Re: [asa] Wells and traditional Christianity

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Armstrong" <jarmstro@qwest.net>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] Wells and traditional Christianity

>A basic dilemma seems to lie in our view of death. It's a bad thing in
> our "local" view. Yet we are faced , as you note, with a creation that
> is laced through and through with death.
> It appears to me to be too thoroughly interwoven to be explained away as
> a separate, post-creation phenomenon. In fact, in many cases, it seems
> to be an actual pathway to new life.
>
> I think of cell death, for example. It is inextricably part of how we
> grow and repair wounds without developing cancer. Unless cell
> replication is limited in some way, one result is cancer...also deadly.
>
> So my sense is that there is a need to rethink the idea that death and a
> loving God are antithetic; and especially that the nature of death is
> somehow punative. [Though it certainly can be in our hands!].
>
> Those are our perspectives, and not necessarily His, and we are probably
> "dissing" God and His Creation in saying so. We are a part of His
> Creation, and a part of His plan. It's probably risky to try from within
> that Creation to be too venturesome in guessing whether some "feature"
> such as death is good or bad when measured against the full measure of
> God's creative intent and how He's chosen to accomplish it.
>
> Or so it seemeth to me. Jim

"The world exists from the beginning in the sign of the resurrection of
Christ from the dead."
                                                                             
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Aug 29 21:28:27 2006