Without Guarantee: in search of a vulnerable God

Without Guarantee:

in search of a vulnerable God

Bob Purdy

Copyright 2013 by R. Robert (Bob) Purdy All rights reserved.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Purdy, Bob (Reginald Robert), 1937-, author

          Without guarantee : in search of a vulnerable God / Bob Purdy.

Includes bibliographical references.

Electronic monograph.

ISBN 978-0-9920625-0-7 (epub).--ISBN 978-0-9920625-4-5 (mobi).--

ISBN 978-0-9920625-1-4 (pdf).--ISBN 978-0-9920625-3-8 (pdb).--

ISBN 978-0-9920625-7-6 (html)

1. God--Love.  I. Title.

BT140.P87 2013                           231'.6                        C2013-905705-6

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New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Quotations from the Psalms are excerpted from the Book of Alternative Services, copyright 1985 by the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada. Published by the Anglican Book Centre. Used by permission.

The haiku on front cover and Dedication page, and at the beginning of chapter four and five are by Jana Purdy, PMHNP, Haikus For You, an eBook, http://www.bookemon.com

Copyright 2012. Used by permission of the author.

eBook published in Canada by R. Robert (Bob) Purdy

4850 Son Ranch Rd. Grand Forks BC V0H 1H5

http://www.vulnerablegod.com

Print edition also available through this website

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Dedication:

To all who dare to search for God


beyond the constraints

of a literalistic or dogmatic perspective.

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A haiku on Love:

Love is to boldly

commit without guarantee

to this life itself

Haiku written by Jana Purdy (see copyright page for info)

inspired by the writing of Erich Fromm.

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Without Guarantee: in search of a vulnerable God

Table of Contents

Foreword by Donald Grayston, PhD

Introduction by the author

A Conversation … before each chapter

chapter 1. Using God-language


• The poetry of devotion and hyperbole of the heart

chapter 2. Biblical metaphors of divine love


• Chesed: ‘Steadfast Love’, love you can totally count on.


• Mercy: Embraced in a life-giving womb of love


• Compassion: Love that shares another’s pain and leads to action


• Agapé: Godly love that gives self for others

chapter 3. But what about judgment and damnation?

• Hell is an obscenity, a crime against divinity

chapter 4. In search of a vulnerable God


• To commit without guarantee to this life itself

chapter 5. The strength of vulnerable love


• Love has profound strength and vulnerability

chapter 6. Praying to a vulnerable God


• Can vulnerable love help release healing?

chapter 7. The vulnerability of spiritual authority

• Spiritual authority: external or internal?

chapter 8. The vulnerability of God in creation


• Does God ‘play dice’ with creation?

chapter 9. The dark side of evolution

• God in charge, or creation ‘without guarantee’?

chapter 10. The vulnerability of the God of justice


• Who is ultimately responsible for justice?

chapter 11. O God, come your longing!

• Is God longing for us to become a race of lovers?

chapter 12. Jesus, Spirit-filled human being

• In love with God and embraced by Spirit

chapter 13. Jesus, vulnerable Lord and Saviour


• A servant-lover filled with the servant-God

chapter 14. Implications for Church and World

• Where might all this take us?

Bibliography

About the author

Book availability

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Foreword – by Donald Grayston, PhD

Bob Purdy is onto something. This is a very timely book. The time indeed has come for us to reflect on the vulnerability of God.

I am writing this foreword on the evening of Palm Sunday, also called Passion Sunday. Passion: suffering, vulnerability. This morning we heard the story of the triumphant entry of the prophet Jesus into Jerusalem, and the transmutation of the supportive cries of the crowd which he heard on that day into the calls for his crucifixion five days later.

In this man Jesus we see the vulnerability of God in person. The second reading for Palm Sunday (Philippians 2:5-11) tells the story in the words of a first-generation Christian:

[Jesus,] though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

The form of God . . . the form of a slave . . . human form. God, long conceived of as Immortal, invisible, God only wise / in light inaccessible hid from our eyes (Walter Chalmers Smith, ob. 1908, in Common Praise, the hymnbook of the Anglican Church of Canada, 393), now makes himself mortal, visible, and accessible in Jesus—and thereby vulnerable, given that Jesus is human. So with the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, later called Christ, God makes the divine self vulnerable, capable of being wounded, which is what vulnerable literally means.

I see a parallel between the almightiness of God of which the liturgy has traditionally spoken and the almightiness of the medieval church in the shadow of which we still live; and a further parallel between the vulnerability of God of which Bob Purdy speaks and the vulnerability of the contemporary Christian community. I see this book as very much in the theological tradition initiated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Letters and Papers from Prison, in which out of his experience of persecution by the Nazis and his recognition of the fragility of Christian witness in the face of Nazi might, he spoke of the weakness of God, who in Jesus is forced out of the world and onto the cross. You can find a beautiful and poetic reflection on this insight in Bonhoeffer’s hymn, People draw near to God in their distress (Common Praise, 201).

Let me mention here an experience I had not long after Bob Purdy sent me the manuscript of this book. I was at a funeral in the Anglican cathedral in Victoria. The funeral was in the context of a eucharist. Early in the eucharistic prayer comes the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might. But instead of these traditional words, we heard these words: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of vulnerable love. In writing this book, then, Bob Purdy is not only recording his own convictions; he is also tapping into a current of new thinking, into a theological and spiritual shift.

This book also evokes for me some lines from a song written by one of the major spiritual teachers of our time, Leonard Cohen. In his song Anthem, we read these words, There’s a crack, a crack in everything:
That’s how the light gets in.

In this book, Bob Purdy has cracked into our traditional images of the perfect, invisible, inaccessible, invulnerable God, and in the light thereby released a fresh understanding of who and what God is—an image which was there in Jewish and Christian scripture all the time! And yes, that is how the light gets in, when something cracks: it’s also how the light gets out into a world looking for light.

In this time of the weakness of the institutional church, and the weakness of our witness as mainstream Christians, God in divine weakness stands beside us, ready to be wounded with us. Bob Purdy has written this book, to use the language of the Enneagram, from head, heart and gut: from his head, because it demonstrates careful research and thinking; from his heart, because it offers to us a new vision of a God of love; and from his gut, because it is written passionately and viscerally. I thank him for pointing us in this new/old and very creative direction, and for encouraging us to search with him for the vulnerable God whom we will certainly find in Christ and in our own vulnerable hearts and lives.

Donald Grayston is a retired priest of the Anglican diocese of New Westminster in British Columbia. Between 1989 and 2004, he taught Religious Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby/Vancouver, BC, and for the last three of those years was director of SFU's Institute for the Humanities.
His website is at http://www.donaldgrayston.ca

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Introduction by the author:

Who am I, and where have I come from, that I should write this little book?

I have been ordained as an Anglican priest for 50 years, and active in parish ministry in Western Canada for all but the last few of those years. I retired as Archdeacon of Bow Valley in the Diocese of Calgary, and since then have served part-time ministries in St. George’s, Banff, AB and St. David’s, Castlegar, BC. All in all, that is a lot of preaching and care for people.

But more importantly, what roads have led me to this writing?

First has been the context of pastoral ministry. So much beauty in this world and in human lives, so much joy and love, so much deep beauty in creation. And yet so much pain, violence, suffering, and despair. Our faith, as our lives, must come to terms with this reality. A superficial faith, like a superficial life, just does not cut the mustard. Pious clichés provide neither comfort nor vision nor life. I have struggled always in preaching, teaching and spiritual mentoring to help people face life and find hope and love which is solid and enduring.

The second road parallels the first. How do we see God in this context of the contradictions of life? There is so much pain; why does God not fix it? Why do such bad things continue to happen to ordinary, good people? Why does scripture and tradition actually blame God for much of it? Why is there such wanton destruction of life? Is God really omnipotent but uncaring? Or is the God of love deeply caring but powerless to make life more secure?

The reality of life, it seems to me, trumps either the goodness or the almighty power of God. One or the other; surely we must choose. This is the ancient theological problem of theodicy, sometimes called the problem of evil but more truly the problem of God.

The third road has been an ever-deeper embracing of the language and thought-forms of poetry and metaphor in understanding scripture and the way God lives and works in the world. I have come to believe that this is the only appropriate language of faith. Left-brained, dogmatic, clinical language is certainly useful for mechanics, chemistry and physics and similarly important endeavours, and for naming and understanding life. Indeed where would we be as a human race without that capacity for analytical, technological thinking? But where would we be also without the other cranial hemisphere, from which comes poetry, music, art, intuition and inspiration? Of one thing I am sure: to speak of the mystery of God and of divine love and purpose our spirits must be free to sing.

These three roads have led me to explore the imagery of a vulnerable God. In this book I will try to do these things:

• Explore in depth the poetry of devotion and the hyperbole of the heart while reflecting on biblical metaphors giving meaning to the statement God is Love.

• Say a forceful No! to the understanding of God as judgment, retribution, punishment, hell.

• Explore the vulnerability of love. If human love is vulnerable, is unconditional Divine Love unconditionally vulnerable? If God is vulnerable, can God also be all-powerful and omnipotent? Is there a vital difference between domination power and the persistent strength of unconditionally vulnerable love?

• Explore the vulnerability of God in relation to prayer for healing, drawing deeply from my own personal life and experience.

• Explore the nature of spiritual authority: is it external or internal?

• Explore the vulnerability of God in creation and in calling for justice, and ponder the question: Is God longing for a race of lovers?

• Share my commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour in the context of my belief in a vulnerable God.

To whom am I addressing this book? You might say I am a theologian; everyone who thinks about God is doing theology—good, bad or indifferent. But I am not, as my writing will certainly reveal, an academic theologian. My life-long vocation has been pastor and preacher. I am not speaking directly to professional theologians, although much of what I have to