Desmond Tutu:  God Waits Impotently For Us To Be Collaborators

I’m guessing God doesn’t conjure hamburgers and pizza because those foods have a larger carbon footprints than locally grown, organic produce.

So who collaborated in dishing up the Manna?

He has to say “the God project” to avoid saying “His project”?

Has Tutu perchance read either Old or New Testament for examples of God working miracles rather than just waiting around for someone to do it for Him?  Not that we shouldn’t try to do His will; we should.  But God is not impotent.

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I think it makes no sense to think of God as waiting, as if the initiative in this relationship lies with us. (Indeed, isn’t that Pelagianism). The initiative lies with God. It’s called grace. His is always the first move.

I’m sure he really said “omnipotently” and got misquoted. Or, maybe he meant “patiently” and “impotently” was just a Freudian slip. Otherwise, it would seem that yet another bishop needs to get in line for…theological education.

Certainly, some of the things that he’s accomplished over the years would suggest that he is indeed one of God’s “partners” or “collaborators”. Or, maybe it was wishful thinking.

God, who created all and sustains all, is present among us and waits patiently for us to respond to His call, so that He might work miracles through us. But we are still lower than the angels.

God made the manna. Moses provided the sporks.

In the spirit of Numbers 22:22-35, perhaps Tutu thinks it’s OK to talk out of his ass.

I don’t think he is making much sense otherwise.

driver8, granting that God’s grace is a first action by Him to start the kingdom among us, it is clear that after we get grace, we are called to get up and do something.  Consider the Gospel judgement scenarios.  Jesus does not ask if we believe correctly, but have we fed the hungry, ministered to the sick and visited the imprisoned?

I will grant before someone raises the point, that it is likely that the scenario may assume that those who don’t accept grace are not even present.  But that begs the question.  If we grant that you or I believe and will be there, who have we fed lately? 

God has said the kingdom is among us.  The question Jesus asks, that ABp Tutu echoes, is what are we doing about it?  Hint: realignment, canon enforcement, and the like are not on the list!  Neither side of the issues can claim to be doing the kingdom based on them if there are hungry, sick and imprisoned who lack care.

FWIW
jimB

I’m glad that sermons are out there for us all to critque but Tutu is not grasping when he says we must partake in God’s plan of helping others. A pastor once told me a tale of the garden planted and after taking pains to keep it tidy for weeks on end took a vacation. After getting back looking over the weed bed that had grown while he was away said, God you must have taken the week off. Meaning that it is He that provides for us. However, without the proper attention given our call ,a lot doesn’t get done if we don’t give it proper attention.

Sometimes we nitpick everything on the market to an excess.

Mtn gospel, I agree that as Christians care for the hungry and poor should be extremely important to us. An honest reading of the NT must include recognition that self sacrifice on behalf of others is a hallmark of faith.

I think the criticism of +Tutu is based on the appearance of the social gospel over and above the actual Gospel. Aid to the hungry and poor is a powerful metaphor for God’s grace in our redemption. But when you lose the language of sin, law, Gospel, justification, propitiation and the like all you’re left with is good works expressed in charity - the metaphor is no longer a metaphor but displaces what it’s supposed to represent.

That strange whirring sound that you hear is Leonidas Polk in his grave at high RPM.

In one sense I can understand the idea of human-divine cooperation, on the condition that God takes the initiative.  But to call Almighty God, the Omnipotent One, impotent is either ignorant, blasphemous or just plain stupid.  At the very least, to say that God does anything impotently is offensive, especially coming from someone in Holy Orders. 

One more reason to continue lowering expectations . . .

From Archbishop Tutu’s sermon on KJS: “. . . she preaches as elegantly as she looks.”

Given her rather, er, interesting choice of ecclesiastical haberdashery, I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

I used to be a great admired of
+Tutu. What in the world happened.

RE: 13 - Maybe he doesn’t like her ecclesiastical haberdashery.  It is not a look that, in my opinion, is good for her or TEC.  Hm.  Now that I think of it, maybe she should go farther afield to really represent what is going on in TEC… 

#14 I remember hearing him admit that he was a communist on Nightline sometime during my high school years (mid to late 1980s).  That pretty effectively inoculated me against admiration of him.

#15 The oven mitt look isn’t in this season.

I’ve had relatives who have insisted that the Bible says, “God helps those who help themselves.” Forthwith, I’m going to write to Desmond Tutu to request a copy of his Bible. That missing piece of my library must be why I haven’t been able to find this potent quote.
The Rabbit.

JimB,
The failure of an individual to accept God’s call may break His heart but it does not ever make Him impotent.  If God wanted to rain down hamburgers, He could and would do so.  He is, was and always will be omnipotent. 

What so many such as Tutu fail to recognize is that the way to convince mere humans to feed the world, is to fill them first with the Gospel of Christ.  For it is only when one is filled with The Holy Spirit that the call of Christ to servanthood is truly heard by us mere humans.

I just read this having come to the Rectory from the Parish Hall where we are collecting food from the Mailcarriers’ Food drive to benifit our Food Pantry. Funny thing, while working (hard) to serve the poor, several youngsters were asking whether or not I thought there was any hope of change on the part of TEC. Of course, in Fort Woth it has been obvious for some time that the TuTu -UberDeacon axis has no knowledge of WHY one would serve—unless one just happens to be one of the lucky, smart, no-gassers born with a silver spork in the rump.  Funny.

#8 Indeed but God is so to say already always active. Active in sustaining creation. Active in bringing about his purposes. Active in loving. Active in leading people to repent. Active in the worship of the body of Christ. Active in the proclamation of the Kingdom. Active in the existence and of all creation. Active in miracles. Active too in the ordinary work of doctors and nurses. Every good thing is his gift.

By his mercy, God’s supernatural grace transform us if we open our hearts in faith. Of course he send us out to proclaim in word and deed the Good News of Jesus. He invites us, by his Love active in our hearts, to be conformed to the image of Jesus.

It is we who are invited to share in his loving and eternal purposes rather than he waiting “impotently” for our activity. He loves us just as actively when we sin and reject his ways as when we, by his mercy, turn to him and are joined to Jesus by the Spirit. Indeed he is pure Act - as someone famously said.

...the people feared the LORD and put their trust in him and in Moses his collaborator.

After the death of Moses the collaborator of the LORD, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ aide: “Moses my collaborator is dead…Be careful to obey all the law my collaborator Moses gave you…

And now, O God of Israel, let your word that you promised your collaborator David my father come true…

...Collaborate with the LORD your God, so that his fierce anger will turn away from you…

...Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: “My collaborators will eat, but you will go hungry; my collaborators will drink, but you will go thirsty; my collaborators will rejoice, but you will be put to shame…

(The above are just a few quotes from that bible thingy with the word SERVANT replaced by the word COLLABORATOR. You’ve heard of the bible, surely. It’s a collection of Dear Diary accounts from various cavemen and their personal interpretations of what they felt their god might be.)

What pains me most about +Tutu’s comments is he is making us equal with God, making us gods ourselves; that we could bargain with God to decide what is right and wrong, what we can and will agree to do, and what’s in it for us if we do decide to work with God.

We do not collaborate. We are called. We either answer and SERVE or we do not. We do not COLLABORATE. That is a deist thought.

“I want to say ‘thank you’ to Bishop Jefferts Schori for her graciousness in the face of very considerable provocation in some things that are happening in our communion,” Tutu said.
Ahem…just who’s provoking who?

It is not a question of “God’s Action” or “our action.”  I do not doubt that God could cause pizza and hamburgers to come from the air.  I know that God feeds the poor and He does not need our help.  We, on the other hand, do need to help God.  We need to learn to submit our selfish and sinful ways to God and to let Him remake us into people who cooperate with Him by our free will. 

So, Bishop Tutu is right in that God does wait for us to help Him.  But he is wrong in that God needs our help.  God designed us to work best when we depend on His grace for our daily bread and spend our time and resources helping those who need our help rather than relying on our own resources to help ourselves.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder

God designed us to work best when we depend on His grace for our daily bread and spend our time and resources helping those who need our help rather than relying on our own resources to help ourselves.

For my money, this is a word of truth to this whole situation.

In his time +Tutu , truly was and is hero,but of late he has become a annoying,heretic,moon-bat,spewing out semi-coherent, jibberish and crap-tastic theological musings. He should enjoy a nice and graceful retirement and shut up and go away.

I like how the RC Archbishop of Kansas is collaborating with God.  I suspect it is the kind of collaboration of which the Lord approves.

Senility is so sad.  Does this poor, worn-out, old man have no one to care for him?  He probably can no longer differentiate among “partners”, “collaborators”, and “servants”.

Other unbright quotes from the former primate of South Africa:

-“If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.” [Creating God in his own image.]

-“A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.” [I’m quite confident that Sabrina the Wonderdog recognizes that I am something distinctly different that what she is—a person.  Using that rationale, I guess that makes her a person!]

-“We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.”  [The first part may be true—God, not us, is sovereign.  The second part is not only wrong but an insult to Christ—God’s standard is in fact perfection, which is why it took a sinless Christ to atone for our sins.]

Trust me when I tell you I am not the biggest TuTu fan in the world. A friend was there for KJS & got what she expected , a well thought out ( for a change) social gospel in which she didn’t stick her foot in her mouth ( this time).

“His is always the first move”

Good way to put it.