The Gospel is Simple; Theology is not.

Anyone can read the gospel, believe and be saved.  What then?  Besides entering into a more appropriate relationship with God, any such person would thus have a worldview they need to understand enough to explain.  Such a person would also have to figure out where to go and what to do.  Oh, and did I forget to mention church? Yeah, which church should one go to?  The fact that controversy surrounds the gospel and all of scripture makes the concept of scripture, as revelation, somewhat oxymoronic.  What is "revealed" is a mystery.  A great deal has to be figured out like a Sudoku puzzle.  We're given a few constants and a lot of variables to manipulate in search of clear, uncontroversial solutions.  Some of the main or more important constants are the goodness of God, the reality of sin and evil, the canon of scripture, the history of Israel from Abraham to Moses to Christ, the law and the gospel, the eternality of the soul, and the final judgment.  The challenge is to piece those constants together with variables or possible answers to the questions any theology must answer: Why is our world not utopian now? Why are we capable of sin?  Why does God tolerate our existence? And why will some people be forgiven while others will not?  And what do I do now?

Ok. Ready for some theology?  Where should we start?  Perhaps we should start where scripture starts--in the beginning.  Now before we struggle with the greatest difficulty to be found in paradise--the presence of a malevolent being, we should be clear about our assumptions. First, paradise wouldn't be paradise or utopia wouldn't be utopia if mischievous people were allowed to run around creating trouble. So while something went wrong insofar as “evil was found in” Satan (Ez. 28:15), human beings who acted like Cain only made the problem worse.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  Already we’re talking as if Cain was the first bad guy.  What about Adam and Eve?  How well do we understand what they were guilty of or whether they would have been guilty of anything if not for Satan?  I said there’s mystery didn’t I?

Continuing then with our assumptions, we also assume God loved Adam and Eve so much that he decided to save them from Satan. Saving, of course, is not an easy thing to do.  Special rules have to be followed when part of the saving that has to be done is from one's ignorance and moral fallibility. The idea, if you are God, is to return one's creatures to a state of innocence and harmony with oneself--not simply overlook their ignorance and moral failures.  This line of reasoning brings us to an important proposition: that forgiveness has to be justified by a righteous God. A God who obliges his creatures to be innocent cannot simply chose NOT to enforce the prescribed punishment of death for guilt without making himself a liar. So, after Adam and Eve became guilty, they died. 

Now we know God has a plan.  He has planned to resurrect them and return them to immortality. And there is nothing evil about that.  God doesn't have to leave them dead.  Giving them back their lives is not really overlooking their guilt.  When criminals serve their sentences, they are freed.  Likewise, Adam and Eve have died and will get resurrected. Unfortunately, this is where the logic of scripture starts to get convoluted.

Faith that saves, according to the gospels, is a kind of trust in the truth of the proposition that Christ died for our sins--that God justifies forgiving us by suffering himself the punishment we deserve.  This is confusing, I know. Didn't we just establish that Adam and Eve weren't forgiven at all? Like criminals who did their time, they suffered the penalty of sin and died. Didn't we just argue that God can exercise his prerogative to restore them to life without violating any law?  

While that is what we said, we didn't explicitly mention that God's plan involves their children--billions of descendants.  We have to recall the fact that Adam and Eve didn't just die immediately.  And, in fact, they still haven't been resurrected.  They were actually allowed to live for quite a long while--long enough to reproduce, to raise children, to preside over the beginning and establishment of a society and of history itself. But these things we call society and history are not things that we human beings have managed very well. We are all guilty of inexcusable ignorance and moral failings.  No one has lived and behaved entirely as they should which was already stated in propositions one and two in my WHY blog. Adam and Eve, and everybody else since, need forgiveness for failing to sufficiently love God and each other over the course of their lives such that society and history would be utopian.  

You’ll remember I said law and gospel are among the constants.  Now we have to get into law. But I’m tired and am going to bed.  Our solution to all the world’s problems will just have to wait until I get more sleep.  For that matter, I’m going to have some fun solving more Sudoku puzzles before I finish part II and post that. Somehow that’s beginning to seem easier.