Trying to understand God’s struggle for justice
We are trained – taught, really – that God is all-powerful. That to me has always meant,since I was a little girl,that there was nothing that God could not do.
I grew up believing that God wanted everyone to be good to each other, to love each other, to take care of each other – lessons that I learned from my mother, my Sunday school teachers and from what I read in the Bible.
So, as I have grown, I have grown distressed that this God seems … limited. This God seems either not to care about the suffering of so many people, or this God is unable to stop that which is causing them to suffer.
I don’t remember where I heard it, but it was just within the week where I heard a preacher talking about God struggling for justice. God is struggling?i don’t remember what else the preacher said. The idea that God has to struggle for what seems to be a nobrainer stopped me cold.
God is omnipotent, we were taught. Everything that was created was created by God. Why, then, would God have to struggle to make “justice roll down like water” as the prophet Amos proclaimed?
And if God is “intimately affected” by the pain of God’s people, as the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, what is holding him up from correcting or fixing the foibles of human nature that cause injustice to exist?
Perhaps the problem is not with God but with our interpretation and understanding of God.
It was the Rev. William R. Jones, a Unitarian minister who wrote “Is God a White Racist?” who said that “one’s theology determines one’s anthropology, which informs one’s sociology.”
When a white person says God is powerful, that statement might mean something entirely different to a Black American, who see the powerful God of white Americans as the God who sanctioned slavery.
The title of Jones’ book suggests that a white person’s notion of “omnipotent” means something far different than that of Black Americans, who would opine that an omnipotent God would dismantle not only the practice of enslavement of human beings but the hearts that would see nothing wrong with it.
Those who are looking for justice do not understand what God’s hesitation is all about.
Some have cringed at hints of what they see as divine weakness. Years ago, a man named Bruce Barton wrote a book entitled “The Man Nobody Knows” in which he disparaged the so-called liberal view of the Christ as “weak and puny.”
And there have been protests voiced by many who follow Jesus about his difficult commands to love our neighbors and to forgive our enemies. A God who would command us to do that would surely know that doing that requires spiritual and emotional strength that few of us have. Those requirements are so difficult – and, to some, such signs of weakness – that many who call themselves Christian simply ignore them.
But is it the fact that those words are ignored the reason that God struggles? It does not seem that an omnipotent God should have to struggle at all; an allpowerful God surely has the skills to put the desire for all people to be treated with dignity in place.
Does God yet struggle, though, because God knows that the people he created will never acquiesce to do what
God says to do? Does God struggle because the people he created have ultimately rejected him and his son?
Does God struggle because God knows that though we call God’s name and reference God and the Christ when we want to justify something we are doing or not doing, that our relationship with God is basically transactional and not indicative of a deeply-rooted respect for and commitment to do what God asks of us?
It does not seem right or fair. Heschel says that God is concerned about the world and is intimately involved in the history of human beings, but it is hard to accept that pronouncement. Too many people have suffered and have continued to suffer, in spite of believing in an all-good, all-powerful God.
Perhaps we need to redefine what those terms mean. Maybe that will help us understand a God who struggles.
The Rev. Susan K. Smith is the founder of Crazy Faith Ministries in Columbus and director of clergy and leadership development for the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Conference, Inc.
Keeping the Faith is a column featuring the perspectives of a variety of faith leaders from the Columbus area.