I’ve been trying to post this all day, but I keep getting interrupted.
It was a good article.
I liked this idea, alluding to Romans 8:22 and the linking of the concept of redemption with regeneration:
“Birthing, which is really also the root for the word nature, (Greek:
natans, “giving birth”) is a transformative experience where suffering
is the prelude to creation, indeed struggle is the principle of creation.
Struggle is always going on, and it is this struggle in which life is
regenerated. Nature is always giving birth, regenerating, always in
travail.”
I’m all into conceptual metaphors these days. It’s my intellectual flavor of the month, so this conceptual metaphor of NATURE EQUALS WOMAN GIVING BIRTH is pretty cool to think about. When framed within the concept of childbirth, the “suffering” of natural evil comes across differently. Childbirth is bloody, sweaty, and gross, not to mention full of hard work and suffering. (for us normal women-- evidently it’s all loveliness and euphoria for the women who write natural childbirth articles in those magazines that get left in the OB’s office, but I digress.) It is interesting to me that in English, we use the verb “deliver” to speak of childbirth. Deliverance and redemption are tied together conceptually too. I would never think of pregnancy as a fallen or corrupted state, or of the suffering of contractions as a natural evil. They are accomplishing the work of birthing which is an inherently redemptive or regenerative process.
I also liked this part, because the Christian God is so personal. While design can be distant and impersonal, there is no impersonal redemption.
"God is not in a simple way the Benevolent Architect, but is
rather the Suffering Redeemer. The whole of the earthen metabolism
needs to be understood as having this character. The God met in
physics as the divine wellspring from which matter-energy bubbles
up, as the upslope epistemic force, is in biology the suffering and
resurrecting power that redeems life out of chaos. "
This passage reminded me of the recent thread on the theological reasons for accepting evolution.
“The abundant life that Jesus exemplifies and offers to his disciples
is that of a sacrificial suffering through to something higher. There
is something divine about the power to suffer through to something
higher. The Spirit of God is the genius that makes alive, that redeems
life from its evils. The cruciform creation is, in the end, deiform,
godly, just because of this element of struggle, not in spite of it. There
is a great divine yes hidden behind and within every no of crushing
nature. God, who is the lure toward rationality and sentience in the
upcurrents of the biological pyramid, is also the compassionate lure
in, with, and under all purchasing of life at the cost of sacrifice. God
rescues from suffering, but the Judeo-Christian faith never teaches
that God eschews suffering in the achievement of the divine purposes.
To the contrary, seen in the paradigm of the cross, God too
suffers, not less than God’s creatures, in order to gain for the creatures
a more abundant life.”
I also really liked the idea that election is not a state of being chosen to not suffer, but being chosen to suffer with and for God. And that even the name Israel hearkens back to Jacob wrestling with God and being injured by him.