Undeception

I mentioned in passing in “Sinners in the hands of an ___ God” that I think universalism has the tendency to overshoot our focus in terms of practical Christian living (Richard Beck agrees). Although I doubt that it does this significantly more than most preoccupations with the hereafter, I do want to suggest that one particular pitfall that people in conservative Christian leadership are keen to point out to those of us who are less traditional in our soteriology actually has some validity to it.

It’s this: I’ve found that Christians whose theology has left the Fundamentalist/Evangelical staging grounds are simultaneously the most likely to lean toward radical inclusivism and the least likely to talk about personal sin. In fact, I expect that many of them won’t get much further than this paragraph before saying, “Not interested. Can’t we get on with talking about how wrong and silly conservative Christians are?”

Now, the reasoned universalists I’m familiar with do not fall into this category nearly as much as those who sort of end up in essential universalism by default after leaving the mainstream Evangelical Christianity herd. “God is love; God won’t condemn; God will give us all bear hugs, especially if we advocate for the marginalized.” It seems that those in this latter group allow the idea of God’s forgiveness of sin to morph into an assumption about God’s disregarding sins – well, sins other than fundamentalist bigotry, anyway. But I think this is a reflex of a faulty view of what constitutes sin in the first place.

The libertarian/classical liberal political philosophy is often summarized as the conviction that, so long as an action does not adversely affect another’s life, liberty, or property, no one has the right to interfere with another’s actions, even when operating under the name of “government”. It’s often noted that while the American Right only honors that philosophy in economic matters, the American Left instead champions that ideal in social matters: let them sleep with whomever they want to, smoke or inject themselves with whatever they want to, and you’re probably a closeted theocrat if you vote otherwise! Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that many theological progressives (who highly correlate with those on the political Left) give the impression that if it doesn’t directly hurt my neighbor, it’s not really sin — or even if it is sin of some sort, it’s not the sort we need to obsess over. Without stating it explicitly, the implication is that God doesn’t poke His head too far into your private business. Love your neighbor and don’t hurt anyone, and you’ll probably be fine.

But if, as I’ve argued in my two earlier posts on this topic (1, 2), sin is conceived as that behavior which is characteristic of a damaged will, our salvation is best thought of as healing and liberation that helps us avoid sin by all means possible through participation in the life of the Spirit.

I agree with my fellow post-conservative Christians that personal (unobtrusive, non-violent, “libertarian”-friendly) sins don’t steam God one little bit. After all, He’s not a peevish tyrant who just arbitrarily decided that He doesn’t like certain things and then judges people for it, and nor is He bound to uphold some esoteric perfectionistic criterion that exists external to Himself. If He hates sin, He hates it for a perfectly good reason.

Under the disease model, sin is bad for the same reason that bleeding from an open wound is bad: it’s a symptom of a problem that, left alone or ignored, produces an even bigger problem. Even surface wounds can turn ugly if left untreated, and in the same way that internal bleeding is anything but desirable, even secret or relatively “contained” sinning is unhealthy. God wants us well, and to the extent that we’re happy to retain our sicknesses, we’re evincing an illness of the will that we should hasten to surrender to our Father’s healing hands much as a child runs to her parents when she thinks she might have broken her arm (even if she hurt it doing something she shouldn’t have been doing).

It’s temptingly convenient to do as many public figures do and separate pet “vices” from the type of moral shortcomings that we feel actually need to be addressed. But as long as the behavior is recognized as a “vice” or “character flaw” it should be rejected, not coddled. Our own personal holiness is something worth intently striving for, and to allay the fears of theological progressives, that concern does not compete with compassion for the hurting and marginalized: attuning our heart to God’s heart will purify and deepen the motivation behind our benevolent actions. And remember, the founder of our faith emphasized personal righteousness no less than he did compassion.

If all this makes me seem like something of a Puritan universalist, I need to clarify something. This is a much more positive view than that of the Puritans or the old time holiness preachers. While I do believe we need to be diligent about identifying the flaws in our own character, where the predominant view of sin goes wrong is in the implication that we should always be obsessed with hunting it down in ourselves and others. Our goal is not to agonize over every sinful inclination but to develop the mind of Christ within ourselves. We cultivate good health, not just the elimination of sicknesses; treatment for illness is the last resort, whereas prevention through healthy lifestyles is how we occupy ourselves. We don’t fear sin for judgment’s sake, because God intends to heal us of it rather than smite or reject us for it; we avoid sin by chasing down perfection, focusing on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, reputable, and praiseworthy. As I was told long ago in youth group, the point of Christian freedom isn’t to allow us to get as close to the “sin” line as we possibly can get without stepping over it, but to allow us to make all haste to leave it as far behind as possible and pursue righteousness.

The Bible occasionally presents ancient, outdated, and arcane standards for what constitutes sin; in fact, quite often it’s referring to breaking certain aspects of Torah, which most Christians no longer put any stock in. But I am uncomfortable throwing the Bible out as an educator in areas of “reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.” Granted, we can’t proof-text sin: behavior is not sinful simply because it’s spoken of unfavorably – or even named as sin – in any particular verse. When someone in Scripture condemns a certain behavior it is only sinful if there’s an actual rationale underlying its biblical censure. Remember, I don’t think God dictates our behavior based on an inscrutable, immutable, abstract, and essentially arbitrary Cosmic Code of Conduct. This much I get. But I do wonder if we liberals should take the admonitions of our faith’s forefathers a bit more seriously; for instance, I can certainly understand why the author of Ephesians might not have been just a prudish killjoy when he advised his audience against drunkenness.  I also want to suggest that we should tread a little more lightly in lifting biblical bans on behavior even when at first glance we fail to see why the biblical authors considered it problematic; for instance, do we have a good enough reason to override the biblical censure on “coarse language”, even if it doesn’t seem like such an awful thing to us? More often than not, I find that there are virtues we all believe in that properly motivate bans on the behaviors that populate those lists of sins we find (e.g.) in Paul’s epistles.

So yes, sometimes upon reflection clarity will surface about where the “sin” line should be drawn: but don’t forget for a minute that there is such a line. Sin that is destructive of others is obviously wrong: but so is self-destructive sin. Jesus reportedly taught that even thinking sinful thoughts is sin — it is against God’s nature and symptomatic of our diseased wills. I would caution against making too firm a distinction between violent sin that hurts others and contained, internal, personal “flaws”: jealousy, bitterness, pride, lackadaisical attitudes about sex, the impulse to call people names and seize each opportunity to demonize their character or intelligence — all of these tendencies must be steadfastly resisted because not only are they contrary to God’s character, if left untreated they have real world effects. Mark and Matthew record Jesus, echoing Proverbs, warning that what our minds are occupied with will eventually spill out.

Even when we give up the idea that sin is some sort of legal offense against God, we can recognize that He desperately wants to uproot it from us with our cooperation. And to the extent that we don’t share His concern, we should submit ourselves to Him for the renewing of our minds.

Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.

~ George MacDonald

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This is Part 3 of a series. Here are the other posts:

Part 1: Sinners in the hands of a ____ God

Part 2: God’s Awful Mistake

I’ve recently had the chance to introduce my children to a book I loved as a kid: it’s called Henry’s Awful Mistake, by Robert Quackenbush.

Here’s how it begins:

“The day Henry the Duck asked his friend Clara over for supper, he found an ant in the kitchen. The ant would have to go. Henry was afraid Clara would see it and think he didn’t keep a clean house.”

Henry's Awful Mistake by Robert Quackenbush

So what does Henry do? Naturally, he picks up a frying pan and smashes the ant. Or maybe not — the ant is rather clever and evasive (or Henry’s just a really bad shot). The book progresses with Henry trying his best to dispose of the ant before his dinner date shows up. Unfortunately for Henry, he becomes more obsessed with killing the ant than he is about keeping his house tidy: as he strikes at the elusive ant repeatedly with increasingly destructive force, he carelessly begins dismantling his house!

Increasingly exasperated by the ant’s uncanny ability to elude him, he finally espies the ant sitting on a pipe that’s been exposed behind a wall he has just smashed a hole in. Henry misses the ant, but he doesn’t miss the pipe, which (spoiler alert) ends up flooding his now completely desolate house. In his attempt to destroy the ant and thereby prove his fastidious care for his home, Henry has utterly destroyed his house and profoundly proved the opposite.

As I pointed out in my last post, viewing God’s hatred of sin as fundamentally a reaction to its being a challenge to His authority that He cannot leave unpunished or a failure to live up to a perfect standard of righteousness that deserves the death penalty usually ends up conceptualizing God as in some way bound to condemn sinners because of sin. “But of course sinners are condemned because of sin!” That’s such a basic understanding of Christianity that it might seem odd to think that I would challenge it. But I’m not going to challenge it so much as nuance it properly: I don’t believe God “condemns” in the sense of irrevocable damnation, but He may well have an interest in “keeping after class” those of us who need to have their problems rooted out. Even this He does as a doctor cares for a patient, not as an irrational duck bludgeoning his walls with a hammer in an effort to win the Good Housekeeping Award.

The teaching that our sinful nature is an illness isn’t some post-modern rationalization: it’s found both in Scripture and in ancient church tradition. It’s even occasionally affirmed by those who also affirm the models I’ve been critiquing. Witness the Lutheran Augsburg Confession:

That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers’ wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit. [emphasis mine]

My own “confession” is that the incongruity of this baffles me: why would any child born with a hereditary illness warrant “wrath” — apart, perhaps, from self-loathing for bringing such a child into the world? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater…bathwater that was dirty before you even put the baby into it.

If sin is the result of a sickness of the will, every one of us who sins is dreadfully in need of God’s saving power. But this salvation isn’t to spare us from punishment awaiting us due to His wrath: salvation is God’s simmering rage concentrated on burning away at the parasitical urge for self-destruction endemic to us all. Gradually, painstakingly, and in cooperation with the part of our will that remains functional, God through sanctification is curing the diseased part of our minds that prevents us from living as the healthy souls He wants us to be. Our salvation is about God loving us enough to pry from our grasp our characteristically human inclinations toward choosing the way of death; what it’s not about is God magnanimously exempting small selections of us from being collateral damage of His war on sin.

As should be obvious by now, just because I don’t believe God is in any way obligated to damn us because of our sins doesn’t mean that I think sin or even divine discipline for sin are passé concepts. This seems to put me at odds with many of my more progressive friends. I’ll have more to say to them in my last post on this topic.

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This is Part 2 of a series. Here are the other posts:

Part 1: Sinners in the hands of a ____ God

Part 3: Is righteousness underrated by liberal Christians?

In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing my views on sin and God’s reaction to it. But first it’s necessary to define it. When we talk about sin, what do we mean?

Can “sin” be defined as a mistake or error in judgment? That is what politicians admit to when they perpetrate white-collar crimes, cheat on their wives, or whatever they’re trying to admit to without getting crucified for. This doesn’t seem to be quite adequate: misappropriating funds for personal gain or violating your spouse’s trust are hardly “whoopsie” moments — there’s some sort of moral or ethical violation going on. And killing someone because they ran in front of your vehicle is certainly not a violation of morality, so intentionality is obviously an important component. I think “a consciously undertaken moral violation” is probably a safe working definition for sin for the purposes of these posts.

(Note, of course, that to be complete we’d have to then define “moral”, but I think Christians generally agree that there are certain moral absolutes, and Christians are my intended audience here.)

The more interesting question is God’s relationship to our consciously undertaken violations of morality, such as lying, cheating, stealing, committing adultery, murder, etc. Which of the following do you find yourself resonating with the most?

1. God’s objection: God hates sin because it is a challenge to His position of supremacy over the universe. God takes great personal offense at sin.
• God’s disposition toward sinners: Sinners are primarily competitors to God needing to be brought under subjection to His lordship.
• The sinner’s predicament: Because the sinner’s will is corrupt, he stands in danger of God’s wrath intended to restore the hierarchy of Creator to creation. Most of all, he needs a miraculous way to submit to God.
• God’s response: Rebellion is a slap in the face of Almighty God. God responds to these slaps in the face according to His nature and relationship with the sinner: specifically, His anger is only mitigated by consideration of the sinner’s submission to Himself through Christ. As Scot McKnight recently put it, “Sin is about usurping, and for us Christians that usurping takes on a powerful christological shape in the NT: it’s about Jesus, it’s about following him. When we choose not to follow Jesus, we choose to become usurpers.”
2. God’s objection: God hates sin because it is a transgression against justice. God sees sin chiefly as a legal offense.
• God’s disposition toward sinners: Sinners are primarily criminals deserving punishment.
• The sinner’s predicament: Because the sinner’s will is corrupt, he stands in danger of God’s wrath, which is necessary to satisfy justice. Most of all, he needs acquittal; penal substitution will accomplish this.
• God’s response: God’s response to sin, whether in punishment or in mercy, is necessitated and determined by an intolerable dissatisfaction that results from the violation of a moral code of justice. Jesus’ atonement was God’s way of satisfying that code of justice so that His loving and merciful nature could be satisfied. As John Frye recently put it, “[If] God is just, he will pay back trouble. This isn’t ugly, sinful, fitful vengeance. God is just and will pay back.”
  
3. God’s objection: God hates sin because it is a destructive force that interferes with His loving intentions toward us.
• God’s disposition toward sinners: Sinners are primarily those in need of God’s healing; He is only truly satisfied when the will that commits sin has been repaired.
• The sinner’s predicament: Because the sinner’s will is damaged (although not entirely corrupt), the sinner stands in need of rescue.
• God’s response: Sin is both the effect and the cause of a will bent toward immorality. Acts of willful immoral behavior are not imputed to the sinner as a property of the one who commits the act, but as symptoms of a misguided will, which is then warped further by sin. God desires to heal the impulses that would reject Him.

These are certainly not airtight categories, and in fact many of us assume more than one of them on different occasions; for instance, some would say that rebellion (#1) needs to be punished primarily because it is a violation of justice (#2). Indeed, #1 and #2 are much more compatible with one another than either are with #3. Be that as it may, I list them as I have because they are broadly three different and conceivably independent explanations for what accounts for God’s reaction to sin that drive other differences in our theology.

Options #1 and #2 both show the warped will as an integral aspect of the person, and God will not change the person. (But more on that in another post.) When God creates people, He either allows or mandates that their wills become so warped as to choose other than the perfect good; He is then obliged to allow their corrupt wills to rein supreme, even though it means their destruction.

Notice that this holds true regardless of the possible libertarian free will defense, in which people say that God wouldn’t want to violate our free will in order to save us: if our free wills are such that choosing evil seems like a good option, there is something wrong with either our wills or our reasoning capacities, and God is responsible for both. When His creation falls prey to the self-destructive wills He provided them, God (a) may, (b) must, or (c) is glad to (depending on your theology) wash His hands of the affair, granting “Thy will be done.”

C. S. Lewis’s contention that God permits the unrepentant to leave Him behind for eternity to be self-satisfied apart from Himself assumes that issues of the will are issues that God has no intent to remedy; but God cannot be let off the hook as easily as Lewis would have liked. If we “choose” hell, it’s only because God set the deck against us. (And might I add that if he’d read his claimed master George MacDonald even a little more closely, he’d have noticed this fatal flaw.)

If, as the Orthodox have always proclaimed, sin is sickness of the soul eating away at the children of God and a corrupt will is an aberration, God’s behavior in the “sinners choose hell” explanation is directly equivalent to your watching idly as a mentally ill person deliberately walks up to and disturbs a rattlesnake, followed by your shaking your head sadly at their poor choice and the fact that they will soon die of poison. “It’s a shame, but it was her decision.” If there is a perfect, absolute good – which few Christians would deny – then without their Creator’s miraculous intervention humans are either incapable of recognizing it or incapable of choosing it. Neither can be credibly blamed on the sinner. God must assume responsibility; at least supralapsarians are consistent here.

For me, the only explanation is that God intends to heal all because the sin is the root problem, not the sinner. The more damaged the will, the more He’ll feel responsible for repairing it: the further the lost sheep strays, the more necessary He’ll find it to leave the ninety-nine. So yeah, I’m a universalist, for this and other reasons. But that’s not the only reason I’m writing this.

In fact, I’m convinced that focusing on the end has the danger of extending our scope too far to be of practical good in the immediate; as I’ll argue in an upcoming post, the cancer of sin and the disorder of the fallen will cannot simply be shrugged off and assumed to be wiped away without consequence in the distant future of cheap Nirvana.

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This is Part 1 of a series. Here are the other posts:

Part 2: God’s Awful Mistake

Part 3: Is righteousness underrated by liberal Christians?