Open Conflict, Hidden God


Dear Eugene,

How fragile we are.  How we need to consider this.  How do we consider this?

Today I was reading again Rowan Williams' "The Wound of Knowledge," and here he speaks about a Christianity that I suspect is foreign to most churchgoers, and I suspect not only in the West:

"The final control and measure and irritant in Christian speech remains the cross: the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is born out of struggle because it is born from men and women faced with the paradox of God’s purpose made flesh in a dead and condemned man. Without the cross there would be no New Testament. . . . What is at issue is that the first Christians were painfully aware that God’s chosen one and God’s chosen people had come into open and tragic conflict: that God seemed to be set against God. If God is to be seen at work here, he is indeed a strange God, a hidden God, who does not uncover his will in a straight line of development, but fully enters into a world of confusion and ambiguity and works in contradictions. . . . "

Am I still engaging in "open and tragic conflict" with God?

I am if I insist on doing away with confusion, ambiguity and contradiction, all signs and fruits of weakness and helplessness we are told we must learn to kill off as soon and as much as possible.  We don't go to school to acknowledge we are ignorant (though we should).  We don't earn our money to get more confused (though we do).  We don't plan for a vacation to have our expectation of comfort contradicted (though we propose we are venturing into the exotic, strange, and unknown).  We don't get married to learn no one is always true (or, more like, everyone is almost always untrue).

Yes, the cross is the "final irritant" on which a most irritating man hanged.  No one needs to put on such a sordid display just to make a point.  We need some simple logic and easy theology to explain this one away.

Yours, Alex

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