Undeception

All flaws duly acknowledged, I still loves me some C.S. Lewis. He is the reason I am where I am today (whether that’s credit or blame is up to you to decide, of course!). His thoughts here have been articulated time and again on my blog in my words, but I am glad to present them here in Lewis’s well-spun words.

Dear Mr. Beversluis,

Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.

To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on. Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s, Paley’s) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.

But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not consult our consciences by trying to feel a thing good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God’s answer might be ‘What is that to thee?’ The passage may not be ‘addressed to our (your or my) condition’ at all.

I think we are v. much in agreement, aren’t we?

Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis

Big thanks to Alex Smith at the Evangelical Universalist message board for this gem (and David Baldwin for tipping me off).

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.

________________

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?

You all know how much I love George MacDonald’s theological writings, but that’s not how I first became acquainted with him.

Image via Wikipedia

In his day he was much better known for his works of fiction. He is now noted especially for his faerie stories (precursors to fantasy), including Phantastes, which C.S. Lewis credited with laying the groundwork for his eventual conversion (he said his “imagination…was baptized” by reading it). Other popular books include At the Back of the North Wind, David Elginbrod, and my personal favorite, Lilith.

Also, in addition to his many sermons in the Unspoken Sermon series from which I usually draw for my regular MacDonald feature, he wrote a few other strictly theological works. Moreover, it is said that he always thought of himself primarily as a poet.

All of his writings are now in the public domain and freely available via Project Gutenberg and countless other websites. Because of this, many editions of most of his individual works are available on mobile devices and services such as Kindle or Google Books.

However, I was glad when someone directed me to this collection of his complete works, over 50 works in all, available on Kindle with an active table of contents. I thought I’d pass it along to you, in case you’re one of those who simply won’t read books on the computer and/or would like to have access to all his published works, some of which I didn’t even know existed. For $1.79, I consider the ability to have all of his writings in one place to be a steal.

You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.

~ St. Augustine

There are profound theological implications for one’s understanding of the fate of sinners depending on whether one believes Augustine’s words. Was Augustine correct?

Much of the church’s soteriology in the last several centuries has taken its cue from the very old notion, found in Augustine, that the will of every human is utterly opposed to God. But stated this way, that stance takes no position on the more important issue of whether this state of opposition is intrinsic to us. Many Protestants have mistaken Augustine’s opposition to Pelagius’ tabula rasa as implying that humanity is intrinsically opposed to God, but even Luther’s own terminology recognized that our wills are not naturally predisposed toward enmity with God: rather, our wills are in bondage. The universality of the bondage of the will undercuts the instinct of some among the Reformed who will be quick to suggest that Augustine’s words refer only to the elect. Remember, Augustine was the most important advocate of what we call Original Sin: his contention was that there was a vacuum in every human soul that could only be plugged by God. We are all fallen, but we are fallen into a restlessness of heart, not into a complete rejection of that aspect of our hearts. We are fallen into a bondage of the will.

For me, this basic belief – that whatever fallenness all flesh is heir to is a corruption rather than a default orientation intended by our Creator – frames the whole debate over the fate of those who die in rebellion against God. The human species is designed such that it finds rest only in its home, and its home is with God.

At the outset, I cannot believe that God made people in a certain way and now condemns a majority of them to suffer irredeemably for it. There is no room in my heart or mind for such a view of hell and the afterlife, nor room in this post to persuade those committed to the idea. If you are content with that view, I will not pry it from your fingers, though I hope better for you; I will look elsewhere.

A more Arminian view (although you needn’t be a five-point Arminian to hold this view) is that many sinners will reject God despite having been presented the alternative and being given a genuine choice. They are responsible for their own damnation by defying and resisting God, who (more reluctantly than in the Calvinist view) sends them to hell as just punishment. But to grant this we have to grant a few things that I find problematic. To begin with, I have severe problems with calling a punishment meted out in mere retribution, without any intent or hope for exacting compensation and reconciliation, a “just punishment”.

Perhaps the most popular alternative to that conception of hell as divine satisfaction of justice through punishment of sins, a conception present in both Arminian and Calvinist forms, is that of C. S. Lewis. His famous understanding of hell as outlined especially in The Great Divorce avoids my objection by contending that hell is not as much divine punishment as it is the result of a final and irreconcilable discord between God and sinners that, crucially, is attributable not to God but to a conscious and persistent choice on the part of sinners. For Lewis, those who finally choose to reject God will never, even given endless opportunities in their post-mortem state (the door is “locked from the inside”), take Him up on His offer of reconciliation. To those who wind up in hell, their selfishness is their home and their reward, and God mercifully lets them go with a sigh and a “thy will be done.” This is Lewis’s hell.

That may be a satisfactory solution to my first objection to the Arminian view, but there are pitfalls shared by both the Arminian view and Lewis’s. Once you grant the position of Augustine, Luther, etc. that God crafted the human soul to be oriented even in its fallenness toward home with Himself, you’ve got to satisfactorily answer the question of why certain souls would never ultimately find their way home. I have trouble accepting that anyone who knew enough about hell to make a reasoned and responsible choice would choose hell: these views require either that God callously accepts the impaired decision of an impaired will or that He designed some of us to have wills that, even if let out of their chains long enough to make a free decision, would point in the polar opposite direction from Himself. We have to ask why a God who loves us all would make some of us in such a way that we would not be attracted to His goodness, preferring a destiny where we’d waste away, all to His own bereavement. Would you have a child if you knew beforehand that he would hate you and die in selfishness and bitterness at a young age? Finally, notice that in these views, God is made out to be an incomplete victor in His war against sin and death. Neither view is much of an alternative to the Reformed one, which after all has a certain terrible logic to it.

The best solution I am aware of comes from the man C. S. Lewis regarded as his mentor (posthumously). George MacDonald’s view was that, because God created humans in such a way that our deepest yearnings are for communion with our Maker, God’s purposes would not – could not – be successful unless those children He made remembered where they belonged and eventually turned back homeward. God is the Great Physician who heals all our diseases, even if they have penetrated deep into our wills and desires. Inasmuch as our wills are misshapen, God’s intention and chosen responsibility is to restore them, through what will undoubtedly be a painful process for all involved (this is MacDonald’s “hell”), but it will eventually be accomplished in all alike. As the greatest and highest objective Goodness, God is wholly and utterly lovely to all He has made. He has never made a soul that could become so blind as to be utterly incapable of recognizing Him as Father, and MacDonald doubted to the extreme that there ever existed a soul that would not be irresistibly drawn to Him and His goodness once it did recognize Him. Our wills are bound, bound by our biology, bound by our cultures, habits, and prejudices: what else would a loving Father do but make every effort to free His children from that bondage? “The will of God should be done. Man should be free—not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him.” Neither a final death (annihilationism in its various forms) nor eternal death (an eternal hell) would be acceptable to God, because it is Death, not the wayward will of one of His children, still less His child itself, that is truly His enemy; He intends to put Death under His feet once and for all, swallowing it up in Life that He may be all in all.

Conceptions of salvation, beliefs about the fate of the damned, and interpretations of biblical eschatology — as nearly all doctrines — have tolerated variations and fluctuations throughout church history, but what has remained a constant underpinning of Christianity is an understanding of God as quintessentially good, loving, and just. For my part, I cannot reconcile the latter bedrock assumption with any of the views discussed above except that of MacDonald. While I cannot claim certainty that his stance is true, I find it to be the least damaging to the character of God as understood by Christians throughout the ages, and with him I believe that God would rather us think the best of His character as reflected in that majority Christian testimony than doggedly defend the factuality of every depiction of Him we can find in the Bible.

Moreover, if the problem of pain, which is probably every bit as much responsible for strife, heartache, and savage acts of sin as it is a result of them, has any solution, it’s in a God who will emerge as the victor over suffering by conquering it and redeeming it for the good of everyone He allowed to endure it. Scoff if you like, but my heart was restless until it found its rest in this God, and I will cling to that hope until my dying breath.

This is a post in response to a blog that does not allow comments. I’d have preferred to have this discussion over there, but here we are.

Over at The Boar’s Head Tavern, the Fearsome Tycoon attempts to apply an argumentum ad consequentiam in reductio ad absurdum’s clothing to a statement in my last post on homosexuality. I wrote:

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with homosexuality, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

He proffers these substitutions to show why I’m wrong:

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with cohabiting before marriage, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with divorcing your spouse to marry your true love, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

A growing number of Christians are finding it harder and harder to believe that God has a fundamental problem with not believing in the Virgin Birth, even when they do not accept it as ideal.

Note the implication that no one may begin to disbelieve anything that he accepts as axiomatic without the whole thing going to hell (literally).

He seems to infer from my statement that I think we should believe whatever it is a growing number of Christians believe. To this I say, You may be in a tavern, but get your face out of the mug, sir! Even a cursory glance through my post shows that I do not argue this or anything like it. He mistakes his own error for my own: unlike he apparently does, I do not assume that acceptance by “the right” people (be they “a growing number of Christians”, an historic council, or whomever) is determinative of the truth itself.

The following statement from his post illustrates what I mean, indicating that he digested very little of the rest of my post:

If the teachings of Christ and the commands of God don’t matter for church fellowship, then nothing does.

It appears he decided not to take me up on my suggestion to step and back and at least pretend that he could be wrong in his interpretations. The entire point of my post was that what precisely constitutes “the teachings of Christ and the commands of God” is not something we can blithely assume to be settled, indisputable, and equivalent to what we already happen to believe. This is not to say that we can’t be confident of our current beliefs but that a truly humble spirit will keep the hair-trigger heresy gun in the holster.

At one point he does indicate that he heard my point about being patient with people who have other interpretations of Scripture; it seems he just decides he’s not too keen on the idea. He sarcastically remarks that those of us who recognize that the Bible isn’t crystal clear on every important point “have decided that God didn’t really teach much we could understand, and so most of what what we believe and practice is just stuff we made up.” The reason he disagrees with this is not stated, but the thing that’s so irksome about this sort of objection is the myopic logic, “God teaches things clearly; therefore, whatever I think is clear is what God teaches.” That logic, and the assumption that “perspicuity” is a right for all believers guaranteed by God, reminds me of a statement I’ve quoted on this blog before. Ironically it comes from the very man the Boar’s Head Tavern claims as its “patron saint”: C. S. Lewis.

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalists’ view of the Bible and the Roman Catholics view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this. For we are mortals and do not know what is best for us, and it is dangerous to prescribe what God must have done-especially when we cannot, for the life of us, see that He has after all done it.

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wise-crack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject”. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam.

Lack of certainty can be a real pain, but I’d rather put up with less certainty about even things that are absolutely true than blow full-steam ahead into a presumption of the correctness of my tradition’s interpretations without the humility that God expects.

Two misconceptions I’d like to clear up. First, I was not personally arguing that capitalism was equivalent to the sin of Ananias and Sapphira, just as I was not campaigning against women in ministry or charging interest: I was playing devil’s advocate, and I’m sure I didn’t make the best biblical case against capitalism. My point remains: there are those who find ample biblical grounds for condemning capitalism.

Next, it was stated that my argument “basically boils down to, ‘If you’re born that way, we can’t possibly tell you not to have sex.’ ” I never mentioned celibacy or not: saying that someone can be a homosexual and a Christian doesn’t itself argue (and at very least, my post never even insinuated) that “free love” or cohabitation is acceptable. An acknowledgment of the fact that some homosexuals are participants in the Christian faith is no more an “argument” against celibacy than acknowledging the fact that some heterosexuals are participants in the Christian faith.

But because the Fearsome Tycoon does not suffer from uncertainty about his doctrines, he proclaims that he’d have no trouble ruling out fellowship with anyone who disagrees with him on the subject of when the Sabbath should be observed, whether charging interest is an acceptable practice, whether socialism or capitalism is preferable, or whether women can be in ministry. Still, I extend the right hand of Christian fellowship to the Fearsome Tycoon, even though he’s given every indication that he’ll consider reciprocation tantamount to accepting sexual promiscuity, divorce, and a denial of the Virgin Birth.

Sheesh. Maybe there’s a reason he hangs out at a tavern with that particular name.

Our model for intrafaith dialogue?

I am more convinced than ever that many Christians suffer from a massive misunderstanding of the nature of justice.

Now for the record, I’m no Rob Bell groupie (I’ve never read anything he’s written), and I certainly don’t intend to critique any and every critique of him or his ideas. Nor do I want this to come off as an endorsement of soteriological inclusivism or universalism, but as a plea for a reevaluation of what justice means.

To begin with, this “remake” of the infamous Love Wins promo video (the makers insist that they don’t intend to parody) illustrates the problem well.

Source: YouTube

First, I’d like to thank those involved for the spirit in which this video was made. If there’s nothing else to commend it, I can at least be happy that it’s not so appallingly smarmy like that one popular parody many of us have seen (which I won’t even bother linking to here).

It starts off by turning Rob Bell’s question about Gandhi around: whereas Bell asked how right it would be for God to condemn a good man like Gandhi, this video asks how right it would be for God to let Hitler off the hook. I’m beginning to think that Godwin’s Law deserves a corollary: ”As a discussion of non-exclusivistic soteriology grows longer, the probability of an appeal to emotion regarding Hitler approaches 1.” Call it the Lovewins Law.

The video goes on to ask how the bad things that those of us who aren’t genocidal maniacs do can legitimately be distinguished from the acts of genocidal maniacs. On that, all I have to say is that if your system of thought gives parity to the life of a decent yet non-Christian teenager killed in a car-wreck and the life of Hitler, it’s up for examination during the next common sense audit. But that’s part of the problem with this video: it pulls Hitler out as a trump card, but then tries to argue that to God, we’re all as bad as Hitler, which of course makes it useless as a trump card.

Many objectors to universalism, like the makers of the above video, do so on the grounds that the victims of evil acts, such as Holocaust victims, must be vindicated if God is going to show Himself just. This is an appeal to our almost unavoidable emotions, especially anger, toward wrongdoers. Hey, if someone were to kill my family and I had the immediate chance to kill him in response, I’m the first to admit that I’d probably not be able to avoid doing just that, and probably as cruelly and as painfully as I was able to. It’s part of our instincts, a social defense mechanism that’s no doubt played into our survival as a species: eliminate even small-scale offenders for large-scale protection.

So don’t get me wrong: wanting to make sure that offenders pay is understandable. It’s completely human. And I mean completely: it’s not divine.

It should be a dead give-away that the predominating view of justice is somewhat askew when we see the line blurred in all sorts of TV and movies by troubled characters trying to get back at wrongdoers and justifying their actions by saying, “It’s not revenge. It’s justice.” The very fact that the lines are so blurry suggests that we should rethink it. Is there a substantive difference between revenge and justice?

One of the first factors people will suggest to distinguish the two is motive: we should prosecute perpetrators impartially and according to the law (=justice), not because we’re angry about what they’ve done (=revenge). But what’s the motivation for good justice? “Well, to stop offenders from hurting others and discourage harmful behavior.” I ask you: what does this have to do with the afterlife? Is God worried that a redeemed Adolph might not be able to resist the urge to pull wings off of heavenly butterflies (or angels…yeah, that’s probably it)? “Ok then, to comfort the victims.” And this is different from outsourced revenge how?

I used to think that pursuing a justice system that sought to reform rather than punish criminals was solely the interest of out-of-touch Woodstock left-overs. But now, even though I still have doubts about the corrigibility of many people and the ability of our current structures to truly reform them, I at least understand the motivation better. A truly impartial justice system should ensure that the desire for vengeance on the part of the victims or the victims’ loved ones does not eliminate our attempts to restore them and heal the holes in their souls that caused their destructive behavior. As MacDonald wrote, “Suppose my watch has been taken from my pocket; I lay hold of the thief; he is dragged before the magistrate, proved guilty, and sentenced to a just imprisonment: must I walk home satisfied with the result? Have I had justice done me? The thief may have had justice done him—but where is my watch?”

If we have to keep wrongdoers locked away in the interest of public safety or to deter crime, it’s a concession we have to make as humans. But God’s not a human.

Or is He only a bigger, better human? Is He, as C. S. Lewis believed, a slave to some “deep magic” that cries out, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth — unless you can get some perfect, sinless guy to come along and lose his eye or tooth for you”? Jesus did not seem to think so: he weighed the lex talionis and, for all the balance implied (it’s not an eye plus a $100 fine for an eye, after all), found it wanting, because it does not get to the root of the problems that cause our hurtful sins. We as humans (especially as victims) find it impossible to be objective about what those who do wrong deserve.

Image via Wikipedia

Who, then, would be in the best position to understand all the environmental and internal factors that would warp the mind and will of a child who delights in painting pictures for his mother into an adult who destroys millions of children and mothers — who other than that person’s Creator? If He is not an impartial judge, we are all in trouble; but if He is, and He chooses to heal all our diseases, casting aside our sins as far as the east is from the west, who can say that His justice is deficient, even if it means that our desire for revenge against the Hitlers of the world is thwarted?

The question is not mercy vs. justice: it’s love versus revenge. Justice can never be about revenge. My hope is that God’s overwhelming, all-consuming righteousness will be revealed in His scandalous mercy.

At the suggestion of a certain rather busy diplomat, I decided to treat this trending ditty as a Theologically Interesting Lyric. It is indeed theologically interesting, because it dovetails into my recent discussions about contrasts in the OT writers’ conceptions of God and those of some of the NT writers.

First the song: “Pray for You” by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. In order to avert the potential spambot activity they would attract I have elected not to reproduce the lyrics here, but here they are in case you don’t want to watch the video:

[Hard link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atBg9zLI2bA]

Potential humor aside, when I first saw this my first thoughts were of just how anti-Christian in spirit such sentiments were. Jesus told us to forgive, turn the other cheek, walk the other mile, etc. My mind searched for a Scripture that would point out how invoking the Lord’s name to do what is evil is condemned and an affront to God.

There may be such verses, but before I got there, my mind rammed into a wall: I remembered the imprecatory Psalms.

Any student of Scripture knows of these psalms in which the psalmist begs God to take revenge on the psalmist’s enemies. These sometimes take the form of simple requests for salvation with the contextual implication that the desired manner of salvation would involve some form of retributive or preemptive violence.

Then there are more sadistic cases in which the psalmist expresses his hope for vengeance that seems to exceed the ill will in our song selection:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,

Happy is he who repays you

For what you have done to us-

He who seizes your infants

And dashes them against the rocks.

Psalm 137.8-9

In his Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis famously referred to such “cursing Psalms” as expressing “contemptible”, “devilish” sentiments. Ironically, these judgments of Lewis are themselves deprecated similarly by many inerrantists.

Lewis’s point is that we can’t necessarily assume that every attitude expressed by even the godly men in Scripture is prescriptive for us or indicative of how we ourselves should respond or believe. We should not just uniformly accept every teaching of Scripture as equally authoritative, not treating the whole thing “as an encyclopedia or an encyclical” but rather “steeping ourselves in its tone and temper and so learning its overall message.”

Too often, evangelicals with “higher” views of Scripture disagree and try to redeem these statements as justifiable, if perhaps hyperbolic, appeals to God for justice rather than personal revenge. But the problem is the definition of “justice” underlying this: the psalmist believes that justice is served by retributive revenge, and apparently the more dramatic the better: if the simple downfall of a foreign nation is a sign of God’s intervening hand, surely the skulls of the infidels being crushed against the rocks is a sign that God’s people are especially vindicated! This is something the psalmist may have believed, but it’s certainly not something we should follow him in.

How can I say this?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matt. 5.43-48

Sometimes it is believed that we should hold our peace, turn the other cheek, etc. because “‘Vengeance is Mine,’ says the Lord. ‘I will repay.’” Just let ‘em be, I have heard countless times, because God’s got something nasty in store for those wicked folks that He might just spare them from if you dare usurp His privilege of enacting vengeance.

But notice the subtle twist in the last sentence of the above passage from the Sermon on the Mount that is seldom duly noted: loving one’s enemies is to be undertaken not in deference to God’s priority for wrath but in imitation of God’s perfection exemplified in self-sacrificial love of one’s enemies! It is when we forgive and show grace that we are acting as our Father in heaven.

Again we see that a faithful reading of Scripture does not automatically deify the thoughts of the authors and contort them so that they appear to be in full concord with one another. As people who self-identify as Christians, surely it is no scandal that we should insist upon reading all Scripture through Christ, judging all Scripture through Christ.

I foresee that many of my evangelical friends will not have a problem with recognizing the circumstantial angst of the psalmist and understand that his emotions may have gotten the better of him. To these I say, you and I are not as far apart as you might think. I simply extend consideration of the limitation of humans in their circumstances in more of the Bible than the imprecatory Psalms.