I second the call for a theology of suffering

My buddy Eddie over at Kouya.net says the church needs a theology of suffering. He disagrees with a comment someone says in a newspaper article that

“Miracles and healings are evidence. They are signs of the Kingdom, and if we don’t have signs then all we have is a bunch of theology.”

He goes on to quote Hebrews 11:33-38, about the anonymous heroes of faith who were d and refused to be released, who were stoned, sawed in two, put to by the sword.

Eddie comments:

But how much faith does it take to be d and refuse to be released, to be stoned to , to be jeered, to be sawn in two. Sawn in two! Now that is real faith - truly the world wasn’t worthy of people who were willing to go through that for the sake of their God.

Good point.

I've thought about these anonymous heroes of faith before. In human terms, they would appear to be failures. They believed God would deliver them, would uphold them, and yet He didn't in this life. Hebrews goes on:

39 These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. 40 God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

But He does uphold them and honor them in the next life. But in this life they appeared to be failures. Along with what Eddie says about not imagining having enough faith to be d, I doubt I'd have enough faith to be willing to appear as a failure.

The 'simple gospel' I don't believe in

The (overly) simplistic version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ says: Come to Jesus and your troubles will be over. Or the troubles you experience will be only dramatic and impressive ones that never really bother you because you'll be delivered quickly from the difficulty.

I don't believe it. At least I say I don't believe it. An exhaustive transcript of my prayer life probably would reveal times when I wanted to believe it.

The Simple Gospel

I don't know if this is original with me, but if it isn't I can't remember where I read or heard it.

Is the Gospel simple? It can be. So simple a child can understand it. But simplistic? Not really. I can whistle the first few notes of Beethoven's 5th symphony. (I can even type them -- da da da DAA). If you listen to the symphony you hear these notes repeated often, but there is a whole lot more going on.

So the Gospel of Jesus Christ is like a symphonic theme, so simple a child can understand and repeat it, but capable of an immense amount of variation and exposition. A large percentage of the uncountable sum of God's thoughts have to do with it.

We need to pray for Iraqi Christians

Christians in Iraq have suffered a lot in recent years, as this article points out.

It appears that having to pay money to not be killed is rather common. I've seen other articles that Christians in Iraq have often been targets of violence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/world/middleeast/26christians.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=for%20iraqi%20christians&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Someone is reading this

A friend told me that she likes my new blog. She said it looks interesting because she knows I'm a deep thinker. I made the obvious retort, that I am a deep thinker-- sometimes it takes me hours to get back to the surface.

Thanks, Jeanne!

Interesting quote

[the] Bible--the most influential indictment of pharisees, courtiers, and tyrants ever printed.

Kevin Phillips The Cousin's Wars 1999. Basic Books p 48.

The book is about the ideological and cultural continuities between the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the US Civil War. The immediate context of the quote is how the high literacy rate in largely Puritan eastern England was a major contributor to the struggle by Parliament against Charles I.

Diversity and loneliness

It is becoming a commonplace observation that God loves diversity. Many institutions (including the mission I work for) wants to promote diversity, to have more different kinds of people involved and working together. One of our favorite passages is Revelations 7:9-10 "After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:
"Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb."

It dawned on me this morning that few people (even introverts like myself) really like loneliness. We don't like being the only one of our kind, the only one who has ever thought X or Y or Z or whatever our idiosyncracies are. We dislike it so much we are tempted to hide what we think or feel when it is very different from what others think or feel. But if God loves diversity, and has never created two people identically the same, doesn't it follow that we are each going to feel alone in some way?