107
Q.
What happened, and is this a good or a bad thing?
Jarrod McKenna
Who is...
?
Jarrod McKenna
Marx Brothers lms are underrated.A.
This question reveals two worldviews that bastardize the gospel,
giving birth to cheap imitations. And as Ammon Henacy reminded
us, “When choosing the lesser of two evils we must not forget they
are both evil.” The two evils are the following:
- God is elsewhere. This would explain the amount of evil, injustice, misery,
and war in the world. God created all, but took some time off afterward,
holidaying somewhere nicer, maybe by a celestial pool, while we suffer.
The founders of the United States believed in a form of this called
Deism. In this worldview, Jesus might be the deity popping back, seeing
everything has gone to crap and then saying, “Believe in me and I’ll take
you elsewhere, too.” The early church called this heresy “gnosticism.”
In this worldview, God is abstract because God is a secret “get-out-of-
creation-free” card.
The other popular option that equally lacks the revolutionary energy and
impulse of the scriptures is that God is not far off because:
- God is everything. Now, if you’ve grown up in a worldview in which God
is always absent, where spirituality has nothing to do with creation,
and where your body was always seen as bad, this might sound like
a better option. Sometimes called “pantheism,” it leaves us with no
cosmic critique of the evil of injustice while affi rming the goodness and
sacredness of creation. Wars, empires, and violence in creation are all just
a part of “God/Gaia/the Divine.” Jesus just shows up to “enlighten us.”
God is redeemer is the biblical vision that, in nuanced and elegant ways,
radically affi rms the goodness of the web of creation while providing an
equally radical critique of all violence and injustice that has colonized it as an
alien force. As Creating, Sustaining and Redeeming, the Trinity is dynamically
involved in history and has acted decisively in the Incarnation, to heal the
brokenness we all know, with the wholeness we sometimes feel. This will not
leave us with “abstract ideas” but with an invitation to action, for by grace we
can be part of God’s “intervention” of the Kingdom.