God in the Dark , livre ebook

Wild Goose Publications - Peter Longson

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

84 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

What becomes of faith in God when bad stuff happens? How do we react when we realise that, for all its glories, this world can be a dark, dangerous and disappointing place? Peter Longson's honest, unflinching exploration of the nature of evil and its consequences for life and faith leads him to some surprising and liberating conclusions about the nature of God.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Informations

Publié par	Wild Goose Publications
Date de parution	12 juillet 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849522205
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

What becomes of faith in God when bad stuff happens? How do we react when we realise that, for all its glories, this world can be a dark, dangerous and disappointing place?
We may decide that God is no longer to be trusted, or continue with a form of belief that is at odds with our experience of life. Or we may choose the most risky and difficult option: trying to build a Christian understanding that looks the facts full in the face whilst holding on – for dear life – to belief in a God of love.
Half-wishing that he had never known the spurious comfort of a religion that promised so much and seemed to deliver so little, the author sets out on the lonely road of re-examining his faith. He discovers early on that we must seek God first in the mess of life, in whatever most perplexes us – in short, we must look for God in the very place where he is apparently absent.
This rock which is the earth is a hard place, in all senses. In sharing his experiences to encourage other ‘battered Christians’, Peter Longson’s honest, unflinching exploration of the nature of evil and its consequences for life and faith leads him to some surprising and liberating conclusions about the nature of God.
Do we need yet another book on a God of love and the problem of evil? Christians certainly need this one! It is written in response to a devastating personal experience of evil. With ruthless logic, deep compassion and a pastoral heart Longson beats a scholarly path through science, theology, philosophy and literature questioning much of conservative Christian understanding of theodicy. Out of the wreckage he builds something where the world as it is, human life as we experience it and a God of love can reside together. It is essential reading for all who seek to bring the love of God to a world which groans under the weight of suffering and evil.
The Revd Dr John Searle OBE

www.ionabooks.com

Copyright © 2012 Peter Longson
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of quoted material for permission and any omissions will be corrected in future edtions.

First published 2012
Wild Goose Publications
4th Floor, Savoy House, 140 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK
www.ionabooks.com
Wild Goose Publications is the publishing division of the Iona Community. Scottish Charity No. SC003794. Limited Company Reg. No. SC096243.

ePub: ISBN 978-1-84952-220-5
Mobipocket: ISBN 978-1-84952-221-2
PDF: ISBN 978-1-84952-222-9

Cover design © Chris Tomlin
The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Drummond Trust, 3 Pitt Terrace, Stirling FK8 2EY in producing this book.

All rights reserved. Apart from reasonable personal use on the purchaser’s own system and related devices, no part of this document or file(s) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Peter Longson has asserted his right in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
C ONTENTS
1 Finding a Voice

Who’s asking?
Permission to speak
Clearing the decks

2 The Way the World Is

A rock and a hard place
Farewell to Pangaea
God of the blank cheque

3 Rogues’ Gallery

Introduction
The things we say
The devil and all his works

The devil and death
The devil and evil
Bring on the good times

No ‘Back to the Future’
Somewhere over the rainbow

4 Finding God in the Dark

Made to be makers

God’s Symphony
God’s music
Praying in the dark: a liturgy
For John and Elizabeth, who have walked with us in love

and with grateful thanks to the editor, Sandra Kramer, for her encouragement, patience and wisdom
One
F INDING A V OICE
W HO’S A SKING ?

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
(A.E. Housman: A Shropshire Lad ) 1
It’s gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won’t come back again. I killed that too, when I told you about Rebecca … It’s gone, in twenty-four hours. You are so much older …
(Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca ) 2
M ost of us are professionals, rather than amateurs, when it comes to the sorrows of the world. Not, of course, in the prosaic sense of making our living from them, but in the deeper sense of being intimately and personally connected to them, of knowing them from the inside. The sorrows of the world have become ‘our business’. Many will be able to identify a moment after which ‘nothing would ever be the same again’. Others will be aware of the slow drip of barely articulated thought that eventually leads to the realisation that, notwithstanding its many glories, the world can be a dark, dangerous and often disappointing place. For the sake of brevity, we will call it for now ‘the problem of evil’. This ‘evil’ can, as we shall soon see, be something for which another human being may be responsible, or it can be the sort where a bad thing ‘just happens’. Either way, this experience, and the knowledge it brings, leads us, if we can face it, to one conclusion: we must forever afterwards understand the world and the meaning of our place in it primarily in the light of the bad stuff that happens within it.
Even for those who have not themselves been touched directly in this way, I think it is impossible to live meaningfully in the early 21 st century without being aware of ‘evil’. Politicians have taken to using the word as a response to horrific world events, or as a description of the soil from which some of those events may have sprung – often using the concept as a justification for taking violent action that in their view ‘responds’ to it. Tabloid newspapers are quick to brand various types of lawbreakers as ‘evil’, though their choices of who qualifies are invariably selective. But awareness of evil is not confined to the makers of public opinion: any imaginative engagement with contemporary life will soon put each of us in the shoes of those who have experienced evil at first hand. And in an age whose character is moulded to a greater or lesser degree by radio, television and the internet, we really don’t have the option of remaining detached or unaware. Writing with some approval of postmodernity, though with much criticism too, N.T. Wright says that that world-view is ‘precisely a restatement of the problem [of evil]’; 3 and it is in that postmodern world that we live, whether we like it or not.
What then are we to do with this knowledge, this experience? For those who have, or had, some kind of Christian faith, I think there are three possibilities. We may decide that God can no longer be trusted, and perhaps that the God we thought we knew was a horrible mistake. We may try to stick it out, holding on to a form of belief that is at odds with our experience of life. Or we may take the most risky and, frankly, the most difficult option: trying to build a Christian understanding that looks the facts full in the face whilst holding on – for dear life – to belief in a God of love.
Later we shall look at those possibilities in more detail. But first, let us identify ourselves, this congregation of the bewildered, this jostling crowd united in some kind of grief, yet each of us separated from all the others by the very uniqueness of our own experience. Many Christians, or would-be Christians, have great difficulty in squaring what we might call ‘the facts of life’ with what appear to be the confident and neatly packaged truths that are presented as the foundations of Christian belief, and to which once, perhaps, we assented with relative ease – even with joy. Each one’s story will be different, but the unifying thread is that of crying ‘Why?’ ‘Why did God allow – that?’ ‘Why did God not prevent – that?’ And then if the ‘why’ question is entertained, even for a moment, the floodgates open: ‘Where was God – then?’ ‘Can God any longer be relied on?’ ‘Does prayer get any further than the inside of my head?’ ‘Is the only answer that God will wipe away all tears – but not yet?’ Each individual will have come to these agonies by a different route, but now we find ourselves united in this overwhelming sense of incomprehension. Jürgen Moltmann shines helpful light on what this feels like. ‘Anyone who suffers without cause first thinks that he has been forsaken by God.’ 4 But, crucially, he continues ‘But anyone who cries out to God in this suffering echoes the death-cry of the dying Christ.’ 5 It will be some time before we re-establish direct contact with that thought, but it will act as a compass bearing in the journey we are undertaking. It can only be read and entered into correctly, though, if before that we have looked the facts full in the face.
Our particular story can be briefly, though not easily, told, and is best got out of the way here at the start. A daughter who was the victim of a paedophile between the ages of nine and eleven or so. (Unusually, the perpetrator was neither a family member nor someone known to the family.) You don’t expect to be taking your young daughter to a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. An all clear verdict didn’t improve the situation; it merely meant that things were not even more disastrous than they already were. Then, a couple of years later, as she was beginning to rebuild her life to some kind of normality, a Christian houseparty summer holiday. Doubtless the leaders’ prayer that morning was ‘Lord, we ask you to protect and be with the young people as they spend the day in the town.’ Her day finished with her being raped by one of the other houseparty members. You don’t expect to be collecting your daughter’s clothes from the police.
As we, each with our own unique story to tell, try to take stock of where we are, a sayin