The tragedy in Moore, Oklahoma seems distant from my balcony; were it not by virtue of my sojourn in Texas and the consequential friendships that connect me to Oklahoma City and Moore, I would mourn like most of the rest of Americans who have never set foot in the state. I tweeted my friend who teaches at OSU and graduated from Moore High School during and right after the event, and only through those tweets did I begin to understand the magnitude of the crisis. Having not looked on the faces of those whose children and homes have been swept away from them, I doubt that I will ever understand fully.
Humility is a virtue. Patience, kindness, temperance, and self-control join with it as extensions of a cardinal virtue: love. Love is the force that bids the Christian to treat others well, to respond to them carefully, and to rebuke them patiently and fairly if encouragement and example fail to correct an error. Carelessness, impatience, unfairness, and mistreatment are signs of a deficient love, or as Augustine (big shot Christian theologian in the late 300's and early 400's) would perhaps suggest, a poorly ordered love. For the Bishop of Hippo, all manner of evil reduces simply to the misuse, mistreatment, or misapplication of a good thing or act. Evil springs out of our willingness to love other things as ends in themselves (idolatry is the fancy term) or out of our tendency to love ourselves and to bend the world around us to our will (selfishness). Self-love is not bad in and of itself; we are individuals with value to God and the Church, and to fail to recognize our own worth is tantamount to rejecting the love of God for us. However, we tend to take this good self-love and pervert it, and that tendency reflects our overarching tendency to love poorly.
For all our posturing and piety, Christians seem more guilty of poorly ordered love than most other people. More than enough ink has been spilled over John Piper's callous tweet (if you are not up to speed, let me direct you here and for the other side here. Yes, folks, unlike Fox News, I am indeed fair and balanced!), and I am loathe to add any more to what Rachel Held Evans has said. Yet I think Piper and his staff have missed the point in two very important ways.
First, let us note his tendency to isolate particular verses from a story. Sure, he quoted more than Job 1:19. But Job is a very large book-- the largest of the wisdom texts in the Hebrew Canon by far. The book extends far beyond these brief scenes of tragedy followed by worship; through the bulk of the book, Job is mourning in dust and ashes, fending off the attempts of his "friends" to blame him for his suffering. If indeed the most important part of what Piper wanted to highlight was Job's response of worship, he must have stopped reading at 1:20. Job gets really really whiney. And he should! From where did we get the idea that grief and mourning are bad? Did not the apostle Paul exhort us to mourn with those who mourn (Rom. 12:15 for those of us keeping track)? Paul realizes in this chapter that the Church needs to know how to live with people. Rejoicing and mourning are part of human responsiveness to others, and even Jesus himself responded to death in grief.
Worship is never the answer to tragedy. Time and time again the psalms cry out in pain and distress to YHVH (the name for God in the Hebrew tradition), and time and time again they only end in worship. Worship is the proper orientation between human and God; tragedy and distress offset that orientation. Why? Is it because us weak humans cannot hold it together to appease God's apparent demand for worship? I do not think so, but this brings us to Piper's second error.
The hyper reformed view of the world is problematic. Creation only exists to allow this god to strut his stuff so to speak. It is intended only as a venue for god to make himself look good. What is the problem here? First, it does not stand up to scrutiny from Scripture. If Jesus Christ is the expression of God's character and Jesus Christ gives himself up on behalf of the world while claiming that "the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve" (Mark 10:45), it seems like God cares for the world deeply. If God is only concerned with God's own kudos, why incur such loss? Moreover, why would God affirm the independent goodness of creation in Genesis 1? Sure creation is sustained by God's will, but God's will neither makes it nor keeps it "good." What makes it good is whether it remains as God made it, and that decision is independent of God entirely. Here is the pill that Piper and company do not wish to swallow: things happen that God does not will. God thus wills to set things right again not by domination and oppression (the things that motivate Adam and Eve) but by reconciliation and service.
Secondly, Piper must implicitly lessen the humanity of Christ. If the world is not a true other (aka independent from God), the world does not exist as fully as the ancients believed that it did. Thus Christ's humanity, as a part of the world, is not as robust as the ancients thought. This may seem petty, but consider what that does for our thoughts on church, people, and the world. The Church cannot serve as the space where God meets and redeems the world any longer, for it must function as the place where humans appease a god who demands worship. No longer are Christians co-workers with Christ or Christ's body on earth, for this god cannot "work" with anyone. People are fodder for this sick and twisted deity, for their existence is devoted to god's fame and can be exploited as god wishes (the paramount example being Jesus Christ who is obliterated and resurrected on those grounds). The world no longer maters for it too is fodder. All creation is value neutral, for the only priority for this god is god. This god does not love. This god consumes all things. This god's love is so disordered that it consumes him; Augustine would call this god Satan.
For Piper, evil is part of what makes us human. He can try to trace this thought back to Augustine if he so likes, but sooner or later he must realize that he gets it from people like John Locke and Reinhold Niebuhr. It is an American doctrine indeed (more on that later)! Augustine always thought that some of the created goodness remains within even the most dreadful person, waiting for the Spirit to awaken it and to begin the re-creation of that person. But redemption isn't the point for Piper, and herein lies his greatest transgression. Scripture is the story of God's act in the world, an act that is always creative, inventive, and redemptive. That act reconstitutes the flawed and faulty parts of the world until there is a new heaven and a new earth. God is the protagonist, but this magnanimity is not directed for God's betterment. God is God and has no need of anything from creation. God's act, therefore, is solely for the benefit of creation. This is what we call grace.
Piper's teaching is dangerous, yet I believe that he is my brother. I do not intend this as a diatribe but rather as a call to repentance both for those who berate him to the point that there can be no further dialogue and to Piper and his followers who have strayed from the Christian faith. The Church is the space where God redeems the world; let God begin with us.
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