First… Iwand has written that “justification by faith” is first God's being justified to us; that is, God's actions in judging and condemning, creating and destroying, bringing weal and making woe are recognized by the “faithful” as the consequence of having a God. God thus “hides” behind these sorts of omnipotencies in order that he would be revealed and found where he desires it: in the Son, Jesus Christ.

Second… The statement: “God is love,” is an assertion made by faith against all the evidence to the contrary.

Third… The difference between “religion” and “faith:” The religious will suffer in order that they might do God's will and be “righteous;” the faithful will suffer God's will to be done upon them whether they are “righteous” or not.

Of all the questions in theology, the question of aseity (the “justice” of God) is one of the most troubling to people. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Because the question is usually preceded by this statement: “If God is both all loving and all powerful, why…?” theologians and philosophers have mostly fallen into two camps regarding the answer to this question.

The first camp holds fast to “God is love,” but relaxes the insistence on “all powerful.” Rabbi Kushner in his best seller on the topic camped here. Most of what we would currently call “liberal and/or progressive” sorts are somewhere in this camp.

The other camp “all powerful, but not all loving,” can be found all over as well; witness the latest pronouncement from Pat Robertson regarding Haiti's plight being caused by a historical “pact with the devil.”

Both camps share the same problem: works righteousness. Behavior determines outcome. For the “loving” camp God can save (or has saved) those who love, but those who don't love belong to the evil one and are condemned out of God's reach. For the “all powerful” camp, God saves the righteous to himself but condemns the unrighteous to the evil one.

In contrast to both those positions, faith in Christ enables the “faithful” (not the religious) to exist within this paradox: “The Absolute Necessity of God AND The Total Responsibility of Humanity.” This is the most fundamental of the Lutheran paradoxes.

To expand on it a bit: To say that there is a God must–by very definition–mean that this God, in order to be God, is absolutely necessary in the operation of every facet of creation, i.e. nothing happens without God “willing” it to happen. This pole of the paradox is the Theo-”logical” perspective.

From the other pole of the paradox–the Anthropo-”logical” perspective, things are just the opposite: Humanity–to escape the despair and angst of fatalism and/or determinism–must insist on its freedom and accept total responsibility for its choices and entirely bear the consequences of its actions. To use a quote favored by Forde: Pete Singer says, “We must believe in FREE WILL; we have no choice.”

“Logically” these two perspectives are mutually exclusive and expose the limits of human logic and reason. Therefore, it is only faith–more specifically, faith in Christ–by which the faithful can hold those propositions in paradoxical tension and, 1) suffer God's will to be done upon them; 2) assert a loving God against all contrary evidence; and 3) know that God is “justified” in ALL his actions.”

Thanks for calling my attention to this site “soulpancake.”

*Gentle prod*

Ray, is it fair to assume this site is dead? I just watched a video about how the internet is where religion goes to die – basically about how a combination of open discourse and the exposure to a huge variety of other religions which are equally (in)valid make the internet very hostile to ideas that only survive in environments where constant reinforcement compensates for the problems of holding faith-based belief. Basically, the internet increases cognitive dissonance in religious people. Anyhow, the bit about the internet being a place for religious ideas to go to die reminded me of this site… not a real positive association.