God and The Reasonable Person Standard

When I worked in healthcare I was told that if I ever made a mistake, especially one that might harm someone, that I would be judged by the “reasonable person standard.”  What that means is that a person’s conduct would be evaluated against based on this concept: What would a reasonable person with similar training and experience do in your circumstances? If what you did was in line with what a thinking person with your certification might do, then even if some harm followed you would be cleared. Your decision wouldn’t be considered an act of negligence.

I was recently reading the book American Sketches by Walter Isaacson. In one of the essays he mentioned that Albert Einstein famously remarked to a friend, “When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.” We may speculate on the larger context and meaning of the statement. But it made me think about this idea: “If I were God, would I have done it this way?”

The implication here is really applying the form of the reasonable person standard to God. Take 100 other intelligent, wise, compassionate people and ask them how they would have made the world. If their answer is different than what we see, then we must conclude that God is somehow negligent. This is the way we often deal with suffering and evil in the world. It is easy for us to conclude that God got it wrong, because we would have done it different if we were in charge.

Lay people do this all the time to the “experts” and it is now more visible than ever.  Social media makes it easy for us to publish our condemnation of coaches, referees, engineers, police officers, surgeons, generals, judges, pilots, etc.  With little consequence we can broadcast our “informed opinions” about all these people and their decisions. Of course, few of us fit into the “reasonable person” standard when compared to these people. We don’t have their training. We don’t have their experience. We haven’t had the privilege of their mentors. We don’t know the rules and guidelines of their profession.  And we aren’t liable to suffer the consequences of their decisions either. What we do have is a meme, or a 30 second sound bite with which to judge them. Somehow this makes us the standard. And it is laughable how often we are wrong. When the full story is revealed many of the most criticized decisions end up being the right ones.

We also do this to God.  We can say with Einstein, “If I were God…” But is there really a more arrogant statement?  What we should really say is: “If I knew absolutely everything, including the past and the future… If I could see into people’s motives and heart dispositions… If I was able to perfectly balance the interests of all things in the right proportion… then I would have done things different.” But that isn’t true.  You aren’t God and neither am I.  You can’t even master 1/100th of all there is to know in any one academic or scientific discipline, let alone all of them. 

But God does know it all, and has gracious purposes.  He has made this clear in sending Jesus to enter our world and suffer on our behalf. He has withheld nothing from us, no matter the cost. Though his gracious purposes include a world of brokenness and evil, we can trust that if we knew what God knew, we wouldn’t criticize. We would just stand in awe. And one day we will. But he hasn't done it the way we would have done it.  But since most of us have trouble balancing our checkbooks and keeping a few resolutions for the New Year, it is more reasonable to trust that the one who framed the all the wonders of the world-great and small-is more qualified than we are. We should stop acting like we are the reasonable person standard for God.

Luther on Matthew 2 & the Magi

"We see here how Christ has three kinds of disciples.

1. The priests and scribes, who know the Scripture and teach it to everybody, and do not come up to it themselves.
2. Herod, who believes the Scripture, that Christ is now born; and yet goes right against it, trying to prevent what it says from being done.  
3. The pious Magi, who left country and house and home, and made it their one concern to find Christ."

Quoted in: Broadus, John Albert. Commentary on Matthew. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1990. Http://www.studylight.org/commentaries/jbm/print.cgi?bk=39&ch=2&vs=1. Studylight.org. Web.

Douglas Moo On Misunderstanding James 4 in Planning and Profit

We are going through the book of James on Sunday mornings and this is a good place to share some extra meat and scraps from the table:

"However, we need to guard against a misinterpretation at this point. It would be terribly tempting (and some interpreters have succumbed to the temptation) to find here a rebuke of those who are out to make a profit at all. The economic system we call capitalism, in other words, might be the real target of James’s polemic. But, whatever we might think about the compatibility of Christianity and the profit motive of capitalism, it would be wrong to find any critique here. As the following verses make clear, James is not rebuking these merchants for their plans or even for their desire to make a profit. He rebukes them rather for the this-worldly self-confidence that they exhibit in pursuing these goals—a danger, it must be said, to which businesspeople are particularly susceptible. And we should guard here against another kind of misinterpretation: the idea that James is forbidding Christians from all forms of planning or of concern for the future. Taking out life insurance and saving for retirement, for instance, are not condemned by James; these may very well be a form of wise stewardship. What James rebukes here, as v. 16 will make clear, is any kind of planning for the future that stems from human arrogance in our ability to determine the course of future events."

Moo, Douglas J. The Letter of James. Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: Eerdmans; Apollos, 2000. Print. The Pillar New Testament Commentary.

Dare To Be A Sinner… You Actually Already Are!

“Confess your faults one to another” (James 5:16). He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!

"But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone. “My son, give me thine heart” (Prov. 23.26). God has come to you to save the sinner. Be glad! This message is liberation through truth. You can hide nothing from God. The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him. He wants to see you as you are, He wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers, as if you were without sin; you can dare to be a sinner...

"In confession the break-through to community takes place. Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light. The unexpressed must be openly spoken and acknowledged. All that is secret and hidden is made manifest. It is a hard struggle until the sin is openly admitted. But God breaks the gates of brass and bars of iron (Ps. 107:16).

"Since the confession of sin is made in the presence of a Christian brother, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders; he gives up all his evil. He gives his heart to God, and he finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus Christ and his brother.

"The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together