We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

The Warfare Worldview: What Would You Tell the Younger You?

Mom says....

Aftab Uzzaman via Compfight

Jessica Kelley has been fleshing out the Warfare Worldview on her blog in a series of posts using the lens of the death of her child, Henry. Jessica is a beautiful writer, and her reflections are powerful and tender. You’re going to want to be listening to her. Her voice is an important one as we reflect on the problem of evil and our picture of God.

From her blog reflection:

I picked up a stuffed seahorse from her nightstand and pressed its belly.  The toy lit up with an amber glow and began to play soothing lullabies.  That seahorse would lure Henry to sleep for years, and even accompany him into surgeries when she and her husband, Ian, were forced to stay behind.  Henry would develop a deep sense of security and comfort from his seahorse… though it offered no real protection.

I realized that what I mostly wanted was to beg Young Jess to wrestle with her picture of God.  It would be two years before she learned that God’s heart was fully represented in the person of Jesus Christ.  Until then she’d believe in the blueprint worldview, the notion that everything occurs in accordance with God’s perfect plan, his “meticulous divine blueprint,”as though God would orchestrate or nod in approval at what was to come.

Related Reading

If Creation is Created in the Middle of Cosmic Warfare, How Can God Call It All Good?

In this episode Greg discusses creation, in the context of cosmic warfare, and considers how God could call it “good.” Links: Greg’s book: “God at War“ http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0022.mp3

6 Things the Church Fathers Can Teach Us about Spiritual Warfare

Image by Christina Saint Marche via Flickr Unlike our thinking today about the source of good and evil in the world, the early church fathers, including Irenaus, Athenagorus, Origen, and others before Augustine, possessed a warfare worldview. Here are 6 ideas that are common in their writings: The Reality of the “World-in-Between” The church fathers assumed…

Secret Doubt

J L via Compfight We don’t usually do this, but Jessica Kelley (Henry’s mom) over at Jess in Process wrote a piece about her struggles with doubt, and we got her permission to reprint it in its entirety. She perfectly represents the basic premise of Greg’s upcoming book Benefit of the Doubt. Thanks Jess! Secret…

The Cross and Cosmic Warfare

Since the time of Anselm in the 11th century, Western theology has focused almost all of its attention on the anthropological dimension of the atonement. In the most popular understanding, the chief thing that God was accomplishing on the cross was satisfying God’s perfect justice and thereby atoning for our sins. The work of the…

The Suffering of God

NYC.andre via Compfight 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.…

The “Third Way”: Seeing God’s Beauty in the Depth of Scripture’s Violent Portraits of God

A publishing house recently sent me an advance copy of a book written by a well known scholar on the topic of the non-violent God revealed in Jesus, asking me to endorse it. (Publishing protocol stipulates that endorsers not critique a book before it’s released, so I will not mention the name of the author…