Innocence of God
Udo
Middelmann
Reviewed by
Lorna Koskela
"Do
you
think God lets these things [disasters and disappointments] happen to
teach us
something?" asked one of Rev Songbird’s friends, after her baby
strangled on its own umbilical cord.
Sigh.
How on earth
does
one even begin to answer that? Our heart naturally goes out to friends,
neighbours and even those we do not know in the event of personal
tragedy, but
the real question for us remains: how do we as Christians reconcile
suffering
with our understanding of God?
I once heard an
excellent sermon which tackled the question “Did God create AIDS or
didn’t He?”
and while that particular topic is not actually addressed in Udo
Middelmann’s
new book The
Innocence of God, the role of God in
our lives is
the focus.
The style used
in
the book is rather scholarly– and consequently it is not particularly
easy to
read. This was particularly frustrating because Middelmann uses snappy
headings
such as “God’s
Choice: It Ain’t What You Think It Is (Or No God
Behind This
Messy Life)”
(p 67) – as an aside what an irritating use of
punctuation! –
but then goes on to discuss topics in ways that are not always easy to
understand and sometimes downright confusing. In particular he seems to
get
bogged down in the long-standing theological debate about
pre-destination and
determination and has lengthy references to Calvinism, which – to be
perfectly
honest – are of little immediate value to “the barber up the road” we
met in
the introduction.
This is not a
book
that Christians can keep in their back-pocket and pull out to offer
platitudes
when they meet people who are in pain. This book is a theological
discourse and
quite frankly is not for the feint-hearted.
That said, I
absolutely love it that Middelmann uses Scripture to paint a picture of
God
that allows each of us to make our own choices –and bear the
responsibility of
the choices we do make – and yet who remains “engaged in
[our]redemption” (p
73) and calls on us to stop “simply accept[ing] real life troubles and
calling
on God to justify them” (p11) and instead encourages us to work with
God
against them.
Middelmann’s
writing is an apologetic work which underlines the main message of the
Bible:
that God has a plan for our lives –a
good plan – but there is no room for sin, for evil, in it. If we
choose
to go that route– then we will pay the price! He shows that evil and
suffering
are the results of our choice to sin and emphasizes that our worldview
is
important because what we believe about ourselves, about mankind, time
and work
each have very public results. As I wrote recently – do people know we
are
Christians by our love – or not?
My favourite
chapter in The
Innocence of God is entitled “Real
Life verses Spiritual
Escape”. In it – among other things – Middelmann writes: “Paul
urged the believers to be more alert,
critical and discerning of their culture” and reminds us that God is
innocent
of what people have done or continue to do every day but that we – you
and I –
have an awakened independence and responsibility to create history,
rather than
to suffer as a part of it. (p 102)
This work is a
must
for students of theology, but it is also really relevant to all of us –
because
we do live in a broken world, where disasters happen, evil is committed
and
people do suffer. The author is well aware that foreign aid and relief
work do
not always work – and does not try to dodge the bullet that there is
real
injustice – poverty in particular - in the world. Nonetheless he
portrays a God
who is innocent of the broken, unjust and absurd world in which we
live.