The God I Don’t Understand
Christopher Wright is a gifted writer. His book Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament, which I read maybe two years ago, gave me a glimpse of the type of thinker he is. He is able to restate things that you either heard before or thought you knew from a new angle and often with fresh insights. His works on Old Testament ethics, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, and mission, The Mission of God, are on my bookshelf and I always feel guilty that I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. Many people have sung high praises of The Mission of God as an unparalleled work on a biblical theology of mission (one that takes seriously what the OT has to say about it). I also enjoy listening to Wright’s preaching at All Souls which is available for free.
It was then, with surprise and delight, that I heard that he wrote a book entitled The God I don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (there is a site dedicated to this book here). I immediately started asking questions like: what is it about God that Wright doesn’t understand? Are his tough questions of faith the same ones I have? Will he point things out that will create more tough questions for me?
The book answered these questions, specially the first one. But to get a sense of the tone of the book, it is helpful to see what is Wright’s goal in writing it.
Those who read this blog know how much I like Ecclesiastes, and I was delighted to see Wright using it to summarize his intention (it is only fitting that Qohelet would have a say in a book called The God I don’t Understand):
When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the labor that is done on earth-people getting no sleep day or night-then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. People toil to search it out, but no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it. (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17, emphasis of the author)
“Even those who claim to have final answers to the deep problems of life on the earth God created are living in some degree of delusion. They don’t really know what they claim to know. My hope is that this book will share some of the honesty and realism of Ecclesiastes while being able to affirm wider dimensions of God’s action and revelation that were not available to the author in his day” (17).
This basically captures the spirit of the book. But here we need to bear in mind that when Wright talks about the God he doesn’t understand, he has several “non-understandings” in mind [p.17-19, emphases in the original]:
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1) There are things he doesn’t understand about God that leave him angry or grieved, because they were, or still are, horrible and inexplicable.
2) There are things he doesn’t understand about God that leave him morally disturbed. Some of these are things that happen in the Bible itself, and especially in the Old Testament. 3) There are things he doesn’t understand about God because they are so puzzling. Why did God say and do things in the Bible that have then been so misunderstood in later generations? 4) There are things he doesn’t understand about God but they flood him with gratitude because he couldn’t live without the reality of their truth, accepted by faith. The supreme example is, of course, the cross itself. 5) There are things he doesn’t understand about God but they fill him with hope in the midst of the depressing destruction of the earth and its inhabitants. |
These are the different aspects of why he doesn’t understand God that he attempts to cover in the book. This is done in four parts: 1) What about Evil and Suffering, 2) What about the Canaanites? 3) What about the Cross, and 4) What about the End of the World. My goal in this post is to say a few things about the book as a whole.
Throughout the book, Wright does what Qohelet does – he tears down and builds up. In each part, Wright not only asks questions or shares his struggles to understand God (as outlined above), he also deconstructs myths or misunderstandings in each area and believes that, although we may not ultimately understand everything, there are biblical ways to think about them. Let me show you in broad strokes how he does some tearing down and building up in his chapter on the cross.
First of all, I thought that every part would deal essentially with a “problem.” “Evil and suffering” and “the Canaanites” were quite obvious problems and Wright spent some time explaining why that was the case. However, when it came to the cross, I did not really feel that it was so much a “problem” as a mystery. So, although it is impossible for us to comprehend all aspects of God’s accomplishment through the cross, there are ways to think about it. So Wright begins with a response to the debates about the atonement (specially Steve Chalke’s book The Atonement Debate which I haven’t read), clears up some misunderstandings about what happened at the cross, and shows that the story of “Old Testament Israel” is the right background for understanding it. Although Wright’s discussion of the atonement debates and common misconceptions was very helpful (the tearing-down part), his outlining of Israel’s history gives us the framework within which to think about the cross biblically (the building-up part). And so throughout the book.
So even if you take issue with his critique of the way these questions are normally answered or debated, he spends more time building up ways of thinking biblically through these issues than just asking questions and hanging you out to dry. So, in this sense, the book is wonderfully imbalanced. This is more of a building-up book.
For a book entitled “The God I don’t Understand,” it felt like Wright understood God a lot more than the title seems to imply. He asked questions, acknowledged the difficulties, refused to give simple answers and then spent most of his time saying that the Bible is not silent about everything and that God, in His wisdom, gave us what we need. This is a book written by someone who has spent many years dealing with Scripture and working in the ministry. Perhaps this is the type of book that you write after spending a lot of time asking “other” types questions and living a life of trust and hope.
Who knows one day I will write my own “The God I don’t Understand” book. My prayer is that, like Wright’s, it will be one that builds up and stands as a witness of a life lived in trust. Trust that God certainly knows the answers even when I don’t.
Update: The writers at Koinonia (Zondervan’s blog) will be blogging through The God I Don’t Understand. Every post will feature video introduction by Chris Wright.
