Some of us have domesticated our God. Caged him. Tamed him. Pulled his claws. With faithless tenets we have tethered the Almighty, carefully circumscribing his territory and restricting his range of movement. After all, it wouldn’t be safe to let him roam loose, would it?
Challenging this pitiful God-on-a-leash kind of theology, one Christian leader asked a question that shook me to the core: “What is your church doing that it could not do if God did not exist?”
Good friends of mine have been taught to expect a miracle a minute. And this bothers me, because it seems to trivialize God, turning him into some sort of cosmic genie controlled by our beck and whim. The Creator of the universe is not my houseboy.
But I’m troubled far more by the theological stance that expects no miracles. God went out of business after the first century, according to this view, so today’s church is on its own and can look for no mighty works at all.
A church with a tame God is a church without a God. And that makes “church” an oxymoron, doesn’t it?
Every Wednesday for a decade I ate lunch with several colleagues. We spent that hour each week munching fast-food and reading weighty works that challenged our thinking. The last volume we shared (but never quite completed before our cadre disbanded) was Evangelical Essentials, a dialogue between Anglican clergyman John Stott and his liberal theologian friend David L. Edwards.
One tidbit Stott shares in the book amused me. In France in the mid-1700’s, Stott says, a group of Jansenists got all worked up about a flurry of miracles that supposedly happened near a particular tomb in a famous cathedral. According to Baron George Lyttelton, who originally told the tale, the whole thing caused quite a stir. So much so that the local authorities, not unlike many church overseers today, decided they needed to do something to put a lid on things.
So these uptight defenders of orthodox, non-miracle-expecting faith erected a wall blocking public access to the part of the church where the miracles were said to have occurred. On this wall they affixed a warning sign: “By command of the king, God is forbidden to work any more miracles here.” The only thing that would make that sign out of place in some churches today is the absence of a king.