Welcome

Welcome. Thanks for stopping by. I hope you will join the conversation.

The focus here will be theodicy, but thinking about theodicy usually leads to a number of other questions regarding the orthodox Christian faith. I think these will arise naturally and land on the discussion table over time, so please keep dropping by.

My recent Master’s thesis on Trinitarian Theodicy revealed a lack of resources integrating the Doctrine of the Trinity with Christian responses to the problem of evil. There certainly could be more available than I was able to find, and so a second hope is that this site will be a repository for resources related to the topic. Please let me know what you know.

I anticipate most of the conversants will be lovers and followers of Jesus Christ, but all willing to participate positively in the discussion are welcome.

Again, welcome – and thanks.

Link

Why, God?

As Maureen Dowd of the NYTimes notes, “death takes no holiday.” Dowd asks Father Kevin for his thoughts in light of the recent events in Newtown CT and Webster NY.

The Shack Revisited

From all eternity, God is not alone and solitary, but lives as Father, Son and Spirit in a rich and glorious and abounding fellowship of utter oneness. There is no emptiness in this circle, no depression or fear or insecurity.  The trinitarian life is a great dance of unchained communion and intimacy, fired by passionate, self-giving and other-centered love, and mutual delight.  This life is good.  It is right, unique, full of music and joy, blessedness and peace. Such love, giving rise to such togetherness and fellowship and oneness, is the womb of the universe and of humanity within it.

The stunning truth is that this Triune God, in amazing and lavish love, determined to open the circle and share the trinitarian life with others.

An excerpt from The Shack Revisited,C. Baxter Kruger, 2012

Dancing with Jesus

Doing life together with Jesus is a coauthored narrative process filled with many points of crisis. But the imaginative, tension-filled process of engaging the crisis is what makes a story interesting.

Every crisis raises relational issues: Will you try and handle it yourself? Will you find a new partner? Or will you and Jesus tackle the crisis together? In tackling the stuff of life together, you’ll see that your relationship with God will deepen.

In pondering Christ, you find that you are in fact living His life, and God is living yours. Christ in you and you in Christ. God doesn’t lead you through phases or steps. He draws you to Himself in continuous motion. What we often have viewed as stages or phases may be a change in music. But the point is never the music. It is the dance. The music is often part of the dance. But sometimes the most beautiful dance is the one where you and your partner make up the music as you dance together.

Jesus Manifesto, Leonard Sweet & Frank Viola, p.68-9.

Faith & Wish Fulfillment

Over on Scot McKnight’s blog today is a post by Jeff Cook looking at our desire that God’s existence be true. It is a great post which I encourage you to read. What follows is my comment to Eric, a poster facing the challenges of terminal cancer, about the oft repeated charge that Christianity is nothing more than wish fulfillment.

Eric: I think desiring something makes us open to it, open to the possibility of it. Noticing a girl when one is young makes one consider the possibility of a relationship with her. It doesn’t make it true, but it does open us to the possibility it

Donald Miller

“Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

Thank God for Good Friday

“Everything Happens for a Reason”

Does it? Really?

I heard this statement a handful of times over the course of the birth of a long-awaited child in early February. It related mostly to the challenges of long distance travel, but as I kept hearing it, I kept wondering (to myself), “really?”

The God Who Will Not Be Without Us

The Trinity “means that God is not some remote, unknowable Deity, a prisoner in his aloofness or shut up in his solitariness, but on the contrary, the God who will not be without us whom he has created for fellowship with himself, the God who is free to go outside of
himself, to share in the life of his creatures and enable them to share in his own eternal Life and Love. It means that God is not limited by our feeble capacities or incapacities, but that in his grace and outgoing love he freely and joyously condescends to enter into fellowship with us, to communicate himself to us, and to be received and be known by us. Moreover, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity means that God does not surrender his transcendence in condescending to be one with us in Jesus Christ, but it does mean that the more we are allowed to know God in himself in this way the more wonderful we know him to be, a God who infinitely exceeds all our thoughts and words about him, but who in spite of that reveals himself tenderly and intimately to us through his Son and his Spirit.” —Thomas F. Torrance

The Incessant, Overflowing Love of God

The aim of man’s life is union (henosis) with God.

This participation takes man within the life of the three Divine Persons themselves, in the incessant circulation and overflowing of love which courses between the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and which expresses the very nature of God. Here is the true and eternal bliss of man.

Union with God is the perfect fulfillment of the “kingdom” announced by the Gospel, and of that charity or love which sums up all the Law and the Prophets. Only in union with the life of the Three Persons is man enabled to love God with his whole heart, soul, and mind, and his neighbour as himself.

A Monk of the Eastern Church

Overcome . . . From the Other Side

As with many of you I too have come to know God most significantly, and to the very core of my being, during the seasons of challenge and suffering that life inevitably seems to bring to us all. He has caught me, enfolded me, reassured me and calmed me just like the North Pacific is calm twenty feet below the surface in the midst of a winter gale. From the surface it appears unsurvivable, while just a few feet below there is not even the hint of a ripple. Richard Rohr says it well: