Daily Archives: August 13, 2013

Jen Pollock Michel: The Misguided Theology of Kindness

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Does this go against your theology? See what you think.

Saunders suggests we cure selfishness to attain to the The Misguided Theology of Kindnessmeasure of kindness. We medicate ourselves with art, education, prayer, meditation, and friendship. We abandon the notion that “we are central to the universe.” We fight our Darwinian “built-in confusions,” which “cause us to preference our own needs over the needs of others.” When selfishness is strangled, kindness will flourish.

There is some inherent biblical wisdom in these words. Despite our reflexive megalomania, we are not central to the universe: “In the beginning, God,” Scripture begins—as if anticipating the reminder we would need. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul describes well our “built-in confusions” in Romans 7:15: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” And finally, Jesus Christ serves as the example that each of us must look “not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others,” (Phil. 2:4).

We Christians hold this much in common with Saunders. However, we could not agree with him that our greatest virtue is kindness and our greatest vice selfishness—at least not as he defines them.

To make kindness into an ultimate virtue is to insist that our most important moral obligations are those we owe are to our fellow human beings. Under Saunders’s assumptions, the only plane of human behavior with moral import is the horizontal one: neighbor to neighbor. Sin is exclusively defined as the harm we do to one another.

Simon Chan: Why We Call God ‘Father’

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An interesting read. See what you think.

We could even say that Israel succumbed to an idea of God that was rather against her natural disposition. Left to themselves, the Israelites would have ended up worshiping the Baals and Asherahs—Canaanite fertility gods and goddesses. Israel’s prophets singled out idolatry for fierce denunciation because its people were constantly tempted to do just that. But Israel’s idea of God’s fatherhood bucked a common trend in the ancient world. Hence, it could not have been an Israelite invention, but rather the result of a long history of living under the revelation of God. It is the church’s continuity with this narrative of Israel that would lead eventually to the uniquely Christian doctrine of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the New Testament, God’s fatherhood conveys two distinct ideas. First, it refers primarily to the internal relationship within the Trinity. This is how the first article of the Apostles’ Creed puts it: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” Even as early as Paul’s writings, the phrase “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” had become commonplace. God is first and foremost the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not an invention of later church leaders, but comes directly from Christ, who refers to God as “Father.” In doing so, Jesus reveals a unique relationship between the Father and Son that constitutes the beginning of the Trinitarian doctrine.

Jesus taught his disciples to call God “our heavenly Father.” Therefore, the loving relationship he has with the Father from eternity now extends to those adopted into God’s family (Rom. 8:15). The father-son relationship is the most intimate personal relationship, one marked by reciprocal love and respect, and it is God’s supremely personal and loving nature that the term father is meant to underscore.

To claim, as many feminist theologians do, that the very presence of masculine metaphors for God excludes women simply does not square with the way Scripture uses them. Masculine images of God do not always convey exclusively “masculine” qualities. For example, Isaiah 54:5–7 refers to God as the Husband who with “deep compassion” (a stereotypically “feminine” quality) called estranged Israel back to himself (see also Isa. 49:13). The term father, then, excludes not feminine qualities, but rather the idea of a distant and impersonal deity, which is precisely the picture of the supreme being still seen in many primal religions.