Sunday, July 16, 2006

A passage from Alan E. Lewis's remarkable book 'between cross and ressurection'

...The protest of unbelief is that the world is godless and unjust, a place of lovelessness, iniquity and pain. Faith, by contrast, hears and speaks a word of promise--that nothing, however evil, can seperate us from God's love, so that the world's sure destiny is peace and joy. Yet that confidence itself contains the temptation so to proclaim the world's salvation as to take no longer seriously its distancing from God through suffering, sin and death. There is a 'faith' which has forgotten what it is to doubt; a way of hearing which no longer listens to the silence; a certainty that God is close which dares not look into eyes still haunted by divine remoteness; a hope for some glory other than a crown of thorns. Such supposed but cowardly and inauthentic faith and hope has failed to wrestle with the connundrum of the grave, evading the possiblity that God is God among the suffering and the dying...(98)