Mark Noll explains that his goal is not primarily to shed light on the causes or course of the war but rather “to show how and why the cultural conflict that led to such a crisis for the nation also constituted a crisis for theology.” That crisis centered on two questions: what the Bible had to say about slavery, and what the conflict seemed to suggest about God’s providential design for the country. Although “both read the same Bible,” as Lincoln famously observed in his second inaugural, Protestants North and South discovered that “the Bible they had relied on for building up America’s republican civilization was not nearly … as inherently unifying for an overwhelmingly Christian people as they once had thought.”
.. American Protestants were typically suspicious of religious authority and skeptical of intellectual élites, and they thought of the Bible as a “plain book” readily comprehensible to “anyone who simply opened the cover and read.” Many viewed God’s ongoing work in the affairs of men as just as easily apprehended;
Richard Rohr: Original Blessing
Looking at Creation in progress, “God saw that it was good” five times and “found it very good” after the sixth day (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). We all need to know that this wonderful thing called life is going somewhere and somewhere good. It is going someplace good because it came from goodness—a beginning of “original blessing” instead of “original sin.” Matthew Fox illustrated this rather well in his groundbreaking book, Original Blessing. [1]
For some reason, most Christian theology seems to start with Genesis 3—which features Adam and Eve—what Augustine would centuries later call “original sin.” When you start with the negative or with a problem, it’s not surprising that you end with Armageddon and Apocalypse. When you start with a punitive, critical, exclusionary God, it’s not surprising that you see the crucifixion as “substitutionary atonement” where Jesus takes the punishment that this angry God intended for us.
.. Why did Jesus come? Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity. It didn’t need changing. God has organically, inherently loved what God created from the moment God created it. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.
Richard Rohr: God is a verb
The mystics always go to the Trinitarian level because here God is a verb more than a noun, God is a flow more than a substance, God is an experience more than an old man sitting on a throne. And we are inside that flow of love. Julian writes:
Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul; and more greatly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is created to be God’s dwelling place, and the dwelling of our soul is God. . . . [This is what some call inter-being.] It is a great understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our creator, dwells in our soul, and it is a far greater understanding to see and know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God in substance, of which substance, through God, we are what we are. [We share in the same substantial, ontological, and metaphysical unity.] And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God. [1]
.. She is not a pantheist; she is not saying everything is God. She is saying everything is in God and God is in everything— which is panentheism.
Richard Rohr: The Cross
God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. The crucifixion of the God-Man is at the same moment the worst thing in human history and the best thing in human history.
Human existence is neither perfectly consistent (as rational and control-needy people usually demand it be), nor is it incoherent chaos (what cynics, agnostics, and unaware people expect it to be). Instead, life has a cruciform pattern. All of life is a “coincidence of opposites” (St. Bonaventure), a collision of cross-purposes; we are all filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled. This is the precise burden and tug of all human existence.