FROM THE ARCHIVES: EVEN HE:

God the Rebel (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.

And now let the revolutionists of this age choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

You'll often read that missionaries had trouble convincing various uncivilized peoples that they should become Christians because those peoples could not imagine that a God who could be killed would be worthy of worship. But it is not even His death that is the most radical part of the story--it is His despair.

[Originally posted: April 4, 2004]

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Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2010 7:06 AM