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The Suffering of God
This seems like a good follow-up post from what Greg posted yesterday. Charisma posted this reflection on the problem of evil and the suffering of God. It’s a great summary of our thinking about what accounts for the kind of world we see where tragedies like Newtown occur.
From the article:
C. S. Lewis sagely observed, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself … Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata–of creatures that work like machines–would hardly be worth creating.”
Put another way, love cannot be coerced; it must be freely chosen.
Related Reading
Podcast: Isn’t God the Author of Suffering in the Crucifixion?
Greg considers the implications of his Cruciform Hermeneutic on his previous work in God at War. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0274.mp3
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The Philando Castile Verdict
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What Does a Perfect God Look Like?
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Voluntary Suffering and the Kingdom
In a post from two days ago, I wrote about the call to voluntary suffering for others as it is laid out in the New Testament. For the first three centuries of the church, Christians understood this call as they sought to follow Jesus’ example of forgoing the use of violence and expressing God’s self-sacrificial…