Is God fair?

 I came across a video on this point, dealing with a claim that 'God is unfair'. The answer was couched in purely judicial terms, reducing God's love and our faith in gratitude to mere forensic transactions.

Most comments saw the hollowness of the response.

This comment more so:

This type of crass moralism is not Christianity.

The problem we have is that we (everyone) are spiritually the walking dead. We have elevated ourselves to 'god' in our own (delusional) eyes and so refuse to turn to the living and speaking creator God, Yahweh, for life.

The point of Christ's work is to open up the way for re-connection, and that is by re-birth, being 'born again' spiritually. This is done by turning from our own futile and delusional god-ness and relying on Christ to give us new life. We cannot be in God's family/kingdom (as joint heirs with Christ) without new life; the living dead would be just dead in the kingdom of light. They would be aliens there, just as fish in fresh air.

In Christ, he being God, God's domain and our domain (the created cosmos) come together, and will be finally renewed. Where at last Rorty's hope for justice and beauty in a single vision would be realized, if only he could have grasped that (his essay Trotsky and the Wild Orchids).

It's not about 'crime and punishment' but about death and life. No matter how 'good' we think we are, we are 'dead in sin'. That is in 'being cut-off from God'. That needs to be repaired, and can only be done by Christ who defeated sin on the cross and proved it by his resurrection.

 

God is fair. The evidence is starkly before us all in Nagel's Edge (read his View from Nowhere), and he (our Father in heaven) gives us the free choice of rejecting death and receiving life...or not.

Source: Is God Fair?

Jung: wrong again!

Richard Noll, in his book "The Jung Cult" writes, quoting Hinkel: 

"...it is indeed a central part of Jung's repudiation of traditional Christianity that offered a God that was distant, transcendent, and absolute."

And how wrong this is.

The Bible tells of a God who is in intimate fellowship with his creatures, then after their repudiation of him, provides a means of regaining that communion.

The God who dwells with his people in their imageness, in propositional communication, in the Tabernacle and Temple, is among us in Christ, who upon leaving us provided the gift of his indwelling Spirit and the family of the faithful.

This is God who is close, who seeks man for fellowship...for man's good. Who has shown us his proximity and relatable connection by performing the creation within the basic delineation of our existence: in a series of days, cementing that relational connection first in the Sabbath then in the person of Christ Immanuel.

McLaren and Christ?

McLaren's view of God, has further ramifications.

His view of Christ must also be in peril. If he has dragged the creator into his creation, merging him with it in the manner of all monist flavours, from Evolution to Animism; he must have a similar parlous view of Christ.

In short, if he doesn't know who God is, he can't know who Christ is.

He cuts God off from the real concrete creation, so Christ can no longer be Creator! (John 1:1-3, Col 1: 16-18 as the most explicit data, but the whole  Colossians passage is relevant: 15-20.).

The Incarnation is the reprise of the creation! The Creation identified God, and thus his Christ; as 'creator' in whose image we are and so gives us our basic identity. The Incarnation is the founding of the Kingdom of God that will be consummated in the New Creation as creature dwells with Creator in eternal fellowship..

Thus, Christ as the Fullness of God embodied (Col 2:8-10) is no stranger to the Cosmos. He is the creator who created in the days of our history. His action in the days contextualizes both the theophanies recorded throughout the OT and the Incarnation as their summation. That is, this is his creation and he is not an alien within it. The Incarnation is the coda on this great biblical theme of God with his people in his image, being their creator. Now in the Incarnation, announced as redeemer as well.

'God with us' in the Incarnation follows as a familial act, a personal event in the same concrete reality as the creation event authored by the same person. This person (God in Christ) first demonstrating his presence and direct connection with the creation by action realized within the terms of the creation he has created (that is a set of defined days that are real in that creation) cohesively with his objective. He now stepping into that creation, again in its terms: in a man. The intimacy of God with us shining forth to us, his image-bearers.

And that's why a real concrete creation as set out directly in Genesis one is more than important, it is pivotal in the most profound way.

McLaren has missed every point the Scriptures make!

Also see A Theological Pivot