God: Good vs. Great Pt. 1 - Guest Post by Michael Wiltshire

One of my favorite people in the world right now is Michael Wiltshire. He is currently a student at Cornerstone University, a Student Ministries Coordinator at Gracespring Bible Church(where I work), and a true partner in ministry. He wrote a this very well thought out piece on this controversial topic. Please leave your feedback to enhance this discussion. 
Enjoy! 


Peter

God: Great vs. Good

God is great, God is good: let us thank him for our food. Amen. As a kid, this little prayer was one of the quickest ways to get “saying grace” out of the way before a meal. I think most Christians have used it at some point to close-in on the time between them and their dinner. The idea of God being both great and good is a familiar one to most Christians as various hymns and prayers are constructed around it throughout church history. But have we missed an important distinction in our theology of God's love and glory?  

In his book, The Mosaic of Christian Belief, theologian Roger Olsen describes the church’s theological consensus on the matter by explaining, “Our God is both glorious beyond our understanding and perfectly good beyond any creaturely goodness.” God’s greatness is often attached to terms like sovereign, transcendent, and self-glorifying, while his goodness is communicated with words like self-sacrificial, compassionate, and loving.  Christians have sought to do justice in focusing on both descriptions of God by letting their theological framework be built in a way which can contain both sides. Their tendency to hastily join them together often ignores a critical distinction which must be made in order to truly understand and experience God’s greatness and goodness for what they really are.

In most cases, by lumping God’s greatness and goodness together, theologians and their followings have unnecessarily overemphasized one side over the other—and then sometimes tend to outright deny the other side altogether. When Luther saw a weakening of God’s greatness from the Catholic Church, he began to preach of a hidden God who is totally free of creation and may damn any man or women without reason. For Karl Barth, God was known as “he who loves in freedom” (Church Dogmatics 2/1) which would summarize his belief that God’s greatness and goodness are not at all in conflict with each other if we abandon all thoughts of projection—that is, both aspects of God are really one aspect seen by humans at different angels.

Here is our problematic struggle with making sense of a God both Great and Good: If a person begins and ends their theology with one aspect of God, they easily distort the other—and eventually even the one they began with—leading to a theological caricature of God. If one begins their theology with “God is great” they often envision God’s goodness to only be a manifestation of his greatness and vice versa. 


On part 2 we will see examples of how this has been happening. 


What was your first reaction to this?