Creation and Forgiveness

A video clip in church yesterday included a woman from Rwanda who survived an attack in which her sister and her family were killed. She's seen the killer face to face, who asked for forgiveness, and she gave it. Her reasoning (wish I had the precise quote): The man sinned against God, not her. The murderer took a life that had been created, so he did the Creator wrong. And that Creator told the woman to forgive. It's His problem now.

Of course, my thoughts immediately turn to science (surprised?). That woman probably doesn't know what evidence there is for the physical mechanism of creation, and she doesn't need to. She gets everything she really needs from reading and trusting Genesis. She believes that God is love, God is creator, and by physically raising Jesus from the dead God tells us to forgive as we have been forgiven. Everything else is secondary and really, if the arguments pull us away from a faith that conforms to the forgiveness of Christ, the arguments have gone wrong, whatever the mechanism, whether intelligent design or BioLogos or theistic evolution or 7-day creationism. What is truly universally needed is not the scientific story, but the theological one. Creation, not creationism.

(The argument is important for our context, and to avoid pietism or docetism or other bad-isms, to make the theology real with what we know, yes, but that is all specific to our Western world, and I don't think she needs that!)

That woman has her theology right, and it causes her to live right.

May we do so too.