"God in eternity looked upon me foreseeing my fallenness, my pride, my sin and said, ‘I want that man in my family! I will pay for him to be in my family with my son’s life.’ That’s love folks, that is mega-off the charts love!" — John Piper
If the above comment is abstracted from its context, it is a wonderful quote. I could gleefully digest it as a Roman Catholic. In the concrete totality of Piper's theology, it is a cruel monstrosity. It is a mockery of Christian theology and the notion of Love. In fact, I should think it were the cruel joke of Satan whispering into the ears of the faithful, ridiculing their faith in God.
In order to demonstrate the sadism of John Piper and his blasphemous joke, I wish to tell a parable about sex trafficking.
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| A picture of actress Jamie Chung in the 2012 film, Eden, portraying a Korean-American girl abducted by sex traffickers. |
In a small town in Vietnam, there was a foreign man named Godot. One night, as Godot was walking through a slum littered with brothels, his heart was moved with compassion towards the girls he found having unspeakable acts performed upon their bodies. The man screamed to the heavens, "I want those girls to be free! And I will pay for their freedom with all my worldly possessions." The man burst in through one of the doors and announced that he is willing to pay for the bodies of all these kidnapped girls to do with as he pleases. Few questions asked, the traffickers handed over the lot of the girls to Godot.
The foreign man took the girls to the prosperous city, and payed for their housing, food, clothing and for their education, so that in a certain years time they will be able to find gainful employment. At the end of the week, once he had gotten the girls settled in to their new life, he packed his bags and began to exist the compound. One of the girls he had rescued, Ai, latched onto his leg, kneeling in the dirt, and said, "Oh kind man, who are you that you could have sold all your worldly possessions to save the lot of us who were dying in our misery?"
Godot turned on his heal to face Ai and brought his eyes down to meet hers that were looking up at him. "Why, my dear," he said with a kind expression on his visage, "I am the sex trafficker who was in charge of bringing all those girls to the network of brothels you were also brought to. I am off to a rural village in south to bring more girls to that terrible place. And after that I am heading to an interview in New York City with Nicholas Kristof to tell the story of how I rescues all of you, for the praise and glory of my name."
With that Godot walked off to continue his job.
The reason Jesus spoke in parables was because the narrative format has a peculiar power to reach the core of our being and influence our spirit. It allows us to understand at the level of the intellect and the heart simultaneously. Godot in my parable takes the place of God in the Calvinism of John Piper. In the deterministic world of Piper, God is the one who sells us into slavery and then expects a grateful reaction from the slaves, and the others, when he chooses to save a small portion of them, leaving the rest to rot in their misery. How could this monstrous theology be conceived of any less than a cruel joke?
Your view of sin, God, man, and salvation is skewed and incorrect.
ReplyDelete1. If God was the man who rescued the girls, then surely that can't be the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible, would want to rescue both the traffickers and the victims.
2. Your analogy makes it seem like those girls deserve to be rescued...But in the true God's eyes, both victims and traffickers are guilty of treason and sin, and deserve much worse for their sins in this world and the next.
3. The fall of man, was never intended by God, but the salvation of man was. God knew man was going to rebel, and so had to make a way to save them. In other words, God didn't have to save us and he would still remain righteous.
4. If you call Piper's quote a monstrous theology, I'm afraid you have been blinded by lies.
I see it is easier to criticize other world views, rather than question your unbiblical world view.
Again, God planned for salvation as seen in the jewish feasts, the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant and so many parts of the old testament. He predestined all these, just so He could save men, who weren't worthy to save. Those victims of sex trafficking deserve it and much worse, I deserve much more worse, I deserve to be burning in Hell, but rather, God died for me, so that I may have life in abundance...And He planned my salvation, even before the creation, as evidence in the garden, when God said, the seed of the woman shall crush the head of the serpent.
First, let me thank you for your comment. I greatly appreciate it. Secondly, let us leave aside the notion that we all deserve hellfire, since that is tangential to my point. My concern is that you understand very little about John Piper's theology. Piper believes that the Fall is an intrinsic part of God's plan to glorify himself. He calls himself a seven-point Calvinist because in addition to the five pointed TULIP, he believes: (vi.) that God purposefully creates people to be damned to hell from eternity past; (vii.) that this plan is the best-of-all-possible worlds for his own self-glorification.
DeleteYou find my parable skewed because you appear to be an Arminian who believes in free will and interpreted it as such, when it was intended as a specific critique of Calvinism. That is why Godot in my parable is the Calvinist God. That is the twist. God does not want to save everybody—limited atonement. He causes people to be in the state of privation; it is all a part of his diabolical plan.