With regards to Piper, not everyone shares your enthusiasm for Piper. There are some critiques located at http://www.thefaithfulword.org/. There used to be a fairly stinging critique of Piper at http://www.c-r-n.org.uk/, but I cannot get that link to work. I saved that article on my other computer’s hard drive.

I am not equipped to offer my own analysis of what bothers me about Piper (not on short notice, anyway - I would have to read thousands of pages and I cannot think as fast or as good as Mr. Spencer), but just thought in fairness that readers should be aware that there are some concerns.

Jim Gieseke
Houston, Texas

The only critiques I am aware of are from…

Non Calvinists who don’t like Calvinists. (yawn)
People who think the term “Christian Hedonist” isn’t helpful.
People who side with the Openness guys.
Folks- like me- with a quibble or two with various things.

Piper doesn’t have anything going to fan much of a critical flame. Once you figure out that he’s a Calvinist, he uses his own terms to translate the theology of Edwards, and he’s intense, maybe too much so at times, that’s about it.

I recently read an article by John Piper, “Tsunami and Repentance” at http://www.desiringgod.org/library/fresh_words/2005/010505.html. After reading the article I felt several emotions, but the primary ones were anger and sorrow. I was angry that he would propound what I consider offensive and sorrowful that so many people that follow him would consider and even believe what he had written.

Piper states:
“The point of every deadly calamity is this: Repent. Let our hearts be broken that God means so little to us. Grieve that he is a whipping boy to be blamed for pain, but not praised for pleasure. Lament that he makes headlines only when man mocks his power, but no headlines for ten thousand days of wrath withheld. Let us rend our hearts that we love life more than we love Jesus Christ. Let us cast ourselves on the mercy of our Maker. He offers it through the death and resurrection of his Son.”

The above paragraph is only a sample of what I find disconcerting about Mr. Piper’s article.

After reading the whole article I remember thinking, “Does God have such low self-esteem that everyone must love Him or worship Him or He will send some deadly calamity their way? Mr. Piper makes God seem like a young child who throws a tantrum when they don’t get their way. For example, “You had better love me and worship me or something bad is gong to happen to you.” To me that type of thinking leads to superstitious beliefs and a life that responds to God out of utter fear rather than love.

Mr. Piper makes it seem like God sends us deadly calamities for our own good and then is pleased when we turn to Him for help getting though the calamity that He sent in the first place. That type of action sounds curiously like Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, where a parent causes harm to a child and then gets some secret satisfaction from helping take care of the child they hurt in the first place.

Please tell me that you don’t subscribe to the same belief as Mr. Piper.

Your paragraphs don’t resonate with me, but I don’t think they resonate much with the view of God’s soveriegnty that Piper is operating from. The Westminister Confession says:

>I. God from all eternity did by the most and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.

II. Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass, upon all supposed conditions; yet hath he not decreed any thing because he foresaw it as future, as that which would come to pass, upon such conditions.

Your outrage is at a very one-dimensional view of Piper’s statement. HE SAID that God’s word to us in any tragedy is to turn from sin and trust in Christ. YOU SAID God was torturing us into worship out of low self esteem.

I assume that you understand the phrases “second causes” in the WCF? In this instance that means that God ordained these events, but he also ordained everything in these events, from the natural causes of an earthquake, to the laws of physics to the limitations of the human body to the freedom to choose where we spend vacation or what we do when the tide runs backward.

And Piper is saying that God also ordains that natural evil send us the message that we are mortal and need to prepare to meet a holy God.

If you are outraged, I would suggest you have two choices:

1) Eliminate God’s sovereignty and become a deist or a process theologian. Read Kushner’s WHy Bad Things Happen to Good People and conclude that God couldn’t stop these events.

2) Become an atheist and then there is no reason to be outraged. It’s just nature being nature and there is no meaning at all.

C.S. Lewis said that Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Thousands of Christian have written that the mystery of suffering is a mystery, but the purposes of God are plain. We do not know why Tsunami’s happen, but if we believe in the sovereign God of the Bible who took responsibility for all natural calamities as demonstrations of his power, then you are left with a certain amount of outrage at God. It’s in the Psalms. It’s in the same Bible that says God is speaking to human beings in the midst of this fallen world, calling them to himself.

It is certainly possible to read Piper and be offended on this. I have another suggestion. Google Piper’s 9-11 messages: Sorrow, Self-Humbling and Steady Hope. Read those and see what you think.

I have said WAY too much. Sorry.

I have read more than one thing from John Piper. I know that he is a staunch Calvinist and I confess that I believe Calvinism is wrong. There is no question that clouds my opinion of his teachings.

I am not a theologian and never will be. I am not familiar with the Westminster confession. I am not trying to persuade anyone to come over to my way of thinking. I am just hoping that people will think about and question what Piper says without automatically assimilating it.

I am just a single soul trying to find peace in the contradictions, and believe me I see lots of contradictions where God is concerned.

I have searched for years for answers concerning God, but I haven’t been able to find any satisfactory answers.

I did read Piper’s sermon on 9-11, but again it engendered no hope or comfort for me.

I wish I could say I find Christianity comforting but I don’t. I find it more tormenting than anything else. I heard a saying once that went something like this, “If you have never been angry at God or never questioned Him, maybe you have never encountered Him.” It seems that I encounter Him every day.

Regardless, I will keep on searching, and questioning, and being angry with God more often than not, and hope in the end that He will have mercy on my soul.

Read what Jesus said in John 9 about a man born blind. No explanations. Mercy.

The cross, the incarnation: that is all God shows us, and the rest is us mumbling.

If you are trying to get a reason WHY for suffering in your life or the lives of those you love, all I can tell you is read Romans 8. The cross is the heart of God, and we don’t find any explanations past that. Spurgeon said when we cannot trace his hand, we trust his heart.

Christianity isn’t an explanation for evil. It is Jesus dead and raised, for us.

The very best sermon I ever heard on the subject of catastrophe was from R. C. Sproul which I heard after the September 11 incident. In it, Sproul was expositing Luke 13, where Jesus is asked about two separate catastrophes which had occurred at that time, one the collapse of a tower on some innocents, the other the slaughter of some worshippers by Pilate. Jesus gives a cryptic answer: “Do you suppose that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered such things? I tell you, No. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” The parable which follows makes interesting reading as well. It appears that Jesus is turning the tables on the questioners from “Why did this happen to those poor innocent people” (a question which God often chooses not to answer, at least not immediately) to “Why are YOU still here and what are you going to do about it”.

Piper’s answer appears to me to be in keeping with the answer Jesus gave in Luke 13.

Am I missing something here?

Jim Gieseke
Houston, Texas