God the Father, Student Workbook, SW06

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G O D T H E F A T H E R

An Absentee God

With a high rise in violent crime in the community, your church is hosting a block wide prayer meeting for the members of the community. Having organized prayer walks and prayer vigils, your congregation is deeply aware of the spiritual forces which underlie the kinds of violence and cruelty taking place in the neighborhood right now. During one of the prayer sessions, a community resident who it not a part of your church stands up and says, “I don’t go to this church, and honestly, I don’t go to any church because God seems to not care for us as he does for others. Why does our neighborhood always have to be terrorized and miserable? He seems to care far more for people who live in the rich suburbs than us down here. He just seems absent a lot down here!” The entire prayer meeting is quieted, and turn to you for an answer to the heart cry of this frustrated neighbor. What words of explanation and comfort would you give in the prayer meeting to this observation? A struggle has been brewing for a long time among the members of your local church because of the new emphasis in “intimate praise and worship.” Fed up by the old, stodgy nature of the hymn singing and liturgy of the past, the new worship leader has been infusing in the order of service new songs of praise and worship, many which speak of God in very intimate, personal terms. Some of the older parishioners object, feeling that the new music and emphasis does make God seem more personal, but all fear of God as the Wholly Other than us is gone. They fear that the awe of God has been replaced with the Lord who is my Cosmic Pal. Who’s right and who’s wrong here? Can both be right and wrong at the same time–how? If you were the leader of this church, how might you help both sides understand how God’s immanence and transcendence enrich our experience of worship to God? A prolegomena , a study of the “first things” of the doctrine of God, humbly affirms that God must reveal himself to us before we can know him. God has revealed himself to us in two special modes. In general revelation , God reveals himself to all people everywhere, and in special revelation , God reveals himself to particular human beings at particular times and places. In his relationship to his created universe, God is both immanent and transcendent . God’s immanence refers to his present and active involvement in all his creation, while God’s transcendence refers to the truth that God is infinite and therefore cannot be contained within creation The Lord Who Is My Pal

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Restatement of the Lesson’s Thesis