Read-thinking

"Imagine this scenario: Parents from around the world send their children to a rustic camp set in the midst of Kentucky's Bluegrass Region for the summer. All one hundred children became infected with a deadly virus during the first week of the camp and have but one month to live. Fortunately, a specialist who has seen a similar outbreak in New Mexico knows of a treatment: the Yucca cactus, when ground to a pulp, blended with vinegar and ingested over a period of three weeks, will completely counteract the virus and return the children to full health.

Unfortunately, every single child finds the smell of the concoction so utterly repulsive that no amount of coaxing by even the best of counselors succeeds in getting anyone to eat any of it. To make matters worse, the virus somehow drives the children mad, prompting them to lash out in foul language at those trying to help them and to accuse their counselors of gross misconduct. Luckily, yet another specialist develops a serum that, when injected hypodermically, creates within the child an insatiable passion for eating the Yucca mash.

Now imagine that new of the virus reaches the alarmed parents. The camp director immediately sends a letter reassuring them that he loves all their children, that he is offering to all their children the life-saving Yucca mash in liberal quantities, that he will supply this expensive preparation without charge and that all children will be brought to the cafeteria three times a day and strongly urged to eat.

Three months later, the parents arrive in the Bluegrass to retrieve their children. But at the campsite, they are stunned to discover that seventy-five children have died from the virus. Interrogating the director, they discover that the life-saving food could not work its wonders unless the child was injected with the appetite stimulant. On further questioning they discover that the director had chosen to inject only twenty-five children with the serum, though he had an unlimited supply at his disposal. To say nothing about their anger and grief, the parents are utterly perplexed!

In chorus they immediately challenge the claim made by the camp director in the letter they had received, asking, "How can you claim to have loved the seventy-five dead children if you could have saved them but didn't?" We can imagine just how unconvincing some of the director's answers might be: "But I offered the Yucca mash liberally, freely and passionately." Yes, but all this talk about the merits of the mixture misses the issue of the serum! "But the children are to blame, since they ate exactly what they wanted and violently rejected my help!" Yes, but you fully controlled exactly what each child wanted! "But note how much attention I lavished on these children in the last weeks of their lives." And you call this love - to provide the most exciting camp activities to a child as she dies, while you withhold the very serum of life?

The director's claim to love all children rings hollow at best, deceptive at worst. If love will not employ all available means to rescue someone from ultimate loss, it is hard to hear the announcement of universal love as good news. Indeed, it is hard to hear it as love at all. In our judgment, it becomes meaningless to claim that God wishes to save all while also insisting that God refrains from making the salvation of all possible [footnote]. What are we to make of a God whose walk does not match his talk?

...[In the Calvinist interpretation,] the true intentions of God cannot be discerned from his words."

Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I Am Not A Calvinist (2004: 54-5, 57) (emphases theirs).

On another note, I have about two to three books I've borrowed from friends here that I want to finish reading within this month, so I can return them before I leave Tucson. On top of school books and writing papers. Speedy eyes and spongy brain!!!