John Piper and Allahu Akbar
A friend brought these remarks of John Piper to my attention and asked me to respond. I’ve already posted a blog on the topic of God and Genocide, but here are a few thoughts.
I understand that the disciples of John Calvin feel obligated to defend their ism at all costs, but my, what a cost it is when it requires impugning the character of God! God is revealed in Jesus, not genocide. The perfect image of God is Christ, not Calvin’s ism.
What I see here is the distortion of God to supreme and capricious Will in order to make a certain theological system work. As if the landmark verses of the New Testament read…
In the beginning was the Will, and the Will was with God, and the Will was God.
Now abide these three: faith, hope, and will, and the greatest of these is will.
God is will.
Once you reduce all that exists or occurs to God’s will, you have moved out of the Judeo-Christian understanding of God into Voluntarism or even Pantheism. Was Nietzsche right? Is everything ultimately about the Will to Power? In the kind of absolute determinism that John Piper espouses there is no authentic being, no genuine freedom, only the sheer will of God. Which begs a question: Is human drama (and everything else) nothing more than a movie playing in God’s head? Is what we know as life nothing more than God’s dream…or nightmare
Or perhaps it begs a more provocative question…
When the suicide bomber (to use Piper’s example) shouts Allahu Akbar! (God is great!) and detonates his bomb, does John Piper say, “You’ve got a point there”?
But what I really want to say is this…
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