I must first apologize for my last post. When I reread some of my posts, with a different mood or frame of reference, they appear to me as whiny and negative.

Story Time

When I was in college, I had a good friend named Owen. He was a terrific guy. He was tall, with long light hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He was soft spoken and kind. I think he was an environmental science major. He had a cute, but tiny (5’2″) fiancée named Terri. Some of the people who visit this blog knew him.

One day, I heard that Owen was going off the rails. He was attending a Bible study led by a Calvinist preacher, and as a result, he stopped going to class and taking care of himself. That didn’t make sense to me, so I went over to his dorm room to have a talk with him.

I will never forget that conversation. Owen was lying on the top bunk in his dorm, me sitting at his desk. “Since God controls everything,” he said, “even the hairs on our head, every action, and each thought {theological determinism}, therefore, any action we try to take, reading, studying, going to class, even showering, and eating, is a rebellion against God’s control.”

I tried to point out the nonsensical nature of what he was saying, calling it hyper-Calvinism. He, correctly, pointed out that he wasn’t saying anything new, but trying to live consistently with what we all claimed to believe.

That was the last conversation I had with Owen. In a couple of weeks, he went home to Nashville for Christmas break and jumped in front of a train. We were all devastated. I couldn’t imagine the anger of his parents and fiancée at how he got so messed up within the auspices of our Christian group.

God, The Micro-manager or Not?

We are left with two possible conclusions. The first, A, is an omnipotent God who gives us tragedies to punish us, or test and teach us. When I lived in Egypt, I observed that the Coptic Christians seemed to believe that all tragedies or bad luck were punishments from God. We cannot fight against cancer, depression, floods, and forest fires without fighting against God.

The second possibility, B, is that an omnipotent God created an imperfect world of cause and effect following natural laws, where there really is good and bad luck. One of the primary tenets of Christianity is that the world is imperfect so that concept is not new.

I’m not considering my previous option (1) that God is finite, evil, or makes mistakes, because it is an untenable position. The Greeks and Romans wrestled with gods who were not omnipotent. Gods who fought among themselves and who were victims of fate, good luck, and bad luck. This left their gods as no more than Marvel superheroes and villains.

If we lived consistently with A above, we would have to live like my dear friend Owen, which is absurd and another untenable position. But why is this the most popular view among Christians? It is a view that cannot be lived consistently, so we live in the margins of that world, one foot in God controls everything, and one foot believing in chaos. That makes us swear when another car crashes into ours or we stub our toe.

The Problem of Common Miracles

I’ve written about miracles before, and I will again, so let me just say, without making this too long, if you falsely believe that God is doing miracles all around you, then it is a slap in the face when a tragedy comes and God seems silent. This disillusionment causes so many people to leave Christianity for good, and it almost did me.

“I don’t understand it,” says a woman. “God did so many miracles in my life, the image of Mary on my toast, running into Debby at the market, finding me a parking place at the mall, but now that I have metastatic breast cancer, God seems absent.”

Put a pin in this spot, too, and I will come back and discuss miracles in detail. But in summary, I lived for 28 years in a world where we believed that miracles happened every day. This belief was essential within that world. But then one day, at a moment of profound honesty, I knew we were lying about them. I vowed in 1990 that I would stop lying, even “lying for Jesus.”

This will likely get me in trouble again, but in my life, I’ve never witnessed a supernatural event. But that’s okay because I don’t require God to do miracles to have faith. But I do require myself to tell the truth and not embellish life events to impress my Christian friends.

With that said, the entire friggin cosmos is an incredible miracle.

When I was diagnosed with cancer, and so much of it seemed unfair, I had no questions about God. I had worked this out in the 1990s, so I was good. God is omnipotent. God is far bigger than I ever imagined as an evangelical. Then, I saw God as the Bronze Age God of the Old Testament. Now, I see God as the designer of a cosmos that, if you traveled 670,616,629 MPH from Earth, it would take you 13.7 billion years to reach what we think is the edge. That physics, including Quantum Mechanics and the Standard Model of the subatomic world, is far more complex than I knew before. Incredible mystery. That biological life itself is complex and beautiful, more so than I ever knew before. Yet, I do not require this God to be a micro manager of my life, to be big enough.

I observed Jesus weeping at the grave of his friend, even though he could and did raise him from the dead. This gives me the authority to know, we cannot only mourn at tragedies, we scream, cry, rip our clothes off, fall to the ground, and eat the dirt. Mourning is an act of worship because it agrees with God that the tragedy is real and sucks. I do not require God to do supernatural miracles to cure my cancer to know he loves me. This is a mystery, and I have to let it go.

If supernatural miracles do happen, just like in Biblical times, they are rare but clear. For reasons that I do not understand, and which is part of the mystery of God, nature in all its grandeur makes mistakes. I had one gene mutate and fold a protein (think origami here, not just s simple fold) the wrong way. This fallen world is incredible, but it is also dangerous with real consequences.

I rest my case,

Respectfully, Mike