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?
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,”2 as though God would orchestrate or nod in approval at what was to come.
Category: General
Tags: Henry, Jessica Kelley, Picture of God, Problem of Evil, Warfare Worldview
Related Reading
Who You Are Reflects the Kind of God You Worship
We always reflect the mental picture of God that we envision, for better or worse. If you have a fear-based picture of God, it will even affect the structure of your brain. You become the kind of person that you worship. If you have a threatening picture of God, you become threatening. If you have a…
A Cross-Centered Evaluation of Responses to Tragedy
I’d like to pick up where I left off on my previous post about Draper’s article entitled “Aurora shooting inspires various perspectives on God and belief.” Toward the end of his article, Draper reports on an informal survey conducted by Stephen Prothero on his CNN Blog. Prothero simply asks people to respond to the question: “Where…
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…
Hearing and Responding to God: Part 2
In this video, Greg continues his thoughts about the difficulties we can encounter when we try to hear God speaking to us. You can view the first part here.
Life and Death in Haiti
Sometimes it’s important to hear about other lives, much sadder and difficult than our own, to reorient us to what is most important. In this season of elections that can be so divisive and in an economy that seems so fragile and creates hardship for many of us, it’s important to remember that we are…
Divine Wisdom
Why doesn’t God end it all and stop the slaughter? Why does God allow suffering and evil to go on so long? Here, Greg offers two possible answers to these questions. Option A is that all evil somehow is designed by God and somehow brings glory to him. But Greg thinks Option B is a better explanation, and it involves…