Home

Lyndsay and I now have a contract on this ranch home, which was signed on our anniversary. Lyndsay keeps saying, "You bought me a house for our anniversary!"

In case you are wondering, we did have a signed contract on a different house previously, but the home inspector saw a few issues that turned into a twenty-thousand dollar foundation problem.

So this is our new home and we hope that we will be closing on it the first or second week of August. Furthermore, I am glad to say that this time around the home inspection went great. We are really excited to get all the paperwork done, so we can start moving into our new house.

I personally am very excited about this move, for it will be, for me, the first time in my entire life that the structure that I call home, will be owned by myself or my family. That's right, I've never lived in a home that was ours. Growing up in Streator we lived in a parsonage, when I went to college I lived in a dorm, after graduation I lived in an apartment, and for the last 6 1/2 years we have lived in a church owned parsonage. This will be my first home.

Redemption as a Special Dimension of God's Activity as Creator

Apparently, the subject of creation theology has been somewhat neglected by professional theologians in years past, and what's more, the subject has often times been subordinate to redemption. Stated plainly, it has often been the practice of theologians to consider God's real work to be redemption.

The reasons for this subordination of creation are listed by Terrence Fretheim in his book, God and the World in the Old Testament: A Relationship Theology of Creation, and are too many to list at this time. As I have read his book, I think that I have at times been guilty of this kind of subordination in my thinking and teaching. His suggestions have weighed on my mind for quite some time and have formed the way I think about creation and its relationship to redemption.

One passage from the book that I find especially poignant:

The redemptive work of God is a special dimension of God's more comprehensive activity as Creator. To equate the two would collapse all of God's work in the world into redemption and diminish God's more comprehensive work as Creator, including blessing. Generally speaking, God's goal for the creation is not redemption; God's redemption is a means to a new creation, and salvation will be the key characteristic of that new reality.

This understanding, in turn, has implications for how one thinks about creation; the creation is not something to be left behind as God works on more important matters, such as redemption. To equate creation and redemption, or to subordinate creation to redemption, is to endanger the status of the world, including human beings, as creation. It is also to place in question God's love for the creation itself, quite apart from the redemption, as if God's goal is to get beyond creation to some other reality. Moreover, such an equation endangers the recognition that redemption has to do with much more than spiritual matters; it includes the healing of the body (finally, resurrection), indeed the healing of the environment.

-Terrence Fretheim

My reflection upon these statements as well as the larger body of Fretheim's work has been very fruitful and provides a framework with which to approach the many environmental issues that concern many people today.

What Is God Like

Yesterday I read a portion of a book that resonated deeply with me and I want to share them with you for your own thought life. In the work that I've been doing on openness theology I have been wrestling with a very difficult question. Do the metaphors, narratives, and poems of the Bible really reveal to us what God is like? Certainly, God is a mystery to man, and we will never fully understand him, and that is fine with me, but the question is: are the words of Scripture reality-depicting?

I have always believed that when the Scripture said that God was angry, sad, or grieved that it meant that God truly experienced anger, sadness, and loss. Yet, classical theism, popularly expressed in much reformed theology states that God is not affected by the world and does not experience anger, sadness, loss, or joy, but exists eternally in a perfect state of blessed happiness.

Many say that these metaphors and narratives are an example of God "talking down to us." John Calvin wrote that God lisps to us like a nursemaid lisps to a child. With this understanding, it seems difficult to see the metaphors as reality-depicting, therefore many theologians and pastors for years have talked about the God behind the metaphors as the true God while the Scripture "speaks down to us" and gives us the God of revelation. For them it is not proper to speak of God experiencing emotion; it is not "dignum deo" for us to think of God this way.

There are many questions, concerns, and problems that arise if we start talking about the "God behind the metaphors." How could anyone really speak about the God behind revelation? How could anyone verify that the metaphors are not reality-depicting? How can someone make the claim that God does not experience anger or frustration at the obdurate nature that human beings can sometimes display? In order to have such information about the God behind revelation, wouldn't they have to have some kind of privileged access to God in order to see that he was in fact different than what we read about in Scripture?

The following authors reject a "God behind revelation" and believe that God has indeed revealed his essential nature in salvation history. These lines resonated with me:


The revelation of God in salvation history is a genuine self-revelation, not a temporary expedient or a public relations ploy, but a portrait of what God is really like.

-Richard Rice, theologian and professor at Loma Linda University

The very nature of God who is self-communicating love is expressed in what God does in the events of redemptive history. There is no hidden God....behind the God of revelation history, no possibility that God is in God's eternal mystery other than what God reveals Godself to be.

-Catherine LaCugna, Feminist Catholic Theologian, author of God For Us.

This revelation is a genuine self-giving. God's true self, God's innermost reality, comes to expression in God's dealings with creation. Consequently, God's saving actions become central to God's identity. In creating and saving a world, he commits himself to the world in such a way that his own destiny and his own identity are forever linked to that of his creatures. Like British generals who acquired their titles from their battlefield triumphs, God's name derives from his saving activity. For Christians the Trinity names God--as Father, Son, and Spirit--identifying God by the definitive moments in salvation history: the mission of the Son and the sending of the Spirit.

Now, if salvation history is a revelation of God's inner reality, we must think of God in a way that is consistent with what we find in this history. Since the qualities of sensitivity, care, commitment, self-giving, and self-sacrifice are prominent in salvation history, as the cross [of Christ] supremely testified, these are the qualities that characterize God's essential reality.

-Richard Rice


[Quotes taken from, Searching for an adequate God: A Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists. ed by John B. Cobb and Clark H. Pinnock. pgs. 196-197.]

So if salvation history testifies to the nature of God, then God is affected by our world; he is a God who suffers; he knows anger and frustration; he really rejoices like the Scriptures say. God has shown us his true self at the Cross of Christ; there is no God behind the curtain, for in the crucifixion of Christ we see God's true self--we see what God is really like. In Christ, we see that God is self-giving love.

United With Christ

Sunday was a great day! For there was a young man in our church, named Caleb, that was united with Christ at baptism, sharing in Christ's death, burial, and resurrection. He is now dead to sin and to the law and is alive to God in our Lord Jesus. For him there is now no condemnation, for his old relationship to sin has been crucified; his old self has passed away and he is free from sin.

Therefore, there is no condemnation for him, for he is now in Christ Jesus. He has been given the Holy Spirit so that he he may no longer be controlled by the sinful nature, but by the Spirit, and with the Spirit he will begin to live the Christian life by putting to death the misdeeds of the body through the Spirit that lives in him.

The Spirit that he received has made him a son of God--an adopted son, who receives all the benefits of a natural born son. He is both our brother and a brother to the firstborn of our new race of mankind, a race of man that will one day be resurrected to a greater plane of existence where death will have no mastery, where we will exclaim that we are alive forevermore. Together we cry out with all of our enthusiasm, emotion, and joy, "Yeah Abba, Father: Yeah Dad."

Together, now we walk in this environment of grace as we become what God has always dreamed we would be--a people formed in the likeness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. While we still experience hardship, may we be reassured that the pain we experience won't be worth comparing to the glory we will experience when we are wholly formed and living in the presence of our great God.

So let us live victorious lives, knowing that God is for us, and that he has revealed himself to us, on the cross, as a God of self-giving love. And let us rest assured that nothing, absolutely nothing can seperate us from the love of Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6-8)

I am so excited for Caleb. It has been my honor and privilege to have been his pastor and to see him grow and mature on his way from third grade to the ninth grade, and I pray that his life will always be Spirit led. I praise God for all the adults that gave of themselves during a week at Church camp, for their effort made an eternal impact in the life of at least one young man, who will never forget one of the most important weeks of his life.