The guy puts up seemingly 30 posts a day on a huge variety of topics. There are all kinds of reasons for tuning him out or just not bothering. And then Andrew Sullivan posts something like this…
I have never found the theodicy argument against faith convincing. My own faith teaches me that suffering is part of a fallen creation that lives and dies – how could it not be? But it also teaches me that suffering in itself can be a means of letting go to God, of allowing Him to take over, of recognizing one’s own mortality and limits. That to me is not some kind of crutch. It is simply the paradox of the cross.
Or in a follow-up, like this…
My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else…That’s why I do not experience faith as some kind of rational choice or as some kind of irrational leap. I experience it merely as a condition of being human.
The man has a firm grasp of what Lutherans would call living under the law and the need for the gospel. But maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising. Said in the best of ways – “only the sick need a doctor.” Would that God would send His church a crop of ministers with that deep understanding and turn my own heart toward that cross.
