It is precisely in face of death that God's power hidden in the world is revealed. Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead. But man may in any case rely on this God who can practically be defined as a God of the living and not of the dead, he may absolutely trust in his superior power even in the face of inevitable death, may approach his own death with confidence. The Creator and Conserver of the universe and of man can be trusted, even at death and as we are dying, beyond the limits of all that has hitherto been experienced, to have still one more word to say; to have the last word as well as the first. Toward this God the only reasonable and realistic attitude is trust and faith. This passing from death to God cannot be verified empirically or rational. It is not to be expected,not to be proved, but to be hoped for in faith. What is impossible for man is only made possible by God. Anyone who seriously believes in the living God believes therefore also in the raising of the dead to life in God's power which is proved at death. As Jesus retorted to the doubting Sadducees; "You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God."
The Christian faith in the risen Jesus is meaningful only as faith in God the Creator and Conserver of life. But, on the other hand, the Christian faith in God the Creator is decisively characterized by the fact that he raised Jesus from the dead. "He also raised Jesus from the dead," becomes practically the designation of the Christian God.
RMJ, yesterday in a piece about an outrageous and disgusting claim about God and the coronoavirus pandemic as "pruning the Church" "cutting off branches that aren't bearing fruit," a statement made in the guise of Christianity, gave something out of his own experience. Up front, I'll say that given what was said, in any such discussion, it is exactly the right thing to bring up.
Another time, earlier than that, actually, I was asked to do a funeral for an infant, because the family had no church. I met the mother at the funeral home and she demanded I explain why God had taken her child. Didn't God do everything for a reason? Wasn't there a purpose? What kind of purpose was this? First, I don't think everything happens as a result of God's direct intervention, nor do I think every moment of our lives has a purpose. Otherwise we are just pawns in some inscrutable (and cruel) cosmic game. But would I offer her a platitude or two about the sparrows and maybe throw in "Jesus loves the little children"?
Which made me very glad that I wasn't a minister or priest or rabbi, who would be asked to explain something as terrible as why infants die, why they suffer,why terrible things happen to them and to their mothers and fathers, and I'll add, uncles and aunts and grandparents. I couldn't answer such a question, I doubt anyone can answer such a question for anyone. If there is to be an answer to such a question that would be of any good to the person asking, it would have to be something that they had to decide for themselves and I would never presume to tell someone that their answer about their own pain, their own loss, the terrible witness of the pain and death of a loved one, especially an innocent child was the wrong one. Such a claim to know what that answer would be would be as useless as it is outrageously presumptuous. The best that anyone can do is to present ideas such as the ones that are in this passage from Hans Kung but as someone is confronted with the pain of loss, in the full pain of such a thing is certainly not likely to be either a kind or useful time to present such ideas.
As bad and worse would certainly be to tell such a person in such pain that their child has ceased to exist, that there is no God, that a belief in an afterlife is a delusion, a cowardly refusal to accept death as final. There is certainly no answer to why children, infants suffer and die in that unevidenced claim of factual finality. I have heard of but never have witnessed bereaved people having that said to them, especially, in one case, a child told that their beloved grandmother didn't exist anymore and that her body was just going to decay and that was the end of it.
The only way I can think of for any comfort to be had by a grieving mother or father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, etc. would be for them to come to an answer that they could accept and there is no guarantee that they will ever find it. Someone telling them isn't going to do it. "Man cannot work out for himself the resurrection from the dead." Nor can we work out life after death or why we die, why we must. We certainly can't explain to a grieving mother why her infant died, how God would explain why to her. We can't tell her that she has no right to expect an answer though we certainly can't give one to her. I would not tell her that it's my experience that only after someone I've loved has died that I came to feel how much I loved them. That took years to happen. It would probably be meaningless to someone who hadn't gone through it.
On something like that, the best answer I've worked out for myself is that you have to die out of your body in order to surpass it and its limits just as in love you have to give up your self-centered habits of thought and feeling, your egocentricity in order to expand past those limits. An ego-centered two-year-old has to expand past that in order to become even a tolerable seven-year-old, not to mention a decent adult. As we see in English language political life, that's hardly guaranteed to happen.
That phenomenon, which is certainly encouraged by believing that God wants us to love others as we love ourselves, seems to me to be a real life example that leads to my belief in God. Our own experience is certainly something that should inform our belief, it inevitably must, personally as well as socially. That's my answer, for now. I don't know if it will be the answer I find believable as I am dying or if another of my nieces or nephews or brothers or sisters or beloved cousins or friends die. I would not be surprised that when confronted with that level of fear or pain that I weaken, though I am far more confident in that than I am in any materialistic framing which is so narrow as to negate the possibility that our experience is meaningful.
There is certainly a lot about this in Hans Kung's On Being A Christian , maybe I should give some of that in the coming days. Lots of us are going to be asking those questions in this pandemic.
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