Is God Pro-Genocide?

29 06 2011

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard Dawkins[1]

Never short for words, Dawkins has a point. Let’s take one tag: genocidal. Think global flood, God eradicating Egypt’s firstborn then throwing horse and rider into the sea, and the divine mandate to destroy seven people groups before Israel could set up in the Promised Land.[2] The Bible is a bloody book, and whilst religion is a convenient excuse for crazy people doing crazy things, much of the blood is directly on God’s hands. In a world with religious violence on the rise, this is disturbing.

Let’s hone in on one particular incident: Jericho. In Joshua 6 we read of Joshua’s conquest of the Canaanites—seven musical rounds of the city and the walls tumbled down. They were to ḥērem this people: utterly destroy all life, including men, women, the young, the old, and even the livestock. I wonder how a Tutsi would read this text? Would they insert Hutu for Israel, recalling the hundreds of thousands of people—friends, grandfathers, daughters—murdered in cold blood back in Rwanda, 1994?

Make no mistake, this is shocking. And unless your tack is to save YHWH by dismissing the Bible (kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face), what we have here seems to be Class A Genocide. No answer will make the situation rosy, but is there a way to make sense of divine violence?

First, a couple of questions: Can God kill the innocent? 

Granted, it’s immoral for us to destroy life: we didn’t create it in the first place. That would be “playing God”. But can God play God? Is there anything inherently wrong with the Creator of life—where life is a gift, not a right—destroying the life he made? It may offend us, but if we can cut the lawn and kill a cow (neither of which we made) then surely God has a right to give life and take it away. Death is everyone’s end, whether in the calm of a nursing home or the turmoil of a battlefield.

I’m not sure Jericho is this stark, though. God is never capricious. Who, truly, is innocent? Can the perfect people raise their hand? In Biblical language, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. … For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[3] Our actions flow from our desires, and we’ve each hated (the heart of a murderer), lusted (the heart of an adulterer), coveted (the heart of a thief), not to mention blasphemed (damning the Life-Giver). (And all of this without unveiling enacted evil, where our self-control couldn’t restrain destructive passion.)

Which brings me to the second question: Does sin deserve to be punished?

Josef Fritzl locked his 15 year old daughter in a basement and raped her up to 5 times a day, fathering her seven kids. He got life in prison. Is his punishment deserved? Perhaps too lenient? Unless you’re a die-hard anarchist, you recognize the need for ultimate justice. When wrong is done, someone must pay. And in the case of the Canaanites, these weren’t minor indiscretions: they imaged their violent and sexualized gods, enshrining child sacrifice, cultic prostitution, bestiality and incest (Leviticus 18). Who better than God to weigh right and wrong, and meter out punishment?

God is longsuffering. From his initial heads up to Abraham about Jericho’s sin in Genesis 15, through to his final right handed violence in Joshua 6, we have 430 years of repeated warnings about impending judgment. One of Canaan’s prostitutes, Rahab, used God’s covenant name YHWH when explaining to Israelite spies that this coming conquest was no surprise; in her mind, the punishment was expected and just (Joshua 2:9-14). Granted, this punishment affected everyone, even infants. For individualistic westerners, this is unconscionable. Yet even we recognize that our actions affect each other—we are part of an interconnected web. A parent’s bankruptcy endangers the whole family. A president’s call to war endangers the whole nation. God was holding all of Canaan responsible for their collective sin. The corruption and violence of this culture was systemic. Enough was enough, so God stepped in to judge.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf was born in Croatia. He lost family members to ethnic violence. Wrath first seemed “unworthy of God. Isn’t God love?” But his final resistance to the idea fell as he reflected on genocide in the former Yugoslavia, millions displaced and thousands butchered. Volf wondered,

“How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? … Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? … I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”[4]

For Canaan, divine violence was just. Israel was the underdog, a nation of slaves called to confront a superpower as YHWH’s sword—not because of Israel’s superiority, but because of Jericho’s sin (Deuteronomy 9:4-6). God returned on Canaan the violence they unjustly exercised on others, even their own people. We may not like it, but we can hardly call it unfair.

But the right-handed violence of God is only half the story. As God laments in Ezekiel 18, “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?” God’s left hand of mercy and grace was always extended to any who would repent.  Even to a prostitute named Rahab. This was not ethnic cleansing. Indeed, Rahab was incorporated as the ancestor of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus the Christ. God would still bless the nations through this nation.

Any blog-length treatment of such complex issues will always fall short.[5] But as I’ve grappled with divine violence, I’ve come to see the truth in the old spiritual, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” Yes, but it takes two hands for God to hold a broken world. God’s right hand of justice will rightly deal with individual and corporate evil, bringing all things to account, precisely because he loves the world. Without confidence in ultimate justice, surely we would play vigilante rather than turn the other cheek as peacemakers in the image of Jesus. But God is arguably left-handed. Grace and mercy had the first word at creation, the decisive word at the cross, and will have the final word in New Creation where violence is no more and swords are beaten into plowshares (Isaiah 2). It is this perfect fusion of both hands together that allows God to hold this fallen world in love. Anything less, and YHWH wouldn’t really be God, or worth worshipping.

Will such answers satisfy sceptics? I doubt it. But God is not genocidal. Dawkins’ rant was one tag too short: Deicidal. God’s character is most truly seen at the cross. Whatever your background, YHWH is ever ready to absorb your evil in love, even if it costs his own life.

Dave Benson

[1] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 31.

[2] Genesis 6-9; Exodus 11-15; Deuteronomy 7.

[3] Romans 3:23; 6:23.

[4] Free of Charge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 138-39.

[5] Delving deeper? Watch the video “God’s Two Hands” at http://wonderingfair.com/media/ and download resources from http://logos.kbc.org.au/blog/resources/logos-talks/gods-two-hands/.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything, The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Congratulations, you may now kiss yourself

27 06 2011

Ever thought of marrying yourself? That is what a 30-year-old lady from Taipei did a few months ago, in a public ceremony with 30 guests, three wedding dresses, two rings, three bridesmaids, three best men, a flower girl, a banquet and a honeymoon by herself in Australia. In a Reuters article, standalone bride Chen Wei-yih asks, “Age thirty is a prime period for me. My work and experience are in good shape, but I haven’t found a partner, so what can I do?” [1]

In a sense, I feel sympathetic toward Wei-yih. For girls especially, and even more in traditional societies like Taiwan, the long transition from singleness to married life is often filled with anxiety. Romantic relationships have become confused and amorphous, and young folks are often lost in a spectrum of possibilities that goes from hooking up, to somewhat-dating, to dating, to somewhere-more-than-dating, to living together, to getting married, to never getting married, to are we really together or what? Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith describes the amorphous, undefined quality of many romantic relationships today, and writes that, for young people navigating this unclear social matrix, “what exactly to call different types of relationships and when to know which kind one is in at any given time seems problematic.” [2] One can understand something of what led Wei-yih to not let herself get down for not being married by the age of 30, and to celebrate, even in an unusual way, her love for herself.

Still, even when feeling sympathetic for unfortunate cases like that of Wei-yih, we become aware of our own extreme individualism as well. For maybe the strongest reason behind the tenuous fabric of our relationships – dating relationships that are too confused or aimless, potential relationships that never start, marriages that break up too easily – is the fact that we can commit only to one person: ourselves. We are so focused in our individual wellbeing, and so willing to minimize any kind of risk, that we often we keep people, even loved ones, at an arm’s length away.

Curiously, we can even feel strong for this weakness. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer defends, “he who is a complete man, a man par excellence, represents an indivisible unity, and is therefore self-sufficient.” For Schopenhauer, the “intelligent man” should execute a whole concert by himself, like a piano and not a symphony, without depending on others. [4] To be strong is to be independent; to depend on others is a sign of weakness.

Thank God that God himself is “weaker” than us. He could have remained aloof in his own perfect world, yet he chose to commit to us, proud independents and anxious self-marriers that we are. In Jesus’ sacrifice, he displayed the strength of vulnerability and the mightiness of exposure, and showed that, in the words of Paul, “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” [5] He chose to assume all risks and to give of himself sacrificially, so that we may glimpse what love is, and love others ourselves. When we understand this other-centered love, and marvel at how cherished we are, we can feel secure enough to commit to others, even if the moment to walk down the aisle arrives well beyond 30… or if it doesn’t arrive at all.

René Breuel

[2]    Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 58.

[4]    Arthur Schopenhauer, Consigli sulla Felicità [Advice for Happiness], ed. Claudio Lamparelli (Milano: Mondadori:2007), 58-59.

[5]    I Corinthians 1:25b.

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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice, On Anything and Everything

And Suddenly It Rains

24 06 2011

There is a huge open field near to where I live. The vegetation is low and the soil is dry, typical of southern Spain. I like to reflect and pray as I walk by this field. Recently, after breakfast, I looked out the window and noticed that there were clouds in the sky, but the sun was still shining. I decided to leave for a walk. When I was about a mile from home I felt a drop of water falling on me. I did not pay much attention to it and continued at the same pace. Soon there was another small drop of water, and then another, then another! I changed direction and quickened the pace. After a few seconds, the rain was falling heavily and I was running back home. As you can imagine, I got completely soaked.

Life is full of surprises, isn’t it? Boris Pasternak, a Russian poet and winner of a Nobel Prize in literature, affirmed that ‘surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.’[1]

Though we all love good surprises, our journeys are marked with surprises we would rather not have received. They break into our lives as uninvited guests. One second you are dry and the next you’re wet. One second you have a job and the next you are unemployed. One second you are healthy and the next you are ill. One second you are beside the person you love, the next they’re no longer around. This is life and we’ve all experienced it.

I am constantly impressed with the Bible’s transparency and openness on this subject. Any honest reader would come to the conclusion that it does not offer any guarantee that those who decide to follow God would not suffer, as a result of unexpected changes. Almost half of its largest book, the Psalms, can be described as laments – their authors were experiencing unforeseen negative surprises which placed them into situations they would rather escape from.

At the same time, a profound message of hope and solidarity emerges from the pages of the Bible. It reveals a God who desires and promises to be with us through all the unexpected changes of our existence.  David, author of numerous psalms, confessed: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me [...].’[2]

Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish mathematician and religious leader born in 1780, echoed the same confidence: ‘When I walk by the wayside, He is along with me. When I enter into company amid all my forgetfulness of Him, He never forgets me. In the silent watches of the night, when my eyelids are closed and my spirit has sunk into unconsciousness, the observant eye of Him who never slumbers is upon me. I cannot fly from his presence.’[3]

It might rain when I least expect. But I certainly will not be alone. And that, I am sure, makes all the difference.

Hélder Favarin

[1] Reavey, George, The Poetry of Boris Pasternak, p. 5

[2] Psalm 23:4

[3] ‘The Scots magazine and Edinburgh literary miscellany’, Vol. 79, p. 126


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

Calm as the Birds?

22 06 2011

Let me confess: I’m a worrier. Some things bug me more than they should. And because of this extra sensitivity to the possibility of things going occasionally sideways, I often imagine how  anxious friends would react to the final part of his Jesus’  famous sermon on the Mount. I can see him standing confidently, shoulders-squared at the top of the hill exuding confidence, indifferent to trouble and unswayed by coming adversity. He proclaims to the huddled crowd, their faces twisted with the a mix of strong emotion and their hearts burdened by complicated lives:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matthew 6:25–27 ESV)

We may think this offers a simple life lesson: “Chill out, God is in control of your future.” But worry isn’t actually my main concern here. While there is surely more to be gleaned from the passage, what concerns me is the assumption that Jesus went about his days demonstrating his confidence in God with stoic indifference. This sort of assumption demonstrates, I think, a grave mistake about who Jesus was. You see, Jesus inhabited his body in just the way we do, and it was a normal human body, capable of pain, and knowing emotion in response to his experiences.

In another situation, later in his life, Jesus contemplated the horrible situation that he faced, an execution at the hands of the Roman government. As he paces around in a local garden, he experienced a whole panoply of emotion: deep anguished sorrow, resignation, and then frustration at his friends inability to support him. After he is carried away and is in his last moments, Matthew records his cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46 ESV). Here is a full expression, not of despair, but certainly of fear.

I take great encouragement in the fact that Jesus experienced anguish, pain, sorrow, and frustration. His experience of these emotions was never considered to be at odds with his confidence that God is able to deliver us from anything. The imitation of Christ does not involve a way of self-negation when we are worried or afraid, a careless dismissal of our emotions, but rather to cling to the word of promise in the midst of what we are experiencing, whether it be challenging or trivial.

Jeremy Kidwell


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Reading, Identification, and Vocation

20 06 2011

It was the intervention of Caesar Augustus which, one day long ago, saved one of the most celebrated narratives of ancient history. Virgil’s last wish was to burn his epic Aeneid, a work which for C. S. Lewis changed “ the subject from the adolescent theme of heroism to the adult theme of vocation.” [1]  One can only wonder what resonated so deeply in Caesar Augustus to move him to save this narrative, and the ways in which the emperor identified his own vocation with Virgil’s narrative about the foundation of Rome.

The contrast  between Augustus and one of his modern counterparts could not be more poignant. When the Allied forces arrived in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, they noticed a strange kind of library. It was filled with books about art, architecture, photography and histories of wars. But the report of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps noticed an eloquent gap in Hitler’s library:  “it was noticeably lacking in literature and almost totally devoid of drama and poetry.” [2] The Führer was not as moved by great narratives as the emperor once was; Hitler’s spirit was forged in a different kind of arena, and one can only wonder how the lack of literary oxygen dwarfed Hitler’s soul, though maybe superior in military skill, in contrast to his ancient colleague. It seemed like Hitler tasted just the wrong measure of the literary spring which, for Alexander Pope, should either be drunk abundantly or not drunk at all:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again.[3]

However much Augustus or Hitler may have read, we all know that to read is a curious experiment. It immerses us in alternative worlds; it enlarges our imagination and our ability to identify with others. When we see ourselves in an epic journey from Troy to Rome which, in 10,000 lines of Latin poetry, stretches our ability to conceive the world, feel it in a particular journey, and color it from an alternative perspective, we consider scenarios which would never cross our path in other ways. We experience the heroic, the virtuous, the tragic, and this trying-out enriches our posture before the ordinary and prosaic. As we play out as heroes, to use Lewis’ phrases, this imaginary weight-lifting enriches our understanding of our own vocations.

We may be statesmen or not, poets or poets-to-be, but an illuminating test for the fabric of our vocation is the kind of reading in which we develop it. It is hard for us to concentrate in long narratives today, as accustomed we are to headline reading and internet browsing. But a sustained engagement of literature like the Aeneid or Moses’ discourse in Deuteronomy or the chronicles of King David pays off, even if often we can’t trace the direct practicality they can bring to our work. But as we see Ulysses facing his journey across the sea, or Jesus his journey to the cross, something inside us grows, and we arrive at our unheroic challenges larger, more vocationally robust, somehow more heroic.

René Breuel

[1]     Carol Zalenski, C. S. Lewis’s Aeneid, The Christian Century, vol. 128 N. 12, 14 June 2011. http://christiancentury.org/article/2011-05/c-s-lewis-s-aeneid

[2]      Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life (London: Vintage Books, 2010).

[3]    Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism


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Categories : Making a Difference

A Predictable Life?

17 06 2011

There is a version of faith that slides very nicely into middle-class, middle-aged life, giving those who are a bit insecure the answers that they need to be relatively confident members of society. In its Christian version, this sort of  faith provides insurance against the fire of hell, the assurance that one is loved by God, activities of a generally wholesome and even charitable quality to occupy Sundays and a few evenings a month, and a host of like-minded, middle-aged, middle-class families with mortgages and work weeks with whom to socialize. In this rendition of Christianity, one is very safe, very secure, and perhaps just a wee-bit boring but very respectable indeed.

There is certainly a great deal of truth in the theology underlying this sort of Christianity―we are most certainly loved by God and biblical Christianity does teach that the death we will all face is not the final word. Yet the safety and middle-class respectability that characterizes this sort of comfortable Christian life is at odds with the biblical narrative and the theology that develops from it. Throughout the story of God and Israel we see people called into lives that are anything but suburban stability: Abraham is called to leave Ur, Joseph is sold into slavery, Moses is raised as a foster-child and then called to leave the palaces of Pharaoh to lead a very, very long journey through the desert, Gideon fights with only 300 men, David stands up to Goliath and then spends years hiding from and sometimes fighting King Saul, Mary agrees to be an unwed, teen mother…and these are merely some of the more well-known stories. Jesus himself is anything but a model of predictable security: his public ministry was itinerant and he faced fierce political and religious opposition, that eventually led to his execution.

While onlookers to the Christian faith often see as a belief system designed to give comfort and meaning to the insecure, the lives of the faithful described in the Bible belie that characterization. The biblical worldview is that God has created all that is and loves it, that Christ is lord over all, and that we are in the business of working with God through his grace to renew that creation and establish the justice and peace that characterize his rule. And this worldview does not merely provide a certain existential comfort and give suburbia meaning (although it can, somewhat miraculously to my mind, even render suburbia significant).

The Christian faith, grounded in God’s love and lordship, empowers Christians to live creative and apparently risky lives. Sometimes those risks look like leaving behind a good job and nice home in Orange County to build clean water systems in Burkina Faso or to live and work in South Central LA. Other times these risks are more subtle, something as basic as the man who risks professional and financial insecurity (and, even today, a certain social stigma) to be at home with a new baby or to be a part-time stay-at-home dad. Whatever the risk, the invitation implicit in the life of faith is the invitation to a life that is fundamentally redemptive, fundamentally creative and, by extension, completely unique to the particular life of a particular individual. When fully embraced, the Christian faith does not pacify our fears and quell our insecurities but calls us out of ourselves, out of our fears and insecurities and into a unpredictable life of great meaning and great hope.

Jessica Hughes


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Categories : Making a Difference

And then, what?

15 06 2011

“Eat your vegetables”, parents will often advise their children at the table. In the last few days, however, the common advice in Europe has been very different: “Be careful with raw vegetables.” An outbreak of the bacteria E. coli in Germany has killed several people and left hundreds fighting the infection across the continent. The source of the deadly E. coli is still unknown, but is thought to be present in some raw vegetables.

To be seen by the naked eye, an E. coli bacteria needs to be magnified around 10.000 times. Yet, a group of them is capable of killing a human being within a few days. It’s sad to think that some people in Germany were enjoying a meal not knowing it’d actually take their lives away. Who in the world would imagine such a thing?

Let’s admit it: life is fragile. As sang by the pop star Sting:

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are [1]

James, author of a book in the Bible, tells his readers: “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” [2]

Please let me invite you to consider a short but profound question: “and then, what?” Life is fragile and we might lose it when we least expect. And then, what?

I’m certainly not suggesting we should be obsessed with death; however, I think it’d be unwise not to seriously reflect on something that I know will take place. Don’t you consider it curious that we often worry about and ‘pre-occupy’ ourselves with possibilities (most of which never occur as we foresaw them) and we simply ignore certain situations that will surely become real at some point? In my opinion, the fragility of life and therefore the reality of death is an example.

Jesus mentioned the existence of an eternal life several times. To give an example: “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” [3] Although we don’t like to hear it, Jesus actually made several references to only two places people will spend their eternity.

And then, what? Your answer, and I respect it, could be: “there’s nothing”. But have you considered a different possibility? Have you sincerely considered that Jesus might be telling the truth? Wouldn’t now, while we haven’t yet fully tasted life’s fragility, be a good moment to seriously ponder our view?

As a Christian I take Jesus’ words to be true. Despite the fact that my life is more fragile than I want to admit, I believe that because of him I can hope for an  infinitely better and eternal life.

C. S. Lewis beautifully expressed this assurance at the end of his final novel in “The Chronicles of Narnia” series. Making reference to the main characters of the book and their time in Narnia, his metaphor paints a picture of the Christian hope:

“But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.” [4]

Hélder Favarin

[1] ‘Fragile’, by Sting.

[2] James 4:14

[3] John 14:2-3

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 228


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“Love your neighbour as your neighbour loves you”

13 06 2011

“Love your neighbour as your neighbour loves you.”[1] Freud paraphrases Jesus’ famous words with his own, rather peppery, twist. Jesus taught that my love for others should be as boundless as my love for myself; in Freud’s account, however, my love for others should be proportional to how much they love me.

Like many others, Freud expressed incredulity before Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbour. He could fully agree on love for friends, for those who deserve or reciprocate our affection in some way. Yet unmeasured, generous love of strangers sounded like an oxymoron. Don’t even get him started on love for enemies. “If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way… He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him.”[2]

Freud articulates this love very interestingly: I love others when I love myself and my ideal self in them. It is a self-referential understanding of love, a love which is directed to me, and to me mirrored in others. True love – moving out of myself to appreciate and dwell in someone else – is not possible; I can only love truly myself. At most, I can love myself in others, or love others insofar as I am cherished by them. Nietzsche expresses a similar self-referential perspective in his Beyond Good and Evil: “In the end one loves his own desire, rather than the desired object.”[3]

What I appreciate of Freud and Nietzsche’s perspectives is how they express
 clearly our self-centeredness. We can’t love others truly, unconditionally. We
 can only love fragments of ourselves. Actually, Luther affirms that the biblical description of humanity agrees with them: “[Scripture] describes man as so turned in on himself that he uses not only his physical but even his spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seeks only himself.”[4] In other words, the self is the object to which we are bent and to which we want to converge everything around us. We are self-centered.

This is not the end of the story for Jesus, however. When he asked us to love our neighbour as ourselves, he knew he was asking for something we cannot do. But he did not pronounce this teaching from a comfortable university chair. Instead, he practiced it himself. He loved us when we were still enemies, when we did not deserve his care. As a passage in the New Testament puts it, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”[5] A paraphrase of this passage puts this beautifully. “We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.”[6]

The Christian love of neighbour and enemy is not naïve, therefore. Nor is it impossible. We can certainly not produce unconditional love by ourselves. But we can rechannel some of this radical love when we get a glimpse of Jesus’ generous love for us, of his undeserved, unearned sacrifice on our behalf. We need not treat enemies with equal violence; we can treat others in the way Jesus treated us.[7] We are called to love strangers and those who do harm to us, but someone already did that on our behalf, and wooed our hearts, and flooded us with gratitude, and helps us love the undeserving, like we did not deserve Jesus’ extravagant love in the first place.

René Breuel 

[1]    Sigmund Freud, quoted in Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life (New York: Free Press, 2002), 175

[2]    Ibid.

[3]    Friedrich Nietzsche, L’Amore Egoísta [Selfish Love], ed. Claudio Lamparelli (Milano: Mondatori, 2010), 44.

[4]    Martin Luther, quoted in Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on Homo Incurvatus In Se (London and New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 70. Blaise Pascal is another theologian who defines sin as being turned in on ourselves. “For if we were born reasonable and impartial, with a knowledge of ourselves and of others, we would not have this bias toward ourselves in our own wills. But we are born with it, and so we are born perverted. Everything tends toward itself, and this is contrary to order.” Blaise Pascal, The Mind on Fire: A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent, ed. James M. Houston (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1989), 66.

[5]     Romans 5:8 (ESV)

[6]     Romans 5:7-8 (The Message)

[7]    Dietrich Bonhoeffer expresses the distinctiveness of Christian love in this way. “How then does love conquer? By asking nor how the enemy treats her but only how Jesus treated her. The love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross and into fellowship with the Crucified… The cross is the differential in Christian religion, the power which enables the Christian to transcend the world and to win the victory.” Francis Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 247, 249.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

On Mary Poppins and Feminism

10 06 2011

Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen Mary Poppins.

Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever noticed its not-so-subtle critique of patriarchy.

I noticed the vaguely feminist critique of patriarchy in Mary Poppins on a recent viewing with my daughter. I think it is classically stated in Winifred Banks’ (the mom) song on women’s suffrage: “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.” I love this. And, quite honestly, I’m not sure I can argue (though I’m not sure I would say that I adore men, even on an individual basis).

Throughout the movie, the father, George, is portrayed as obtuse to the real values in life and is regularly manipulated by Mary Poppins in the interest of his children. Later, when Jane and Michael (the children) visit the bank with their father, the movie takes aim at capitalism as it is made clear that the capitalist enterprise is less valuable than feeding birds. Amen? (I’m not a huge ornithophile.)

A wise man (who I imagine would rather not be dragged into this blog post by name) told me once that anyone who has a daughter ought to be a feminist. Well, I have a daughter.

Now, feminism comes in all shapes and sizes, as do feminists. Some are militantly against what they consider phallocentric (or phallocratic) structures and thought patterns and certainly this has its place from time to time. Others are genuinely mad at men, some for very good reasons. Still others offer critiques, from gentle to stringent, aimed at unsettling a self-assured patriarchy in order to allow the voices of women to be heard as equals. Being a man myself, and not a self-hating one, I think I fit in the last category.

I want to be an advocate for my daughter. I want to fight for a world in which she is allowed the same freedom of self-definition and the same capacity to follow her dreams as a man has. [1] I don’t want her to be treated as a sexual object by over-sexed men who are incapable of seeing her as a person. I want her to be able to function as an equal member of society whose views matter. Who wouldn’t want these things for their child? Therefore, since I want that for my daughter, I must also want that for every daughter…and every woman is someone’s daughter.

Sadly, I think that Christianity has been far too slow to jump on the feminist bandwagon. (Of course, since some of the earliest advocates of women took aim at the church, I can understand a little bit of reticence, even if I wish it had happened differently.) Even on the most patriarchal reading of the Bible, my desires on behalf of my daughter can only be justified, not controverted. [2] Women and men are created in God’s image: “And then God created humanity (ha-adam) in his image, in the image of God he created them (otam), male and female he created them (otam)”[3] For Paul, Christians “are all children of God though faith” where “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free-person, male or female.” [4]  This is not meant to eliminate differences, people are still women and men, but, as part of the “new creation,” we are equals before God. [5]

This should lead Christians to be enthusiastic supporters of women, fighting for them when they are treated as less than men. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. So, I just want to say that I’m sorry to all the women who have been suppressed rather than supported by Christians. And, to every Winifred Banks out there, I’d like to march with you.

Ben Edsall

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[1] Of course, the contemporary obsession with absolute freedom to do whatever we want has its own problems and that is not what I am aiming at.

[2] I don’t think that a strongly patriarchal reading of the Bible as a whole is in fact the best one, but I don’t have nearly enough time argue the point. So, go read The Blue Parakeet by Scot McKnight and Finally Feminist by John Stackhouse. Sure, they’re not the final word, but they’re a good start.

[3] Gen 1.27

[4] Gal 3.26-28

[5] See Gal 2.16


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

So Real, it’s Surreal…

8 06 2011

I’m writing this article in the study of some German friends, having arrived from Adelaide in Australia to their little German village, Bad Mergentheim, yesterday. Maybe it’s partly because of the jetlag, but this place is making my wife and I feel really befuddled.

See, Adelaide has a strong German heritage, because German Pietists came to Adelaide in the nineteenth century. When they arrived, they obviously wanted to feel at home, so they built their homes in areas with similar climates to Germany, using German architectural designs. The outer suburbs of Adelaide like Hahndorf, Lobethal, and the Barossa are also filled with food inspired by Germany: there are German pubs with German meals, German beers, German sausages. Many of the older wineries seriously look like nineteenth-century German castles. So I’m used to all this stuff… kinda.

When Leanne and I were being driven from Frankfurt to this little town, we drove through many villages and towns that look a lot like what I’ve seen around Adelaide. It’s just that it’s more “real” here, if that makes sense. In Adelaide, it look superimposed, a replica, almost fake – no,  that’s not fair, it’s not fake. After all, for the German immigrants, it’s a latching onto what was real for them before.

The thing is, we are in the place they were latching onto, but we’re only used to the replica. So my wife routinely asked on the drive, “So do real people live in those houses? Or is it just a replica village?” Our friend would look at her quizzically and say, “Of course it’s real!”, because she lives in one of those houses herself.

This got me thinking of Plato’s Analogy of the Cave. Plato describes a bunch of people locked in a cave, who eternally face the wall of the cave, not the sun streaming from the cave-mouth behind them. They see the shadow of things that pass by the mouth of the cave, and their own shadows on the wall, and think that the shadows are the reality – it’s all they know. One day, one of them escapes, turns around, and goes outside to see the real world. He sees the realities from which the shadows have come from. Elated by his discovery, he returns to tell his compatriots still stuck in the cave, so they can be liberated into the reality outside the cave-mouth too. Sadly, though, they don’t believe him – they think he’s mad.

Christians have often resonated with Plato’s analogy, because of our sense that, while this world in which we live is real, there is something more real beyond it. C. S. Lewis, for example, wrote about that in his book on the afterlife, The Great Divorce. In his vision of heaven, grass is really green, rain drops so real they are heavier than we could imagine now. More than that, people are more real there – they are the complete, whole reality, the culmination of their life here. The hope of the Christian is not to escape this reality, but enter into a deeper one.

Our German holiday shows me that, perhaps one reason why people – Christian or not – struggle to comprehend, appreciate or accept that hope, is because they can only see the “real” in front of them. Tangibility is an attractive option to base your reality upon. Indeed, the only reason any Christian can begin to appreciate the higher reality, is because One Who is from there, came here, and showed us the way. He also told us that if we follow that way – which is actually Himself (“I am the Way”, He said in John 14:6) – He is preparing a place for us to participate in that reality. The realest reality.

I just hope they have really good Bavarian pretzels there, they’re delicious.

Matt Gray


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