“Mark Tindall” <> wrote in message . > G’day all!

>

> I’ve been absent for few weeks owing to the illness and death of my mother

> in Sydney. This has led me to re-examine many of my beliefs and, as

usual, > I have more questions than answers.

And my sympathies are with you too, Mark…

> How practical is our worldview? Does it help us exist moment by moment?

> How and in what ways?

Good questions. It seems the main options are: denial/resignation, facile faith in this or that religious or non-religious conviction, anger, rationalizations of one sort or another (reincarnation, fundamentalism: some are in others out)… More below on this…

> Of what value is the golden rule of loving others? How far is this to be

> taken? Can we love Bin Laden?

Only saints can ‘love sinners and hate their sin’. I don’t meet many…

> What lies beyond death?

Better figure out who has any authority on this subject, and take notice of the most credible witness…

> Does it matter?

As the left-handed dictionary says ‘It does matter if we are more than matter’…

> Why? How does your view on this

> matter relate to current knowledge?

On this subject I’m a bit skeptical of current knowledge. The proton and eschaton are beyond our ken…

> For me the ultimate questions involve existence, love and death as these

are > common to all people. Does a belief in God help in these areas or not?

> Why?

Ah, there’s the rub.

Two stories, a quote, and a Benediction: * The young boy had a refined and beautiful face, the face of a ‘sad angel’. He was silent as the German SS guard placed his head in the noose. ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ someone asked. After the boy’s chair was tipped over it took him an agonizing half hour to die. Again the voice: ‘Where is God now?’ Elie Wiesel heard a voice within answering: ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows…’ And ‘that night the soup tasted of corpses’…

~~~

* God is all-powerful. * God is all-good. * Terrible things happen.

You can reconcile any two of these propositions with each other, but you can’t reconcile all three. The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There have been numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality of evil itself they are none of them worth much. When a child is raped and murdered, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants us to love him, we must be free to love or not to love and thus free to rape and murder a child if we take a notion to…

Christianity… ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene – not even this – but that God can turn it to good.

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, London: Collins, 1973, p.24.

~~~

Some years ago our twenty-one-year-old daughter and the lad to whom she would some day have been married were both drowned in a yachting accident. God did not stop that accident at sea, but he did still the storm in my own heart, so that somehow my wife and I came through that terrible time still on our own two feet… There came an anonymous letter from Northern Ireland: `Dear Dr Barclay, I know now why God killed your daughter; it was to save her from being corrupted by your heresies’… The accidental destruction of the beautiful and the good – the will of God! If I had had that writer’s address, I would have written back, not in anger – the inevitable blaze of anger was over in a flash – but in pity, and I would have said to him, as John Wesley said to someone: `Your God is my devil’. The day my daughter was lost at sea there was sorrow in the heart of God.

When things like that happen, there are just three things to be said. First, to understand them is impossible. Second, Jesus does not offer us solutions to them. What he does offer us is his strength and help somehow to accept what we cannot understand. Third, the one fatal reaction is the bitter resentment which for ever after meets life with a chip on the shoulder and a grudge against God. The one saving reaction is simply to go on living, to go on working, and to find in the presence of Jesus Christ the strength and courage to meet life with steady eyes, and to know the comfort that God too is afflicted in my affliction.

William Barclay, Testament of Faith, Oxford: Mowbrays, 1977, pp. 45-46.

~~~ A Benediction

And as you go into this day or this night, and into the future, remember:

The light of God surrounds you, The love of God enfolds you, The power of God protects you.

Wherever you are, God is: behind you, before you, within you, above you, around you, ahead of you.

You are blessed, and you are loved. May you truly know that, and may the joy of his delight in you make you whole. Amen.

And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen. 1 Peter 5:10,11.

—

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher