The Sovereign Love of God In a Messy World – Brad Jersak

Question:

In the past, you’ve addressed the problem of evil with what you referred to as a “theology of consent.” The idea was that God does not force goodness on us but invites us to participate in good. Essentially, this answers the classic question of the problem of evil in saying that God is love, but God is not all-powerful in some unrestricted sense of “might makes right.”

Where I am looking for further development is how we are to understand God’s sovereignty … or to put it differently, how we can completely trust in God/love. Looking at Jesus as a model, it seems that Jesus completely trusts in God and calls us to do so as well.

Response:

Yes, it seems like we’re tracking. I’d like to fill this out further for other readers since the question of sovereignty has been recurring more frequently in my world recently.

First, you remember correctly that I have referred to a “theology of consent,” but I should clarify that the phrase is shorthand for “consent and participation.” I’m glad you noticed that second part because participation (ours and God’s) is what distinguishes my model from Deism.

Second, I would note that aspects of my work on consent overlap nicely with Thomas Jay Oord’s sense that since God is love, God’s participates in the world, not through divine control or coercion but in dynamic, responsive relationship with humanity. So far, so good.

On the other hand, I’m not an Open Theologian but came to some similar conclusions through Simone Weil’s engagement with Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Timaeus (47e–48a), and the Pythagoreans, especially in her classic, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks). In her interpretation of the Greeks, Weil establishes a cosmology in which the Nous orders the cosmos by “persuading necessity” rather than overpowering it by force.

Weil famously paraphrases Plato’s Timaeus as:

« L’intelligence gouverne par la sage persuasion de l’amour » “Mind rules by the wise persuasion of love,”

where “Mind” is referring to the Platonic Nous—the cosmic principle that orders chaos toward beauty and goodness. In this sense, the Nous is very closely aligned with the Johannine Logos (Word) or divine Sophia (Wisdom). And the divine Nous corresponds to the nous in individuals, which is not the rational mind but rather, the faculty of the soul (or eyes of the heart) that turns (metanoia) to the Light, apprehends the Good through attention, consent to reality, and openness to the Good.

For Weil, this model is also deeply Christian, a kenotic theology of the Cross that involves both divine and human consent and participation. But let’s now be explicit: how does sovereignty or providence work? And here, credit to my friend Ernie Tai who has helped me think this through afresh:

1. The nature of God is Love plus nothing. There is no providence or sovereignty that stands as some attribute independent of love. Like all attributes of God (what we attribute to God), sovereignty is defined by, limited to, and filled out by divine Love. God is sovereign Love.

2. The word sovereignty relates to sovereigns who rule or reign. Sovereignty refers to how God governs the cosmos. And as Weil says, God reigns by Love—by the wise persuasion of love—and not by force or coercion, or in Oord’s words, “the uncontrolling love of God.”

3. But Ernie also reminded me that even before (logically, not temporally) divine-human consent (to human freedom and natural law) and before divine-human participation (seen most clearly at the Cross), we should begin by identifying God’s sovereign Love or providential care in the context of God as Creator.

Here, we mean far more than God’s great big bang creation event in aeons past. Rather, to be Creator means as the One who upholds all things and all people at all times. This is what the ancients referred to as “the ground of being” or “ground of existence,” the en arche Foundation (Genesis 1:1, John 1:1) that under-girds the cosmos, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” The Founder or Logos holds all things together by love—all things, including the sun and rain, the droughts and floods, the just and the unjust, the world’s divine Lover in joy and sorrow, sickness and health—always with us, never abandoning us. And as the Christ, unites eternity and time, spirit and matter, permeating the Whole as ever-present, living Love.

4. But this is precisely where the problem of evil still haunts us… It all sounds great, but then our own lived Reality hits us with the tragic. How can we say that God is ever-faithful, unfailing Love in the face of human affliction or cosmic devastation? And that is where theodicies fall and fail. They seek to rationalize the goodness of God and the affliction of humanity in ways that end up calling evil good or good evil.

Weil won’t stand for it. She sees divine goodness and human affliction as a real, soul-tearing, astonishing contradiction that cannot be answered with syllogisms. BUT…

a. The contradiction, once we stop evading it, acts like pincers that arrest us and throw us into an altered state of attentive, contemplative waiting.

b. In that paralysis of attentive waiting (and lament), the eyes of the nous may by grace behold the contradiction of these opposites as they intersect in the Crucified One. Ah, there it is: divine beauty, human affliction, one person.

c. Jesus Christ is thus revealed as the living-dying metaxis who embodies self-giving surrender to natural law (death by crucifixion), human agency (including murder), and above that, divine will (complete trust in God’s Love). At the Cross, Christ reveals God’s divine kenarchy (rule by kenotic love, a la Roger Mitchell)—the restoration of all things and all people through the slow, messy uncontrolling, but irrepressible movement of kenotic Love.

d. It is into this kenotic love that Christ calls us as participants through surrender/trust to divine care—as we become co-authors of history in the kenarchy of God.

5. Contra Calvin, who wrote, “God governs every evil; nay, he commands it,” Weil and Tai see that God’s governance of kenotic Love upholds human agency and natural law (along with their shadow sides) as necessary pre-conditions to love and life, refusing to violate these secondary causes through coercive force, but loving them forward toward restoration as Christ submits to them himself in the Incarnation.

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