—Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity
Recently I’ve run across a couple of deep religious thinkers who express the same reservations. And they are unquestionably on to something. The normal responses to such thinking—like “God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is no”—are hopelessly glib and inadequate in the face of the Holocaust or 9/11. In these and many other cases, God seems exasperatingly silent.
So is Borg right, then? Not so fast. I see some real problems with a non-interventionist God as well:
- What do you do with those instances where, from all appearances, someone has prayed and actually received a concrete response? You could chalk up the biblical examples to a spiritual dramatization of actual events. But what about modern-day healings? Not all of them can be attributed to natural causes, like the change in emotional state that prayer sometimes brings.
- How do we explain the concept of vocation—not just to ministry, but to anything? Isn’t the act of calling someone to do something an intervention in itself?
- To take it one step further, how do we explain any divine influence on the human soul? Certainly, neuroscience and psychology explain a lot. Still, I have found that by opening myself to the divine presence, I find myself thinking and doing things that I never would have imagined. I’m not saying God is doing brain surgery on us, but can we truly say that God is not involved at all?
That still doesn’t make instances of an interventionist God’s non-intervention any less horrifying or impossible to explain. It simply means both viewpoints leave way too many questions unanswered—and unanswerable.
So what do we do? I see no reason why we can’t treat this as we do so many other aspects of God: simply revere it as an ineffable mystery and go about our lives. Even Borg, despite his belief, continues to pray for a variety of reasons—one being that it’s arrogant to refuse to do something because you can’t imagine how it works. And again, in some mysterious way, the practice of prayer seems to open us to God’s presence—and that presence has an equally mysterious way of transforming us from the inside out. That alone is reason to pray all the more.
3 comments:
I think it is important not to confuse two concepts here. There is the idea of divine intervention, in the sense of God forcing events to occur in a certain way through divine power, so as to achieve a desired result; and then there is the concept of God calling out to us, without forcing any particular result to occur. Many who reject the idea of divine omnipotence (as it is classically conceived) still accept the idea of a divine calling. It is one thing to say that God forces certain events to happen a certain way; it is another to say that God is constantly calling out to us and that we can listen to God's voice. This is a very important part of process theology, for example, which expresses the view that God acts not by force but by calling out to us at every moment.
That's a very good and important distinction--and it certainly refines the thinking away from the absolutes at either end of the interventionist spectrum. I do think it still leaves some questions unanswered, but then any legitimate discussion of God probably should. Thanks for the good input.
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