Our church is soon going to begin the “40 Days of Purpose” program, based on Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose-Driven Life.” It seems like we’re the last church in America to do this. We’re SO not trendy, but that’s okay.
As we prepare for it, our elders wrote up a statement regarding two points in which they disagree with two things in the book: the role of baptism in one’s conversion, and the idea that God has planned out our lives completely. I won’t discuss the baptism part here, other than to say that I’m in favor of viewing baptism as a necessary part of our conversion story. It’s the other piece I’m thinking about today.
There’s an idea that floats around evangelical Christianity that says, “God has a plan for your life. He has had it mapped out since the beginning of time, and knew before anything happened exactly what you would be doing at this moment. He is in complete control of your every step.” It’s very deterministic, and makes us sound like some kind of robots. For that matter, if God planned every moment of my life, why would He make me commit any kind of sin? And if He planned each person’s life, why would anyone who sins ever be punished for an action they had no control over. I don’t think the original statement is very helpful for understanding what it means to be human, much less to be a human in God’s image.
On the extreme other end is some kind of deism, which says that God set things in motion, then left us all to go about our lives, and doesn’t care much what happens. That’s not the kind of God I care to believe in, much less worship and try to be like.
Somewhere in the middle is the idea that God did know from the very beginning what would happen in each moment of everyones’ lives, but not because He caused it to happen. God created us in some kind of pattern that resembles His being (whatever that means), and we all have control over our actions, and make choices according to our beliefs, our feelings, our intellects, and our impulses. God transcends time, so he would know the ultimate result of the all of our actions.
My question is why can’t the truth be some combination of the “middle ground” and the deterministic view. Not an average, or a compromise, but a combination of them. Is the idea that God planned my life really in conflict with my having free will? On the face of it, yes, but there is language in the Bible to suggest both are true. Perhaps the truth is greater than we can see, and we don’t do God any disservice by expressing that both are true.
Here’s another paradox that we play with all the time: Jesus was completely human and completely divine. Our rationalistic sides might say that He was “100 percent human and 100 percent divine.” That, of course, adds up to 200 percent, so He was twice the being that anyone else was, apparently. But percentages don’t tell the story, in this case. Perhaps that Jesus was both human and divine expresses a different truth: that to be human is to be much more like the divine than we tend to think. If we were created in God’s image (and we were, according to the Genesis account), then maybe Jesus’ divine essence fits very easily into human form. Still, He did “empty himself,” according to Philippians 2, so there is some major difference -- just not the kind of difference we might be expecting.
I think I’m thinking too much, without getting anywhere. But this is what I’m thinking about at the moment. Thank you for reading.
