But I’m also a person who in the past year has learned that not only do I love the physical world around me, but that it’s OK for me to love it. And not only that, God loves it, too. He loved it so much, he took on flesh and allowed himself to experience the physical world for himself – or at least as much as he could. He even suffered and died so that he could restore it to himself. For whatever reason, God loves the world and the people in it that much.

So I recoiled a bit as I heard some of the same old reactions to the Moore tornado that we hear after every tragedy – reactions that sound uncomfortably close to the lyrics from some classic hymns: “Just a few more weary days, and then I’ll fly away.” Or, “This world is not my home; I’m just a-passing through.”

No.

This world is our home. We live here, fully present in its joys and its sorrows. We await a return and a restoration, but until then, we groan with creation, hoping for a release that is so hard to find, some days harder, much harder, than others.

For all of the tragedy and the sorrow and heartbreak, this is a good place. We would not bring more lives into it if it weren’t. And those lives matter. They are not insignificant ciphers on their way to somewhere else. They are children of God, and the loss of even one blasphemes the goodness of creation. We can, should and do mourn them.

Yes, we have hope, and with that hope we wait for the day when all things are restored to the one who made them and he banishes forever the chaos that breaks into our lives.

Until then, we do so much more than pass through: We live, and we love. We celebrate, and we grieve. In short, we risk. Because this life, and this world, is worth it.

Did you notice who killed the firstborns? The Lord (Ex. 12:29). And years later, God Himself put to death His own beloved Son so we might be set free from slavery.

Back away slowly.

It’s worth remembering that even as the early church fathers explicitly focused on the notion of theoprepes, what is fitting for the divine, we do this, too. Everyone puts God in a box. Can God sin? If your answer is no, then you have decided it is not fitting for God to sin. Can we describe God with feminine pronouns? If your answer is no, again you have used theoprepes. 

For Origen and his successors, theoprepes was important because it was a significant criticism from the Greek pagans, who largely agreed with Plato’s conception that the soul had sinned and fallen into the body. Therefore, the body was something like a contaminant, and unfitting to house God. The incarnation thus was a major stumbling block, and the early fathers needed to explain why theoprepes  allowed for God to take on flesh.

Athanasius of Alexandria followed Origen in this vein with his work On the Incarnation of the Word. In answering the question of the fittingness of the incarnation, he argued it was not only for the liberation of humanity from sin and death, but to restore humanity its dignity. Further, it was not the annulment of creation, but its culmination. The world was renewed by the same Word who created it.

This was an important fact. The Gnostics and the Marcionites, as we have discussed, saw the creator and redeemer as different. Athanasius was responding to these heresies, both of which saw the material world as evil. No, Athanasius argued: The physical world is not evil, it is salvific.

So why did God become human?

The race of men [would have] gone to ruin had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to meet the end of death. (I.9)

God may be sovereign, Athanasius writes, but as our creator, he is responsible for our well-being. Only a human being can redirect the human condition, but only the divine can rescue humanity. Humanity was drifting away in corruption and death – disappearing, you might say – and the work of God was being undone. Would it have been more fitting, Athanasius asks his interlocutors, for God to have left creation to fall apart? Why would God create humanity to let us drown?

Gregory of Nyssa echoes these themes in his writings on creation in An Address on Religious Instruction.

Like Athanasius, he sees the incarnation as fitting for God because any alternative would have been less so. We’ve discussed Gregory’s ideas about evil and atonement. He developed these in part because he sought to show that God need not become evil in taking on flesh. If evil is a corruption or privation of the good – and is therefore not a substance per se – then flesh is not inherently evil. The divine does not have to become evil in the incarnation.

Rather, the opposite is true: God steps into the world to rid it of the parasite that threatens to destroy it. Gregory sees God as providing divine therapy. In a truly radical move for his time – and, I would argue, ours as well – Gregory says that God comes to the aid of those who need it.

Gregory and Athanasius, in other words, have a message for us: God is not a monster.

God did not leave his creation to suffer and decay under the bondage of sin and death. The God of love, grace and justice found a way to rescue us. He is not the author of death; he is the defeater of it. He does not reject the physical world; he creates it, affirms it and restores it.

If you, like me and like my professor, wound up hearing or inferring a different story, a far bleaker tale of wrath and judgment, death and retribution, I hope you find these arguments from the years immediately after the incarnation to be freeing. Indeed, if the church is the body of Christ, an extension of the incarnation, then the notion of rescuing and restoring the world around us should spur us to action in a way “I’ll fly away” eschatology and hoping for the created order’s imminent destruction never could.

God did not become human to perpetuate the cycles of death in which we were trapped. He did not enter our world to condemn and destroy its physicality. God became human to heal, affirm and restore the created order.

That is truly fitting.

Following is a summary of a lecture given yesterday by my professor in Patristic and Medieval Theology

To understand Origen of Alexandria – or Gregory of Nyssa or almost any other Greek-speaking early church father – you have to understand the concept of theoprepes. Plato introduced the concept of theoprepes when he went after Homer’s depictions of the gods. Because the gods/god are/is the ultimate Good, Plato has a big problem with the way Homer makes them act, but because Homer’s poetry is foundational for Greek culture, Plato can’t just dismiss it outright.

So he metaphorizes it. He maintains the truth of the moral lessons but rejects the historicity of the depiction, which he considered blasphemous because the gods did not act in a fitting manner. And that is theoprepes, the concept of what is fitting for the divine.

Origen is faced with a similar dilemma.

He believes in the inspiration of Scripture, which for him writing about 200 C.E. is still just the Old Testament, but he recoils at the anthropomorphism of God found there. And with good reason, from his perspective. When Celsus writes the criticism of Christianity to which Origen responds in Against Celsus, one of his prime concerns is the anthropomorphism of God – it’s just not fitting, in Greek thought, for God to act this way, and a literal reading of Scripture was a huge stumbling block to those educated Greeks to whom Origen was reaching out.

Not only that, he finds numerous places where the text contradicts itself or describes absurdities. So he argues for a metaphorical-allegorical reading of those pieces of scripture where theopedes is violated. Thus, in On First Principles, IV.15, Origen writes:

Divine wisdom took care that certain stumbling-blocks, or interruptions, to the historical meaning should take place, by the intro­duction into the midst (of the narrative) of certain impossibilities and incongruities; that in this way the very interruption of the narrative might, as by the interposition of a bolt, present an obstacle to the reader, whereby he might refuse to acknowledge the way which conducts to the ordinary meaning; and being thus excluded and debarred from it, we might be recalled to the beginning of another way, in order that, by entering upon a narrow path, and passing to a loftier and more sublime road, he might lay open the immense breadth of divine wisdom.

And in IV.16, he gets specific. I’ve broken up this paragraph for easier reading:

Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate,that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars— the first day even without a sky?

And who is found so ignorant as to suppose that God, as if He had been a husbandman, planted trees in paradise, in Eden towards the east, and a tree of life in it, i.e., a visible and palpable tree of wood,so that anyone eating of it with bodily teeth should obtain life, and, eating again of another tree, should come to the knowledgeof good and evil?

No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam layhid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it.

The departure of Cain from the presence of the Lord will manifestly cause a careful reader to inquire what is the presence of God, and how anyone can go out from it. …

The same style of Scriptural narrative occurs abundantly in the Gospels, as when the devil is said to have placed Jesus on a lofty mountain, that he might show Him from thence all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. How could it literally come to pass, either that Jesus should be led up by the devil into a high mountain, or that the latter should show him all the kingdoms of the world (as if they were lying beneath his bodily eyes, and adjacent to one mountain), i.e., the king­doms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians? Or how could he show in what manner the kings of these kingdoms are glorified by men?

And many other instances similar to this will be found in the Gospels by anyone who will read them with atten­tion, and will observe that in those narratives which appear to be literally recorded, there are inserted and interwoven things which cannot be admitted his­torically, but which may be accepted in a spiritual signification.

I want to be clear: This was not some liberal German theologian from the 1800s but one of the most brilliant and preeminent church fathers writing 1,800 years ago. In fact, Origen argued a literal reading of Scripture had led some of his contemporaries into heresy.

He specifically chastises Marcion, who in seeing the dramatically different portrayals of God in the Old and New Testaments, determined they were not the same god at all, and that the Redeemer of the world was not the same deity as its creator; and he singles out the Gnostics, for their belief that the material world was created by the Demiurge, a sub-divine figure somewhat equivalent to Christ, and some Christians, who subscribe to such divine dualism but argue the opposite of Marcion, that in fact the Creator God is supreme to the Redeemer God.

All of these heresies, Origen argues, come from the “simple,” who cannot understand that portions of the Bible are meant to be read nonliterally:

Now the reason of the erroneous apprehension of all these points on the part of those whom we have mentioned above, is no other than this, that holy Scripture is not understood by them according to its spiritual, but according to its literal meaning (IV.9).

Now sometimes, Origen’s insistence on a spiritual meaning leads to some odd interpretations. For example, in On Prayer he metaphorizes the story of Daniel and the lion’s den, talking about how the mouths of spiritual lions were closed so as to save Daniel’s soul. Sure, or maybe it’s just a story about a guy who was thrown into a lion’s den. But of course Origen didn’t have the blessing of the historical-critical method. He didn’t have access to the idea that the inaccuracies and contradictions found in the Bible were simply inaccuracies and contradictions. Nevertheless, I don’t think he would have minded so much.

This isn’t to say Origen just abandoned the teachings of scripture to Greek assumptions. As you can see above, Origen was careful to give total agency to the Holy Spirit and saw the historical impossibilities as something of a code to be unlocked by the knowledgeable.

This notion of theopedes extended to core Christian doctrines, as well, but rather than explaining them away, Origen turned to apologetics, showing to Christianity’s  Greek critics that the radical doctrine of the God-made-flesh who suffered on a cross was indeed fitting for the divine. Origen wasn’t the first to do that; the writer of the Gospel of John did it most noticeably when he adopted the Stoic conception of the Logos and applied it to the birth of Jesus.

Ultimately, Origen’s goal was to show, in the words of my professor, “that God has a clue and a plan, and if he doesn’t have a clue and a plan, then he’s not worthy of belief.” Indeed, as Origen shows by highlighting the heresies of the Marcionites and Gnostics, taking the text at face value in all cases leads to horrific, damaging conceptions of God. When a passage delivers an unfitting portrayal of God, reading it literally requires the worship of an absurdity.

So why would God inspire scripture to be written in such a way? Origen explained this by dividing his congregation into two basic groups, the simple and the (lower-case) gnostic (i.e., knowledgeable or intellectual) Christians. To Origen, God uses scripture to move students to a deeper level, from simple to gnostic. God, therefore, is something of a pedagogue, working subtly through the text, preserving the agency and freedom of the student while moving her to a state of deeper knowledge of the divine.

We don’t need to subscribe to Origen’s Bible-code theory of the text – that the Holy Spirit placed “stumbling blocks” for those enlightened enough to trip over them – to understand his broader theory of God’s work in the life of the Christian through the text. In fact, given what we know about the way God created the natural world – working subtly through his creation while preserving its agency and freedom – it makes a lot of sense.

What was true for Origen 1,800 years ago is true for us today: The God we worship depends a great deal on how we read his inspired scriptures. We don’t need to distort them by taking them literally, and we don’t need to worship an absurdity.

Origen is probably the most famous of those names. Based in Alexandria, Egypt, his notions of asceticism and spirituality were hugely influential, and he’s considered one of the – if not the – most brilliant theologian before Augustine, who came around about 200 years later. He’s also famously odd, not only thanks to his idea that humanity could, through ascetic practice, achieve perfection (and thus transcend the physical body into some sort of spiritual state) in this life, but also because he’s essentially Christianity’s first outspoken universalist, arguing that eventually all things would be restored to God.

I say Christianity’s first outspoken universalist, but of course, one could argue that in fact that title belongs to Luke or Paul of Tarsus; after all, they’re the ones who use the language of all things being restored (Acts 3:21) and every knee bowing and every tongue confessing. Nevertheless, Origen, writing around 200 C.E., gets credit for first explicating a full-on concept of universal reconciliation.

He wasn’t alone, however. Gregory of Nyssa, himself no slouch intellectually, followed Origen’s footsteps around 380 C.E. In his Address on Religious Instruction (also known as The Great Catechism), Gregory put forth the notion of universal reconciliation as part of his theory of atonement.

Gregory’s notions of atonement, judgment and reconciliation all stem from this formulation of evil: It doesn’t exist.

Or at least, to the extent evil exists, it’s only through the absence of good. He compares evil to blindness, in that blindness is merely the absent of sight.

Evil in some way arises from within. It has its origen in the will, when the soul withdraws from the good.For as sight is an activity in nature and blindness is a privation of natural activity, so virtue is in this way opposed to vice. For the origin of evil is not otherwise to be conceived than as the absence of virtue (6.5).

Evil was born, Gregory argues, when Satan closed his eyes to goodness and turned to envy and pride, jealous of the special stature with which God had created humanity. He then schemed to corrupt God’s creation, which he of course succeeded in doing.

God then set to work restoring humanity to himself. And he chose to incarnate himself in human form to do it. Why?

If, then, the love of man is a proper mark of the divine nature, here is the explanation you are looking for, here is the reason for God’s presence among men. Our nature was sick and needed a doctor. Man had fallen and needed someone to raise him up. He who had lost life needed someone to restore it. He who had ceased to participate in the good needed someone to bring him back to it. He who was shut up in darkness needed the presence of light. The prisoner was looking for someone to ransom him, the captive for someone to take his part. He who was under the yoke of slavery was looking for someone to set him free (10.15).

Gregory then advocates a ransom theory of atonement – that Jesus’ death ransomed humanity from the mastery of Satan.

What, then, would he exchange for the one in his power, if not something clearly superior and better? Thus, by getting the better part of the bargain, he might the more satisfy his pride.

Thus Jesus performed miracles, on the one hand proving his divinity to his followers in the future but on the other making himself a more enticing ransom for Satan, who would be willing to relinquish his hold on the rest of humanity if he could capture the one turning the world upside down in Palestine.

When the enemy saw such power, he recognized in Christ a bargain which offered him more than he held. For this reason he chose him as the ransom for those he had shut up in death’s prison (12.23).

But Satan couldn’t know that Jesus was in fact God, which is why Jesus came cloaked in the humble garb of humanity. “When he saw this power softly reflected more and more through the miracles, he reckoned that what he saw was to be desired rather than feared.” With Jesus’ death, humanity was released from its grip, and with his resurrection, death was banished once and for all.

Needless to say, this opens God up to accusations of deceit. Did he trick Satan by making him think Jesus was a human rather than God himself? In one sense, Gregory acknowledges, yes, he did. But here’s where Gregory expresses a truly novel concept:

He who first deceived man by the bait of pleasure is himself deceived by the camouflage of human nature. But the purpose of the action changes it into something good. For the one practiced deceit to ruin our nature; but the other, being at one just and good and wise, made use of a deceitful device to save the one who had been ruined. And by so doing, he had benefited, not only the one who had perished, but also the one who had brought us to ruin. For when death came into contact with life, darkness with light, corruption with incorruption, the worse of these things disappeared into a state of nonexistence, to the profit of him who was freed from these evils.

The purification process can therefore begin, not just for humanity – but for the one who enslaved it in the first place. In other words, Gregory argues, when the Bible talks about all things being restored, it really means it. Even the fallen angel will be restored.

When, over a long period of time, [evil] has been removed and those now lying in sin have been restored to their original state, all creation will join in united thanksgiving, both those whose purification involved punishment and those who never needed purification at all (13.26).

So how does God distinguish those who need purification from those who don’t? Gregory’s answer is baptism.

Those who in their lifetime here have already been purified by baptism will be restored to a state akin to this [new life]. … But those, on the other hand, who had become inured to passion, and to whom nothing had been applied to cleanse the stain … must necessarily find their proper place. Now just as the appropriate place for debased gold is the furnace, so the evil mingled with these natures must be melted away so that, after long ages, they may be restored to God in their purity (18.35).

There’s plenty to question and quibble over. You might not believe Satan can be redeemed, or you might not believe he exists. You might disagree with the necessity of hell to purify the unbaptized. You might have all sorts of problems with the ransom theory of atonement as Gregory describes it.

But all of his theories are based on his overriding assumption about God: that he is loving and wise and just.

God creates humanity, Gregory writes, “not by any necessity” but “out of abundant love,” and his motives are similar in his desire to restore us. Indeed, I think Gregory would find quite disturbing modern notions of penal substitutionary atonement, in which God’s core attributes must be angry and vengeful.

It is universally agreed that we should believe the Divine to be not only powerful, but also just and good and wise and everything else that suggests excellence. … What is good is not truly such unless it is associated with justice, wisdom and power. For what is unjust and stupid and impotent is not good. Power, too, if it is separated from justice and wisdom, cannot be classed as virtue. Rather it is a brutal and tyrannical form of power. … We seek above all, in the case of God, signs of his goodness (12.20).

One need not believe in universal reconciliation, but we would do well to keep in mind Gregory’s admonition. Does eternal torment in hell comport with the notion of a good, wise and just God. About 1,600 years ago, some of the greatest theological minds the world has ever seen said no.

This notion seems to come from two misunderstandings – 1, how the key text of Genesis 1 actually describes creation, and 2, how creation narratives work in ancient texts like the Old Testament. Clearing up these misunderstandings could help creationists come to grips with evolution – in fact, I would argue the creation texts of the Old Testament fit the world described by science quite well. There is, in fact, much less contradiction between the Bible and science than many assume.

The first problem is that of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. This tends to be the default assumption for readers of Genesis 1, but the text does not in fact say God created the world from nothing. It’s a problem of interpretation; most Bibles reflect what the NIV says in Gen 1:1-2:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

This phrasing leads us to the possibility that

1. There was nothing
2. God created
3. The earth was formless and empty

As a result, many conservatives have formed theories – no more scriptural than evolution, by the way – that try to reconcile some scientific evidence, such as an old earth or the dinosaurs’ seeming humanless existence, with the literal text of Genesis 1. But what if the NIV and its compatriots are doing a disservice? Consider the CEB:

When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters

In this translation, the earth is without shape or form (“without form and void”) at the moment God begins to create. That’s significant; in the cosmology of Genesis 1, something already existed. God did not create from nothing.

How do we know this is the correct interpretation? I’ll leave the textual analysis to those who actually know Hebrew, but when we look at the other creation stories in the Old Testament, Genesis 1 fits better with them when we remove the assumption of creatio ex nihilo. 

I should step aside here and note that I understand even the notion of “other” creation stories will be problematic for some, but I don’t know what else to call them. Genesis 2:4bff. simply tells a completely different story with different vocabulary and a different order of events than Genesis 1-2:4a, and the various descriptions of creation I’ll discuss below do not bear much similarity to that passage either.

One of those is Psalm 74:12-17, perhaps the oldest creation narrative in the Old Testament:

Yet God has been my king from ancient days—
God, who makes salvation happen in the heart of the earth!
¹³         You split the sea with your power.
You shattered the heads of the sea monsters on the water.
¹⁴         You crushed Leviathan’s heads.
You gave it to the desert dwellers for food!
¹⁵         You split open springs and streams;
you made strong-flowing rivers dry right up.
¹⁶         The day belongs to you! The night too!
You established both the moon and the sun.
¹⁷         You set all the boundaries of the earth in place.
Summer and winter? You made them!

Once again, translation is the key, as we have hidden here an ancient Ugaritic creation myth. In the Ugaritic myth, the god Baal-Hadad battles four primordial gods of chaos for control of the world – and they all make an appearance in Psalm 74 as adapted Hebrew nouns:

1. Yamm, god of the sea (yam, ”sea,” in v. 13)
2. Tunnan, the twisted serpent (tannin, “monster,” v. 13)
3. Litanu, (liwyatan, “Leviathan,” v. 14)
4. Nhr, god of the river (nahar, “river,” v. 15)

It’s not terribly surprising that as Hebrew evolved out of Ugaritic that proper names would become common words – but it would be quite the coincidence indeed for Psalm 74 to just happen to describe creation using words that correspond to the four gods Baal-Hadad battles in the Ugaritic myth.

In fact, Psalm 74 is not the only creation story in which Yahweh battles primordial forces of chaos in the creation of the world. We see the same thing in Job 38:4-11, although here the power of the sea is much reduced from the earlier version in Psalm 74:

Who enclosed the Sea^[a] behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
⁹     when I made the clouds its garment,
the dense clouds its wrap,
¹⁰     when I imposed^[b] my limit for it,
put on a bar and doors
¹¹     and said, “You may come this far, no farther;
here your proud waves stop”?

Rather than an all-out battle with the sea and Leviathan, Yahweh in Job 38-41 controls and limits their destructive power. We see, then, that Genesis 1 continues this trajectory in which Israel’s understanding of Yahweh evolves and ascribes to him more and more power over creation. The primordial chaos now is nameless and perfunctory, and the sea is no longer an adversary to be conquered but a part of the creation Yahweh speaks into existence.

Jon D. Levenson, in his terrific book Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence, points out that this trajectory, while affirming Yahweh’s preeminence over creation, does not necessarily ascribe to him complete victory over the forces of chaos.

In Psalm 74, a story of Yahweh’s victory over these forces, the author places it within a lament psalm, in which these forces seem to have reasserted their control in the world.

God’s mythic victory must be interpreted in the light of the historical experience of the torching of his cult sites, the absence of miracles, the blaspheming of his sacred name, the defeat of his partners in covenant, and the general collapse of his mastery in the world. In short, the composition of Psalm 74 expresses a theology that is reluctant to accept the hymnic language of primordial creation as a given, but instead honestly and courageously draws attention to the painful and yawning gap between the liturgical affirmation of God’s absolute sovereignty and the empirical reality of evil triumphant and unchecked. (19)

The tale these stories tell us is that God did not necessary create out of nothing (he very well might have, but that’s not what these passages say) – but that he fought the forces of chaos to order the world. This notion of order out of chaos is rather, well, evolutionary. Evolutionary biologists would argue that the theory of evolution does not in fact call for the world to continually improve – the system of random mutation and survival of the fittest does not itself place value judgments on whether the result is “better” or more ordered. But those of us who believe God set the process in motion are not bound by such studied neutrality; we can argue without reservation that however he has chosen to do it, God has brought order to chaos.

That said, the chaos clearly still exists. The events in Boston and West, Texas, this week bear that out. Which is why creation stories such as the one in Psalm 74 can provide such comfort: The forces of chaos might be confined, Levenson writes, but they are not eliminated:

The confinement of chaos rather than its elimination is the essence of creation, and the survival of ordered reality hangs only upon God’s vigilance in ensuring that those cosmic dikes do not fail, that the bars of the Sea’s jail cell do not give way, that the great fish does not slip his hook. That vigilance is simply a variant of God’s covenantal pledge in Genesis 9 never to flood the world again. Whatever form the warranty takes, it testifies both to the precariousness of life, its absolute dependence on God, and to the sureness and firmness of life under the protection of the faithful master. The world is not inherently safe; it is inherently unsafe. Only the magisterial intervention of God and his eternal vigilance prevent the cataclysm. (14)

In this case, these “other” creation stories not only can help show a way between the warring camps in the debate over creation and evolution but also provide a message of solace in a world in which chaos too often seems to have the upper hand.

One of my new favorite places is the Boston Public Library, with its arching ceilings and omnipresent murals – and, above all, its cavernous study room, complete with dozens upon dozens of green-shaded lamps. If ever a monument has been built to the notion of learning, expanded horizons and the acquisition and beneficial use of knowledge, this is it.

I went to the library Thursday. Across Copley Square, workers were finishing up construction of the grandstand at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. And, of course, across the street from both the library and the grandstand, two bombs exploded during Monday’s marathon.

So many people I encountered in Boston, natives and tourists alike, were friendly, kind, helpful and – perhaps I was projecting a bit – seemingly thrilled to be in one of the world’s great cities. It’s hard to imagine how twisted by darkness one must be to experience what I experienced this weekend and remain committed to turning it into tragedy.

A friend of a friend posted this to Facebook. It captures my sentiments so well:

In the heart of this great old city, where it is richest and most resplendent with the legacy of its power, where even the churches look like fortresses, there is a library. And every single person who is anyone or no one at all can go there, they can wander the stacks, they can ask for help and find it, in a building that is as good as a palace or a fancy museum, except you can touch most everything. Even where it is old and musty and winding, it is a delight.

Once a year some of the finest athletes in the world, and some of the most dedicated amateurs in the world, run past this place to the finish line of one of the oldest continually held sporting events in the world; the culmination of a day when practically an entire city comes out to yell and cheer – 9-year-olds, drunk sophomores, Ethiopians, Brazilians, snobs in expensive coats, whatever.

And there, right there at the finish, where that great house for knowledge welcomes the long train of exhausted, elated finishers, triumphant in the sheer joy of completion, right there is where they set those bombs.

Many have been posting the famous quote from Fred Rogers – “look for the helpers.” In a similar vein, a friend posted the comments of comedian Patton Oswalt:

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

This reminds me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Even in the face of such incomprehensible injustice – for certainly the death of an 8-year-old boy watching a race in which the competitors at the time were mostly running for charity can be described with no other word than that – we are reminded that we still can choose to bend that arc.

An Illinois senator named Barack Obama made this very point: “It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: It does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice.”

Robert Krulwich, NPR’s science blogger, made this connection last Christmas.

Do I think humans are getting gentler? Fairer? Having been one (a human, that is) for only 60 or so years, having missed any number of religious wars, pogroms, sacks, annihilations, cruelties, I’m not in a position to say. What I know is too little. But in my short time, I have also known kindness. I have loved others, been loved, and felt the power of it, the mystery of it. I know there is a fierce goodness in the world. It is there, stubborn, insistent, tenacious. The question is, why?

Maybe, as Kevin suggests, we have been seeded with a little angel dust; love and altruism have been given a teeny boost in us. If that’s so, I’m OK with that. I need the help. I am thankful for any angels I can get. But I’m also wary of my shortcomings, of my temper, of my capacity for not being kind. I certainly don’t feel like an angel.

I’d rather strive to stay ahead of my darkness, and keep aiming for the light.

Indeed. On the days that seem darkest, it’s easy to despair. But as we go forward in this life, tasked by God with helping to restore his good world, we must remember that not all is random. That we can make history’s arc bend just a little bit more, and in so doing combat the forces of darkness that won a small victory Monday in a war they have already lost.

I’m leaving town for a work conference this week. See you all when I return!

God created humanity in God’s own image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

“Master” the earth, “take charge” of its animals. Or, in the famous words of more traditional translations: We have “dominion” over this world. Throw in Psalm 8 for good measure:

You’ve made [humanity] only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let them rule over your handiwork,
putting everything under their feet—
all sheep and all cattle,
the wild animals too,
the birds in the sky,
the fish of the ocean,
everything that travels the pathways of the sea.

Cut and dried, right?

Not so fast.

Genesis 1 is after all but one creation story in an Old Testament that has many of them. There’s Genesis 2:4b-3:24, there’s Psalm 74, Psalm 104, Proverbs 8, Job 38-41, Isaiah 51. Pieces of various cosmologies and creation myths litter the testimony of the Old Testament. Sometimes they agree with each other; sometimes they don’t. And Job 38-41 gives a decidedly different picture of humanity’s place in the world than does Genesis 1.

Kathryn Schifferdecker’s book Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job is a great place to go to unpack these bizarre, even unsettling speeches of God from the whirlwind after Job and his friends have had their say about the nature of the world and humanity’s place in it.

Schifferdecker argues the question the book of Job seems to be asking is: “What is humanity?” Job serves as a type for humankind. He is described as a priest, king and judge for the rest of creation, and the discourses between him and his friends lay out dueling views on why suffering and tragedy exist generally, not just in the life of one man.

So for 37 chapters, several characters in this story get to have their say about the nature and purpose of a person’s interaction with the world: primarily the accuser, Job and his three friends.

In Job 1, the accuser argues God has “fenced in” Job/humanity, protecting the righteous from harm. In Job 3, Job agrees he is fenced in, but rather than seeing it as protection, he sees it as prison; he cannot escape from God’s chaotic order, in which an essentially random and lawless world deals suffering to the righteous and blessing to the wicked. The contrasting, human-centric views of creation are both repudiated by God, when in chapter 38, he too uses the “fenced in” language, but instead says he has fenced in the sea, that primordial force of chaos that otherwise would overwhelm and drown his creation.

It’s the first indication that in God’s speeches, he might not be affording humanity the central place we have assumed for ourselves.

In chapters 3 and 9, Schifferdecker argues, Job/humanity has attempted to unmake creation, first by cursing it, then by ascribing to the creator the very qualities of chaos God is traditionally described as defeating and limiting. God’s response, therefore, is to re-create his world, first by reestablishing the framework (38:4-24), then restarting the meteorological forces (38:25-38) and finally repopulating it (38:39-41:34).

Schifferdecker in her book points out the many ways in which God rejects the notion of an anthropocentric world as he reorders his creation:

• God is midwife to the sea (38:8), father to the rain and dew (38:28), and mother to the ice and frost (38:29) – but nowhere is the parental relationship to humanity affirmed.
• Humanity in fact is barely mentioned at all, and every reference is derogatory. We are mocked by the animals we cannot control – the wild donkey (39:7) and the ostrich (39:18) – and even the ones we think we control, such as the warhorses, are in fact eager to turn that use against us (39:24-25). Finally, the carcasses of our children provide food for the birds of prey (39:30).
• Whereas Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 see humanity as the pinnacle of creation, Job 40 says Behemoth is the “first of God’s acts,” and this remaking of creation climaxes with Leviathan in chapter 41.

This is no anthropocentric creation; it is a theocentric creation, as God affirms only he can control these animals or master the elements. In chapter 30, Job betrays his assumption that there are places of the earth so barren they are fit only for the outcasts of society. In 38:27, God rejects this, affirming that he provides even for the “dry wasteland.” As Schifferdecker argues, God is making sure Job, and therefore humanity, knows there is no such thing as a “God-forsaken” place in his creation.

Job is not the only place we see this theme. In Hosea 2, Israel is described as having failed to recognize the blessings Yahweh has provided through creation (v.8), so he removes them (vv.9-12). But as Yahweh unexpectedly allures Israel back to him, he makes a covenant. But not with Israel. Not with people. With the animals!

On that day, I will make a covenant for them with the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the creeping creatures of the fertile ground. I will do away with the bow, the sword, and war from the land; I will make you lie down in safety.

Hans Walter Wolff in his commentary on Hosea for the Hermeneia series points out this isn’t the only time peace among people is connected with peace between people and animals. Ezekiel 34:28 and Leviticus 26:6 also connect these seemingly disparate ideas.

What should we make of these passages, in which humanity’s very fate seems to depend not on our own agency but on our ability to get along with the rest of creation. Well, the point should be pretty obvious. As Schifferdecker argues:

The vision of creation in the divine speeches can fruitfully be used as a corrective to a consumerist view of the natural world. This worldview is fed by a nearly constant barrage of advertising urging the average American to acquire more and more “stuff” without regard for how much of the earth’s resources he or she is consuming. Such a consumerist culture encourages one to be focused on oneself or (at best) on one’s family and friends, to the exclusion not only of the billions of people who live in “developing” countries but also of the nonhuman world, which suffers from human greed.

A market-driven economy fueled by consumerism views the natural world primarily in terms of how it can be exploited by human beings. One has only to consider the proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to see that worldview in action. To that consumerist culture, the divine speeches offer a radical vision. The speeches proclaim humanity is not the center of the universe, that there exist creatures and places that have intrinsic value quite apart from anything to do with human beings. (129)

As Schifferdecker notes, seeing this alternate view of humanity’s place in creation can help lead us to “a place of humility.” Simply put, we are not all that – at least, no more so than any other piece of God’s good creation. “Creation is not made for the sake of humanity; it comes into being at the pleasure of the creator” (130). The God who calls us to treat each other with selflessness, justice and compassion is, not surprisingly, interested that we do the same with the rest of his creation.

Perhaps it’s time to set aside for now the vision of Genesis 1; it has been used too often and too destructively over the millennia since it was written. Instead, maybe we should pick up the vision of Job 38-41 with its call to recenter ourselves around the creator and partner with the rest of creation to achieve his vision of restoration.

To make it up to you, here are a couple of Easter-related things that caught my eye this week, and some comments I had on them:

Holy Week for Doubters, by Rachel Held Evans 

But you won’t know how to explain that there is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about standing in this hurricane of questions every day and staring each one down until you’ve mustered all the bravery and fortitude and trust it takes to whisper just one of them out loud on the car ride home:

“What if we made this up because we’re afraid of death?”

Indeed, one of the more misused verses in the New Testament is the one I quoted on Facebook today, 1 Corinthians 50:55, “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” We say this as if we should not fear the power of death. But Paul’s words in context tell us something much different. I never noticed it until I read and posted 1 Cor. 15:50-55  from N.T. Wright’s Kingdom New Testament  translation:

This is how it will be, you see: The trumpet’s going to sound, the dead will be raised undecaying, and we’re going to be changed. This decaying body must put on the undecaying one; this dying body must put on deathlessness. When the decaying puts on the undecaying, and the dying puts on the undying, then the saying that has been written will come true:

“Death is swallowed up in victory!
Death, where’s your victory gone?
Death, where’s your sting gone?”

Did you see that? When the dying body puts on the undying body, then the saying will come true. It’s not true now. Death still wins sometimes. It still hurts. Yes, it’s Easter, but yes, it’s still Saturday, too. And as long as there’s death, there will be doubt. Death is our ever-present reminder that all is not right here, and until everything is right, we simply can’t know for sure that it ever will be right. What if we just made it up?

He Descended Into Hell, by Scott Paeth (h/t Tony Jones)

One needn’t believe in an literal, or at least eternal, view of hell and damnation in order to believe in the importance of Christ’s descent into hell. On the contrary, one may believe that Christ’s redemptive activity is precisely that which saves us from the hell that he himself suffered. He deprived hell of its eternity, not to rescue us from divine wrath, but from our own experience of god-abandonment.

In the presence of death – indeed, in the presence of hell itself – we cling to the belief that Jesus suffered hell for us. He knows. He understands. He doesn’t just sympathize. He empathizes. Because he was there. He felt the abandonment, and he experienced the despair.

Could we have made this all up? Could we have invented a God who would give up his rule to be tortured and killed, who would leave heaven to experience hell just so he could spend forever with us? Could the human mind ever conceive of such a ridiculous notion for the creator of the world to undertake?

In spite of all the death, all the suffering, all the chaos and brutality and hellishness – I still say no. We did not make that up. Maranatha. Come, Lord Jesus. Quickly, please. Saturday has lasted long enough.

Many Christians disagree, and I confess it’s difficult to listen when someone truly “goes off” on God – as happens in the Season 2 finale of The West Wing, which my wife and I are working through on Netflix.

Below the jump, I’ll post the speech in its entirety; most Christians, I suspect, will wince multiple times. You might even be offended. But the question we need to ask is this: Are we offended because God is, or are we offended because we have been taught to be?

[This paragraph contains spoilers] The speech occurs in the National Cathedral, after a funeral for President Jeb Bartlet’s longtime assistant, Mrs. Landingham, who had died in a car wreck. The death occurred after a string of crises and tragedies – including an assassination attempt that nearly killed his deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman – that, let’s be honest, serve to make the show interesting, but would lead a normal person to consider whether she had been singled out to play Job in some sort of modern-day heavenly remake. [End spoilers]

Bartlett asks the Secret Service to close the cathedral so he can spend some time alone, and after some unnecessarily loud and echoey door slamming to let us know the cathedral has been closed, Bartlett begins walking up the aisle toward the vestibule.

You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?

She bought her first new car, and you hit her with a drunk driver. What, was that supposed to be funny? “You can’t conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,” says Graham Greene. I don’t know who’s ass he was kissing there ’cause I think you’re just vindictive. What was Josh Lyman? A warning shot? That was my son.

What did I ever do to yours but praise his glory and praise his name? There’s atropical storm that’s gaining speed and power. They say we haven’t had a storm this bad since you took out that tender ship of mine in the north Atlantic last year… 68 crew. You know what a tender ship does? Fixes the other ships. Doesn’t even carry guns. Just goes around, fixes the other ships and delivers that mail. That’s all it can do.

Gratias tibi ago, domine.

Yes, I lied. It was a sin. I’ve committed many sins. Have I displeased you, you feckless thug? 3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico, increased foreign trade, 30 million new acres of land for conservation, put Mendoza on the bench, we’re not fighting a war, I’ve raised three children…

That’s not enough to buy me out of the doghouse? Haec credam a deo pio? A deo iusto? A deo scito?

Cruciatus in crucem! Tuus in terra servus nuntius fui officium perfeci.

Cruciatus in crucem. Eas in crucem!

Setting aside the likelihood of a Nobel winner in economics cum president of the United States somehow knowing Latin, the wonders of the Internet allow me to tell you what Bartlet says at the end of the speech:

Thank you, Lord. (sarcastically spoken) …

Am I to believe these things from a righteous God, a just God, a wise God?

To hell with your punishments (literally: To a cross with your punishments)! I was your servant, your messenger on earth. I did my duty.

To hell with your punishments. And to hell with you!

What are we to make of speeches like this? Perhaps we are not to make anything of them at all. Perhaps speeches like this are a natural – even healthy – part of what it is to be human.

That, I think, is what Walter Brueggemann would say. In his Theology of the Old Testament, he discusses texts that describe Yahweh’s partnership with humanity. After moving through some core characteristics of the human person as described in the Old Testament, he moves to a second series of characteristics – those that define a person when “human existence is troubled, disturbed and at risk; when obedience, discernment and trust have either failed or are shown to be inadequate” (470).

The three characteristics of the human in crisis are complaint, petition and thanksgiving. And Jed Bartlet is clearly engaging in complaint.

The complaining person is one who treats his or her troubles as serious and legitimate and not to be accepted as normal. The complaining person refuses silence and resignation, but rather issues a vigorous and shrill protest grounded in the covenantal right to be granted well-being and to be taken seriously. … The complaint psalm is expressed variously in a mood of vexation, insistence, anger, rage, indignation, doubt and hope, but never indifference or resignation.

Of course, there are many psalms in this vein. There is also Jeremiah 20, in which the prophet accuses Yahweh of seduction, force and deception – even rape – and the many complaints of Job, who directly accuses Yahweh of injustice and unfairness in his treatment. Jeremiah and Job share much in common, including the blunt sentiment (paraphrased): “If I forced you into court, you would rig the system to convict me without cause.”

This is difficult for modern Christians to grasp. Such open questioning of the goodness, justice and mercy of God is seen as a calamity – a blasphemous rejection of faith. Perhaps we should change our lens and begin seeing it as the opposite, a courageous expression of it.

Yahweh is said in these prayers to be not only negligent and guilty by default, but more directly and aggressively involved as the perpetrator of trouble. … Israel is clear, moreover, that such angry and and insistent protests addressed to Yahweh are not acts of unfaith, as they are often thought to be in quietistic Christian piety, but are a vigorous act of freedom and responsibility. The human person must insist on his or her own well-being, even with shrillness; therefore, when appropriate, the person must call Yahweh to accountability. Thus humans in trouble are mandated by the character of Yahweh to take the initiative toward Yahweh. (471)

As a church we simply do not allow this kind of talk. Lament in general makes us uncomfortable and an angry lament that lashes out at God is simply rejected. By making God too big, by worrying so much about preserving his holiness and his sovereignty, we have made it impossible to truly express to him how we’re feeling, for fear that he will be offended. Which frankly seems even more insulting.

The result has been what we see in American churches today – the culture of “fine,” in which we rarely acknowledge pain, grief or despair and certainly never anger, fear or doubt.

The loss of this standard practice of complaint and petition … is precisely what has produced “false selves,” both in an excessively pietistic church that champions deference and in an excessively moralistic, brutalizing society that prizes conformity and the stifling of rage. Quietistic piety and conformity moralism together have encouraged docility and deference that generate phoniness at the most elemental levels of human existence. (474)

Why has this occurred? I’d argue it’s a side effect of what I’ve dubbed “I’ll Fly Away” eschatology, in which we are all simply waiting to die so we can truly begin living our lives in heaven. Along with promoting a modern day version of gnosticism, in which the physical world is despised in favor of a spiritual one, such a focus has discounted the realities of lived experience. The true Christian is focused on “things above” and should not be so concerned with the problems here below.

But that flies in the face of the testimony of the Bible, both Old and New testaments. Paul in Romans 8 is very much attuned to the suffering inherent in creation, noting that it groans as it waits for restoration. And the psalms of complaint and petition that litter the Old Testament make clear that our lives and emotions matter as we plead with God to restore creation and banish the pain and suffering of this world so that his will may be done here as in heaven.

The hope is that the absence, abrasion and distance that occur between God and human persons are provisionally overcome in cultic worship, and are finally overcome in the full restoration of creation, wherein the human person may appear in the presence of Yahweh naked, defenseless, unashamed and unafraid.

Worship, then, should be an expression of the hope we have, but hope can only be expressed after our grief and pain and anger are acknowledged. Christians express plenty of hope, but without acknowledging or expressing the pain and doubt of lived experience, that hope becomes more stifling than freeing. Hurting people are made to feel inadequate because they cannot skip right to the hopeful parts, thus compounding their tragedy.

If we are to find the light, we must first grope in the darkness. Denying the darkness’ existence – or toning down our description of it – does not make it go away.

“It is the central conviction of Israel that human persons in the Pit may call to the One who is powerfully sovereign and find that sovereign One passionately attentive,” Bruggemann concludes. “That is the hope of humanity and in the end its joy” (491).

As Jed Bartlet railed against God in the National Cathedral, many I’m sure were shocked, even offended. Myself, I was inexplicably moved. A tear slipped down my cheek because somehow, this seemed OK. A man of faith, hurt and wounded, expressing, however crudely, to his creator that hurt, grappling with the wound he had been dealt. Jed Bartlet might have felt lost in utter darkness, but he was closer to the light than many of us.