|
1 - Hallelujah! The Lord God Omnipotent Reigns |
Hallelujah! The Lord God Omnipotent Reigns
By Patrick D. Miller
It seems built into the nature of God, at least as Jews and Christians
have learned about that, to be omnipotent, all-powerful, in charge of the cosmos.
Reinforced by powerful biblical images of creator, ruler, warrior, and judge,
the God of Christian faith wears the epithet "Lord" appropriately
(apart from its possible gender associations). The only thing more obvious than
that is the way in which human experience of the world seems to contradict such
assumptions all the time. A traditional and central tenet of Christian theology
generally and especially of the Reformed tradition, the sovereignty of God stands
on relatively shaky ground in our time. The challenges, and they are not peculiar
to our time, are several.
Theologically, the reality of great evil, identified so inescapably in the Holocaust,
undercuts claims that God is in charge and rules in justice and mercy over the
cosmos. Divine rule and divine power increasingly seem to be abstract and unreal
notions. It is not only massive human evil, however, that raises theological
questions about divine sovereignty. Much more personal and intimate experiences
evoke theological questions and revisions. Harold Kushner's best-seller Why
Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? argued that God's power is limited and
did so out of Kushner's own experience of the loss of a child.
Pastorally, of course, God's effective rule of the universe is under suspicion
in all the "why" questions that human experience raises in the face
of tragedy, evil, and suffering, large or small. Few Christians do not find
themselves at some time confronted with occasions that raise perplexing and
disturbing doubts about God's power, particularly in relation to human suffering.
That means we continually face both a theological responsibility and a pastoral
one: We need to find a more adequate understanding of God's power than those
that have been around but have failed or foundered on the rocks of human experience
and theological analysis, and we need to discover means of communicating such
an understanding in ways that enable Christians to comprehend, that is, to understand
and to overcome, the darkness that suffering and evil inevitably bring down
upon us.
Furthermore, a different kind of challenge to God's sovereignty has arisen in
our time. One might characterize it as a resistance to notions of power, control,
and rule over others, to hierarchical relationships in general
|
2 - Hallelujah! The Lord God Omnipotent Reigns |
and thus to their manifestation in divine-human relationships
in particular. Several things seem to have evoked this resistance. A major factor,
of course, is the oppressive domination experienced by individuals, nations,
communities, and races that have lived under some controlling power. Power is
not simply assumed to be an oppressive weapon. The heavy hand has in fact been
felt over and over again when some have been under the control 'of others. The
very image of ruler is laden with negative connotations in the face of the history
of tyrannical leaders, monarchical or otherwise. Feminist theology has made
this point vigorously and challenged theological positions and systems that
focus on divine power and sovereignty and slide lightly over the fact that,
as Catherine Keller wrote in these pages, "the abuse of power ... can be
seen at every level of the social orders dominating the planet" (July,
1995). The latest book in feminist theology to arrive on our review shelves
titles its chapter on God "By Whose Power? The Problem of Divine Authority
for Feminist Prayer" (M. Procter-Smith, Praying with Our Eyes Open: Engendering
Feminist Liturgical Prayer).
That this rational and visceral reaction to divine sovereignty as a kind of
divine domination should be deeply felt in feminist theology is not surprising.
The Bible itself sets forth notions of husbandly rule over wives and male rule
over women and then tells us stories about such rule that curl the hair. Perpetuation
of ecclesial male domination in hierarchical modes in the church and elsewhere
simply reinforces the conviction of women that notions of sovereignty carry
with them patterns of domination that suppress fully and mutual responsibility,
opportunity, and reward. It is to be expected that out of such encounter with
human sovereignty, theologians, female and male, would seek to discover or construct
a kind of theology that reveals a God in whose nature and activity mutuality
or some other kind of relationship replaces hierarchical control of the world
and its creatures and whose imaging is appropriately set by images that are
more open, gentle, vulnerable to others, and preserving of freedom in the creation
in all its forms.
Other factors have also pressed this challenge to divine sovereignty and power
in contemporary theology and culture. The individualism that pervades our society
resists relationships in which one's freedom and control are compromised. The
desire for autonomy is as old as the Bible, but it has hardly ever been so thoroughly
exalted and made a political and cultural slogan as is the case in much of Western
society, especially in the United States. The "revolution" being talked
about these days in the halls of the U.S. Congress is at base a renewed quest
for individual autonomy and resistance to political systems that place any kind
of control over one's life, finances, decisions, and values, except on some
matters, such as abortion. Such long-standing libertarian and individualistic
forces in the ethos of our society permeate religious thinking as much as they
do the social and political realm. Acknowledgement of a power over our lives
and a power in our lives that is not ours to control-of course it has always
been subject to question and challenge, at least in the biblical tradition-cuts
|
3 - Hallelujah! The Lord God Omnipotent Reigns |
against the grain, and so we seek theological directions that
exclude or do not accent notions of sovereignty that might impinge on the world
and on our particular lives.
Alongside such cultural and social factors-but not separate from them-there
is within many of us a desire for a softer-edged God, "a kinder, gentler"'
deity, to use a recent presidential expression. The many depictions of the serene
Jesus in popular Christian art confirm the preference for a "Lord"
who will not dominate us. Positive responses to the use of maternal imagery
for the divine are not simply due to the reclaiming of the feminine. They are
seen as preferable to the aura of controlling power that is so often associated
with paternal imagery. So also, the biblical image of the supporting arm grabs
us while the ruling arm of the Lord connotes domination and subjugation (Isa.
40:10-11; cf. Deut. 1:30-31).
Finally, in behalf of this challenge to an image of divine sovereignty that
focuses upon ruling and controlling power are the many indications from the
Scriptures themselves that the ruling power of the God of the Bible is not solely
to be defined by the most common perceptions of kings and rulers. Thorny crowns
are as oxymoronic theologically as they are absent from the palaces of all human
rulers, and they suggest, at least the only one I know of, a radically different
kind of ruling power. Vulnerability may be the most popular new attribute of
God, but it is in fact as old as Scripture, if vulnerability involves the pathos
of God, the openness of the divine decision to human intercession, and the execution
of God's anointed.
What then belongs to the ongoing enterprise of discovering and constructing
what it means that God rules? Two or three things are fairly obvious. One is
the need for continuing attention to the nature of power, its various manifestations,
and especially its relation to powerlessness. For one of the things that Christian
faith maintains is that power and powerlessness are peculiarly joined together
in the Godhead. So, Paul hears a word from the Lord, "My grace is sufficient
for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," and says himself to
the Corinthian Christians that Christ "was crucified in weakness, but lives
by the power of God" (2 Cor. 12:9; 13:4). One of the meanings of the social
character of God as manifest in the Trinity is the interaction of power and
powerlessness in the nature and work of God. That interaction, so often manifest
in the Scriptures, tells against simplistic notions of power and domination
as the nature of divine sovereignty.
So also, reflection on the nature of power and particularly divine power needs
to discern and work out its relational character. As James Luther Adams often
noted in his various essays on divine and human power, power involves both the
expression of God's law and love and the exercise of human freedom in response
to that law and love. One of the contributions of feminist theology is to press
a relational notion of power rather than a unitary or monistic understanding.
Both the social character of God and the reality of the world as creation invite
a notion of power and sovereignty as a complex nexus of interdependence and
mutual dependencies.
|
4 - Hallelujah! The Lord God Omnipotent Reigns |
The other large item on the agenda is the continued wrestling
with-not dismissal of-the images of God in Scripture. The rejection of monarchical,
judicial, and military metaphors in the depiction of deity in Scripture happens
all too often without attention to their complexity. For example, it is rarely
recognized, theologically at least, that one of the dominant royal images of
Scripture is that of the shepherd. Indeed, the conjoining of the pastoral, royal,
military, and maternal in a single complex of images in the text from Isaiah
40 mentioned above is an important clue to the biblical depiction of divine
rule. The images speak in various ways about the fact of creation's s standing
under a divine governance and about the character of that governance. That God's
rule can be both powerful and tender is regularly a claim of the biblical text.
That God's rule can and will be just and merciful is also a claim of Scripture
in direct statement and by its images for the divine rule. So also, the biblical
texts know an encounter with the rule of God that is inscrutable in its outworkings
(thus Job) and as painful for God as it ever has been for humankind (visit Golgotha
on the way to Auschwitz and Dachau).
In the essays that follow, these and other matters are taken up by persons for
whom the issues of divine sovereignty are important both theologically and personally.
Read them on the way to worship. That is the only real check we have on these
matters-at least until we finally bow before the throne. And remember that the
early Christians went to their deaths out of the conviction that Jesus, is Lord.
They thought that was good news. It still is.
-Patrick D. Miller