Mr. Repohl's intimate reflection on the lost faith of friend is respectable and telling.
I would like to offer some thoughts in the wake of the ultimate denunciation which his friend Jim and many others have made against God and spiritual things following the 9-11 attacks and other horrid atrocities, misleadingly labeled "Acts of God."
Repohl comments that his friend majored in religion in the hopes of receiving a revelation. Unfortunately, a revelation is not garnered by intellect but received--or revealed, if you will--by faith, just as by faith (not blind faith, mind you) we recognize that the worlds framed under and around us could hot have sprung ex nihilio by themselves.
The Big Questions which we teethe on are simply too big for our small minds to comprehend within themselves or with the limited resource available to our sense and sensibility. There are many manifestations in our life which defy logic-addicted mind, like the aerodynamic infeasibility of a bumblebee, which still buzzes along notwithstanding the resistance of rationalist naysayers.
Religions as a man-made expression of "wanting more than already is" will always have a dark side, as human nature is suffused with the wicked imagination, outlined by God to Noah in the Hebrew Torah Genesis and the Prophet Jeremiah: "The heart is deceitful above all things; who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9).
In response to Archibald MacLeish's one-sided damning of God, I only posit the following response:
"If God is God, then he is not Good." God is "good" not by our contemptible standards, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Even if a person rejects this contention of man's innate depravity, how then can one reconcile the "do-as-I-was-told" mentality of "ordinary people" who watched aimlessly as Jews and other "undesirables" were gassed and incinerated during World War II? And let's not forget the atheistic Utopia envisioned by Marx and Company, which has engendered a veritable hell on earth from the moment that Lenin and his Soviet minions instigated the Russian Revolution.
Even the selfish nature of a child, from the moment a parent cautions him not do so something, demonstrates an inner propensity to wrong, for he is intent on violating the very prohibition impressed upon him. Yet children, like all human beings, have this ludicrous tendency of excusing our own faults while ruthlessly exposing the wrongdoing of others, especially the seeming "non-goodness" of the Almighty.
"If God is good, then he is not God." On the contrary, when God accorded freedom and dominion to Adam and Eve, they were deceived and relinquished this authority to Satan, who in turn has plagued mankind since then. Natural disasters and human atrocities are not God's fault, nor should he be chided for not intervening. Every human being is granted free will, and to those who believe, there is a Way out of damnation into blessing and eternal life.
If you read the Book of Job faithfully and diligently, you will discover an upright man who was not yet righteous, not yet accepted before God by faith, unlike the Patriarch Abraham, who was accounted righteous for his faith in the Lord. After facing God up front, Job cannot hide his own "vile" nature from himself. After acknowledge that God's ways are not his ways, God does the miraculous-unthinkable: he gifts Job with double for all that he lost, including the most beautiful daughter in the land and a life rich and full of years. Many pessimistic agnostics and atheists have this false notion that God is an aloof or unkind tyrant, yet the revealed Hebrew Scriptures argue otherwise. Yet it takes faith, not intellect, to appreciate this unspeakable grandeur.
Faith is not a product of the mind. Faith, like tradition and other spontaneous process in culture, are a reception and imitation which must be appropriated, even though they war against the seeming wisdom of our sense and sensibility.
God is sovereign in himself, but we live in a dying world because after He had lovingly proffered this authority to man, he in turn gave it up out of foolish deceit, attempting to be like God by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Furthermore, as mankind continues to condemn God, placing Him on trial for every evil and failures which are unfairly attributed to him, let us not forget that His own creation put him on trial 2000 years ago, executing Him on a Cross. Yet by His death, and resurrection, grace was accorded to the human race, that whosoever should believe on Him would not perish but receive everlasting life. The world may perish, but by faith in Jesus Christ, a man may escape from this terrors of this perverse generation.
I pray that Mr. Repohl will extend this response to his friend Jim. In the midst of his religious studies, he must have perused something about Christianity and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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