HEARD AT CHURCH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let’s think about God’s will.

I’m preparing to teach my students about the Puritan religion along with its Calvinistic underpinnings. I thought about that this morning when I heard my pastor quote a recently deceased theologian who said that sin, disease, and disasters were not God’s will.

Anyone who knows anything about John Calvin, the scientist burner, knows he believed that nothing happens without God’s preordination. Everything’s already decided and set in stone. We’re just waiting for time to unfold to the last chapter.

Yada yada.

People still believe Calvinism today. I know my hometown Chattanooga, Tennessee has a church, First Presbyterian, wherein many of its members believe it.

There’s a college built atop Lookout Mountain, Covenant College, wherein the faculty and professors believe it.

I remember some of their students taking a Paul Tillich class for credit at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The professor who taught that class, Dr. Weisbaker, studied under Tillich at the University of Chicago. Dr. Weisbaker was a Princeton man with a University of Chicago doctorate pointing us hillbillies to a God loftier and larger than Calvin’s concrete idol.

The Covenant students did not do very well. It must have been difficult for them to imagine a God who was more abstract than their concrete deity. They were nice Christians, however, and they sought to follow Christ. We agreed on what was necessary.

The idea that our God of love would send a disease to punish an individual is silly and baseless. Worse is the idea that God would write the story of history and put cancer into his story just to bludgeon his characters (whom he created) as a punishment for sinning in the way he decided that they would sin.

Sorta like Yahweh did with Pharaoh.  Moses tells the Egyptian king that Yahweh wants him to set the Hebrew slaves free.  Pharaoh refuses.  God socks him with plagues that cause suffering for him and his people.  Moses tells him Yahweh’s message again, but Exodus tells us that God “hardens Pharaoh’s heart” and thereby makes him disobey.

Ancient people thought that way, but only because they did not understand the nature of disease, disaster, and possibly even sin itself. To suggest that God sends a tornado to punish Pecos Bill for getting drunk on a Saturday night today deserves scorn and ridicule.

However, many who suggest such nonsense are our brothers and sisters, so we must never scorn them or ridicule them.

It is not our God of love’s will that any should suffer, and it most certainly is not God’s will that we treat each other unkindly.

Blessings…