The selected readings from chapter two of Walter Klaiber and Manfred Marquardt’s Living Grace: An Outline of United Methodist Theology focus on two traditional flashpoints in Western Christianity’s tension between the ever-growing body of secular truths and theories about the natural world and the all-powerful, loving creator God of the Old and New Testaments. In the first selection - pages 93 to 102 - the authors focus on the tension between the Judeo-Christian belief in ex nihilo1 creation and natural science’s discovered truths and generally accepted theories over the last several centuries. In the second selection - pages 115 to 126 - the authors focus their attention on the Wesleyan theology of theodicy; how we explain and embrace the seemingly contradictory nature of a loving God who allows suffering. In both selections the authors juxtapose the seemingly nihilistic nature of modern atheistic, secular thought against the always-creating Christian God of love. Rather than furthering the conflict, the authors in both selections bridge the gap between worldviews by presenting a theology of God that is larger than ancient Mesopotamian understandings of creation and beyond the machinations of DNA chains and the “chance” of natural selection.
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