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Foreword
God's Healing
Strategy
Defending God and the good news of
God’s reign has a long and storied past. In
theological circles such a defense has often been labeled
“theodicy.” In its simplest version, the
argument goes, “How can an all-powerful, all-good
God, allow evil?” Other versions of the same
essential question abound. The Psalmist repeatedly asks
God, “How long?” “How long will you hide
your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Ps.13:
1-2).
In relation to such agony, even
Scripture comes under scrutiny and needs defense. What
does a Bible reader do with conflicting stories of God in
Scripture? How do we reconcile biblical depictions of God
as ruthless tyrant with those of a benevolent parent? Is
the God of the New Testament the same character as the
God of the Old Testament? The questions pile up.
God’s Healing Strategy is
an excellent response. It is a defense both of God and of
the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments. As pastor,
college professor, and biblical theologian, Grimsrud
argues his case clearly and cogently without the usual
arcane highly specialized jargon often associated with
such important questions. Each chapter is chock-full of
stimulating discussion points making the book a cross
between a refreshing Sunday sermon and a Bible study
lesson.
There is an amazing built-in healing
quality to our physical bodies that to this very moment,
astounds me. Our doctors can aid in this process, but
healing is a basic structural component of life, as we
know it. So much so, we take healing for granted, until,
that is, we get terribly ill and our healing requires us
to endure a long recovery—or none. Grimsrud speaks
to both sides of our experience. On the one hand, he
defends the basic nature of reality as one of healing or
wholeness (shalom). On the other hand, he
accounts for why healing of our own and of the
world’s woes often takes so long. The former is best
accounted for in the Bible’s view of God as Creator
of a good and healthy world. The latter comes out in the
Bible’s vision of God as the Redeemer, Healer,
Savior of a world gone awry. God as Redeemer, which
depends on the first description of God as Creator, is
what Grimsrud suggests is the golden thread that ties the
whole Bible, Old and New Testaments, together. From
Genesis to Revelation, the Alpha and Omega of biblical
revelation is the story of God’s healing strategy.
Still there is that nagging question,
“How long, Oh Lord?” Why does God’s
healing strategy take so long to be fulfilled? The great
blessing of this book is that Grimsrud does not sidestep
that most difficult and universally asked question. To
dodge such a fundamental query would be to charge God
with neglect of the worst kind. Grimsrud shows how
ultimate healing must happen without coercion. Like a
masterful surgeon, God’s healing strategy has always
been to help remove obstacles to our complete wholeness
so God’s (super)natural power of healing can then
flow through us to the world.
What God has chosen, however, is to
remove obstacles through noncoercive perservering love.
Given the recalcitrant nature of humans and our slow
learning curve,God’s loving response to
evil—God’s healing strategy—requires a
long, slow process. God’s patience joins God’s
love in thwarting attempts to rush the healing process by
means contrary to God’s character.
To his credit, Grimsrud defends
God’s willingness to change, to adapt to ever new
situations of human failure, so God’s healing
strategy can take place. What is truly unchanging about
God is God’s perservering and patient love. To argue
in traditional terms that the God of Scripture is
unchanging is to make God out to be arbitrary and
distant. The perfection of God does not lie in God’s
impassibility. The perfection of God lies precisely in
God’s willingness to change when love demands it.
The Bible as a whole tells the story of
such a God of love.
People of God who call themselves
Christian cannot simply pull Jesus out of a
magician’s hat, as it were, as if no one before
Christ’s time had understood the healing strategy of
God. Jesus understood his own healing ministry and that
of the church which would bear his name as part of the
same old, old story revealed in his Scripture, our
“Old” Testament. The incarnation of God in
Christ is simply the latest, and yes, for Christians, the
climactic revelation of God’s noncoercive patient
love, adapting as it had so many times before. This book
provides its readers with a profound recovery of a
central message in the Older Testament that gives meaning
to the New Testament. One cannot read God’s
Healing Strategy without renewed appreciation for
all of Scripture, Old and New, cover to cover.
The Apostle Paul, on trial before King
Agrippa (Acts 25), had to defend his encounter with the
God of his past as revealed in the Christ of his present.
In much the same way, this book stands under the weight
of history declaring, for all who would listen, a defense
of its wild hope. In the words of the apostle Paul, which
could well be those of Grimsrud, that defense rests on
the “hope in the promise made by God to our
ancestors, a promise that our people hope to attain, as
they earnestly worship day and night” (25:6-7).
For the apostle Paul as for us, this
hope lies in understanding God’s healing strategy
for the world as revealed in all Scripture. King Agrippa,
of course, was almost persuaded by Paul’s argument:
“Are you so quickly persuading me to become a
Christian?” (v.28). Well aware of the utter patient,
perservering love of God, the apostle responds,
“Whether quickly or not, I pray to God that not only
you but also all who are listening to me today might
become such as I am” (v. 29). And so, whether
quickly or not, may the defense of God and God’s
Scripture put forward by this small book persuade all who
read it of the hope in God’s healing strategy for
the world.
James E. Brenneman
Pasadena, California
Lead Pastor, Pasadena Mennonite Church, and
Professor of Old Testament,
Episcopal School of Theology at Claremont
God's Healing Strategy
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