If we accept a non-linear view of time and if we move beyond homogenous notions and modes, indeed more deeply understanding and experiencing God as Trinity, being caught up in/participating the ‘dance’, then our faith will always be developing, growing changing, deepening, but never have arrived, always in process, beyond our time of equilibrium. Accepting such notions then can we not be more honest about the things of faith and Christ?
Brueggemann’s 19 theses emphasis the scripted life, but I think it is not in terms of a script that confines, but is liberating into the counter – story, text and indeed drama of God's mission (missio Dei)
1. That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence – [a] huge problem for us.
2. The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless. [I think the writer of Psalm 119 would probably like too try, to make it seamless]. Because when we do that the script gets flattened and domesticated. [This is my polemic against systematic theology]. The script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must betaken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible self.
I would add to this by noting what he does in his handing of the psalms – as a movement and flow involving orientation (where all is perfectly in order and balanced), disorientation (where and when things are ragged, confusing, painful and messy), re-orientation (a newness to life brought about by God’s grace and fresh perspectives and life).
Such faith is not settled and fixed, it has a sense of tension and resolution to it and can somehow see the transient more in the daily-ness of living.
So what is the trouble if the Archbishop raises honest questions and what if we don’t have answers? Is that the point? Must we have answers or are wqe called to something else in response?
In the Telegraph (UK) -
"In a deeply personal and candid article, he says "it would be wrong" if faith were not "upset" by the catastrophe which has already claimed more than 150,000 lives.
Prayer, he admits, provides no "magical solutions" and most of the stock Christian answers to human suffering do not "go very far in helping us, one week on, with the intolerable grief and devastation in front of us".
(for some ongoing discussion on this one go to Jason Clark's Blog)
In the rawness of life perhaps this awful event may act to everyone, the church included, like God’s megaphone (see Craig’s blog) as it threatens and disrupts everyone’s convenient, comfortable equilibrium. If we dare to unpack the box in which we have confined God, perhaps these events may fill us with passion and give voice to another counter script, indeed, our responses in the longer term beyond giving aid, is also to give a voice to the lament (which we have sanitised and cleaned up in our churches and liturgies) of disorientation that the world feels letting experience touch us in new psalms that give voice to how we feel today in the face of such destruction.
Praying the psalms.
"I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me' Ps77
