John 20.11-18 ‘God has to die,’ said David Peters a former army chaplain who served in Iraq. The God we learn about in Junior Church, who always keeps us safe, who can overcome everything that life could possibly throw at us, who makes sure that love and goodness always come out on top, ‘has to shatter into a thousand pieces, die, disappear or change.’ Only then can our belief in God survive the bad things that happen. Only then can we find a grown-up sort of faith. When he was serving with the army, Peters was inspired by ' Paul Tillich , a German American theologian who’d also served as a chaplain - but during the first world war. The carnage of that war and its heavy psychological toll pushed Tillich to the brink of his faith and beyond. Tillich hit rock bottom and... came to see God as ... a god who met him in darkness when the other version of God had proved trivial and inadequate.' Shattering into a thousand pieces sounds like a bad thing, but actually it can b
A blog by a Methodist minister in the UK