and shit and transients living among animals.  Living like animals.  A family far from home.  The stench of their street-feet  rising stronger than anything else in that stable, sticking to our skin.  This is what we saw.
And it is this, this, that made the angels sing.  Made them swell so brilliant that, just for a moment, the veil was lifted and we saw them.  Exultant.  And they spoke to us.  They told us to come and see this blood and piss and shit and fear and exhaustion.  They told us that here, in the midst of this, we would find our saviour.  And maybe, just maybe, we did.
Because we found someone who was with us.  With us in our blood, our piss and shit and stink.  With us in our fear and exhaustion.  With us in our poverty and helplessness.  With us in places where humans should never be, but where we our forced to go.  With us.  And if this baby is who the angels say, and if he grows and continues to remain with us, then maybe, just maybe, we will be saved.

Christmas is one of the hardest times of year for street-involved people.  Granted, it’s a time when they receive more free stuff than usual, but more powerful than the stuff are the feelings of loneliness and loss, and the many painful or traumatic memories about family, or the lack thereof, that are triggered at this time.  There’s a reason why acts of suicide and self-harm go up at this time of year.
And so, I thought I’d post a link to the “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues.  Here’s a bit of Christmas music for all the lovely motherfuckers who are going to spend Christmas eve in the drunk tank, the hospitals, and the homeless shelters.  God bless us, everyone.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff3aoSyYOVs&feature=related]

[Ben Myers recently posted ’10 theological theses on art’.  This is my response.  As you can see, I find his theses — like the vast majority of Christian reflections on art — to be problematical.]
(1) Theodor Adorno famously remarked that writing poetry, after Auschwitz, is barbaric — Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.  This, then, prompted others to explore the possibility of doing any form of theology, music, or art ‘after Auschwitz’ (i.e. after the Holocaust).  And rightfully so.  Adorno is not simply questioning poetry; he is questioning the entire web of Western culture which has now been revealed as indissolubly connected with the mass production of death.  Illustrating this point, George Steiner writes: ‘We now know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning’ and Adorno adds: ‘The idea that after this war life could go on as normal, that culture can be resurrected… is idiotic.’  Thus, Adorno and Steiner both pose deep moral challenges to our cultural or artistic endeavours.
(2) It is these challenges that are the proper starting place for any Christian discussion of art.  Why?  Because Christianity necessarily privileges the experiences and perspectives of those who are oppressed and who are not only excluded from the circles of the cultured, but from the community of the living.  This is what necessarily results from following a crucified Lord.
(3) However, to question the value and role of art ‘after Auschwitz’ does not yet take us to the depths of our current dilemma.  After all, the Holocaust is now more than half a century in our past and the world — including the world of culture and art — has gone on.  People have forgotten what happened, the survivors have slowly been dying, and we are left with little more than the sentimental representations of the Holocaust provided for us by Hollywood — precisely the sort of representations Adorno warned us about.  Thus, we have become incapable of creating art ‘after Auschwitz’ because we are incapable of properly remembering Auschwitz.  Therefore, when we visit the location of Auschwitz, as a tourist destination, we are engaging not in an act of remembrance, but in an act that illustrates our inability to remember.  Indeed, this is why aging Holocaust survivors are three times more likely to commit suicide than others — they are the ones who, unlike us, are unable to forget Auschwitz (which then leads us back to Adorno’s greater question: ‘Is life possible after Auschwitz?’  The answer, I suppose, lies in series of questions: ‘Life for whom?  The survivors?  The perpetrators?  The spectators?’ and ‘What sort of life?’ but exploring these would take us too far from the topic at hand).
(4) That said, we must immediately recognise that we are not really living after Auschwitz.  Proper reflection upon our contemporary situation should lead us to conclude that we are living during Auschwitz.  By saying this we are not suggesting that the Holocaust of the Second World War is still ongoing; rather, we are retaining an understanding of ‘Auschwitz’ as a way of referring to the mass production of death related to Western culture and its self-absorbed lust for property and power.  Thus, for example, every 200 days something equivalent to the Holocaust occurs — every 200 days another 10,000,000 people, mostly children, die due to starvation, water-borne illnesses, and AIDS.  These are just a few of the largely preventable, but largely ignored, causes of death in our world.  Causes of death, we must repeat, that are intimately linked to the web of Western culture, politics, and economics.
(5) Therefore, the question becomes, ‘what is the role of art during Auschwitz?’ and the answer, just as with the question above, depends upon whom is doing the art.  On the one hand, we have seen that, even within Auschwitz, inmates produced art.  Indeed, oppressed and persecuted peoples have always produced art, and it cannot be denied that both the act of producing that art, and that art itself, contain a great deal of life-giving-and-sustaining power.
(6) On the other hand, we must ask ourselves about the value or significance of art produced by those who are numbered amongst the oppressors and spectators during, but outside of, Auschwitz.  Here, we must become much more critical.  All too often such art is simply a contemporary manifestation of the madness and cruelty of the Roman dictator, Nero, who is rumoured to have played the lyre and sang in theatrical garb… while Rome burned.  Thus, while children starve to death, we paint pretty pictures; while children die from drinking dirty water, we analyse films; while children are destroyed by AIDS, we deconstruct classical literature.
(7) Therefore, to continue to engage in art as though Auschwitz never occured, and as though Auschwitz is not continuing to occur, is unjustifiable and immoral.
(8) Instead, art must be created or performed in such a way that it becomes a part of a life-giving process of mutually liberating solidarity with victims and survivors, the dying and those left for dead, around the world.
(9) Indeed, to think that art can ‘seek the beautiful’, or be ‘a parable of redemption’, or come into the ‘proximity’ of the ‘beauty of God’ in the ‘crucified Christ’ apart from engagement in this life-giving process of mutually liberating solidarity is foolishness.  Again, more strongly: to engage in artistic endeavours that seek the beauty of God (which is found in the crucified Christ), without simultaneously engaging the crucified Christ who is revealed in the poor people of history is, to borrow Adorno’s language, idiotic.
(10) To make this assertion is not to suggest that all art must then engage in some sort of overt or superficial didacticism.  It is simply to suggest that the Christian artist — like Christians in every other profession — stands under the Lordship of Christ and is accountable to certain basic, and unavoidable, Christian commitments.

How long, now, have we been waiting for you to come back to us?
Almost eighty generations.  Almost two thousand years.
How long, now, have we been waiting for you to come back to us?
Countless wars.  Countless plagues and famines and floods.
How long, now, have we been waiting for you to come back to us?
We are bleeding.
How long?
We are suffering.
How long?
We are dying.
How long?
Our hearts are breaking.
How long?
Our minds are breaking.
How long?
Our bodies are breaking.
We are still waiting.
For salvation.
Waiting.
For healing.
Waiting.
For redemption.
Waiting.
For liberation.
Waiting.
For life.
Waiting.
For you.
Return to us.
Our voices have grown hoarse.
Return to us.
Our eyes have grown dry.
Return to us.
Our hands have grown weak.
Return to us.
Our hearts have grown hard.
We are lost without you.
O, come.
So lost.
O, come.
So lost.
Immanuel.