In his Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain wrote that he couldn’t understand why, in the instance of Onan, God was satisfied with punishing him alone. Why not set to “slaying all the inhabitants for three hundred miles around — they being innocent of offense, and therefore the very ones he would usually slay”? By this time embittered beyond repair toward the God of his childhood, Twain quipped: “If he had a motto, it would have read, ‘Let no innocent person escape.’”

Do you ever find, in a moment of contentment and satisfaction, when all seems right in your world, that something dark brushes across your thoughts, an expectation of disaster? Somewhere in the odd amalgam of angry Baptist and sterile Moravian sermonizing that comprised my religious upbringing, I acquired the sense that sooner or later, God is going to get me. Further, the odds of this vengeful God striking increase with my immediate happiness. If things are good right now, just wait — you’ll get your little red wagon fixed soon enough.

When I was older, I read Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which is partial Gospel at best, and on the lips of a closet sadist (some pastors are fond of delivering this sermon to their congregations), horrific. It crystallized my view of God for the next ten years — He is real, yes, but he’s really, really angry, and most of us in these pews are in big trouble when He finally satiates his need for vengeance by watching us — men, women, and children — writhe in agony for eternity. When I was still older, and just finally coming into a genuine knowledge of and faith in God, he let my daughter die.

So it’s been hard to see past these filthy windows — of my own heart as well as the twisted and half-baked theologies of men — to the God whose son promised: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” It’s been hard to accept that God is not like H.L. Mencken’s Puritans, “haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Just as the Prosperity Doctrine errs by assuming that the Lord’s overriding goal on this earth is my immediate comfort, I am wrong to assume that God wants me to suffer. He ordains pleasure and suffering in a manner beyond my reasoning, and when I cling to him, I am brought to a place where peace persists. It is just as Paul wrote: “In any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.”

This is what I recall when I read the Bible, but that tacit theology of doom persists, the lingering scar that kept me away from church for fifteen years. It is the dark-winged thing that sweeps across the landscape when things are good, as they are now. But even our wounds have a purpose, I suppose, and the purpose of this is to bring me back to that great refuge from pernicious theologies, which is prayer.

Here are links to Tony’s first two posts in this series: “Tacit theologies,” “Tacit theologies II.”