Saturday, June 11, 2005

Is God Out Of The Loop?

From Annie Dillard's For The Time Being . . .

God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or fiddling with chromosomes, than he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men - or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome - than he is pitching lightning bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insurers call "acts of God."

Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?

. . . Nature works out its complexities. God suffers the world's necessities along with us, and suffers our turning away, and joins us in exile. Christians might add that Christ hangs, as it were, on the cross forever, always incarnate, and always nailed.


I got nothin' to add . . .

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