Undeception

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?

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 intend this 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.

I doff my hat to Robin Parry…

I used to think that if I could see the lost in hell, surely I must weep for them. If I could hear their horrid wailings and see the dreadful contortions of their anguish, then surely I must pity them. But there is no such sentiment as that known in heaven. There the believer will be so satisfied with all of God’s will that he will quite forget the lost in the idea that God has done it for the best, that even their loss has been their own fault, and that he is infinitely just in it.

If my parents could see me in hell they wouldn’t have a tear to shed for me, even if they’re in heaven, for they would say, “It is justice, O great God; and Your justice must be magnified, as well as Your mercy;” and not only that, but they would feel that God was so much above his creatures that they would be satisfied to see those creatures crushed if it might increase God’s glory. Oh yes, in heaven I believe we will think rightly of men. Here men seem great things to us; but in heaven they will seem to be nothing more than a few creeping insects that are swept away in plowing a field for harvest; they will appear no more than a tiny handful of dust, or like some nest of wasps that ought to be exterminated for the injury they have done. They will appear such little things when we sit on high with God, and look down on the nations of the earth as grasshoppers, and “count the isles as very little things.”

Oh, the satire! Wait…it is satire, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, no. In fact, apart from a few tweaks in wording I applied in order to obscure its provenance (the 19th century), the above was from an actual sermon, ”The Hope of Future Bliss.“ by none other than Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It’s amazing how this much revered preacher (who I have little time for) breathlessly affirmed almost the identical picture recently painted by Chad Holtz, but at least Chad wrote his piece actually conscious of how problematic that picture was. I dearly hope that those Christians whose theology lines up with Spurgeon’s will feel ashamed to see it so starkly stated; yet my fear is that instead, many will feel emboldened and more dedicated to haranguing us all with this cancer that they call “the gospel” (“good [sic] news”).

Theologians like Spurgeon certainly paved the way for a movement that currently seems to be gaining in influence in America. But how did Christians miss the fact that his concepts of the relationship of justice, mercy, and love, though popular even now, were questioned and (I do not hesitate to say) soundly defeated within twenty years of this sermon?

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Spurgeon’s words is the fact that it’s hard to propose a rationale for why the dehumanization of humanity and especially the devaluation of non-Christians should not be acknowledged right here and now, long before that time when we, the elect, are issued our harps in the sweet by and by. In fact, Spurgeon impatiently emotes that this disregard for the well-being of our fellow humans, and even our own family, is something precious that we can look forward to fully grasping only in the hereafter!

No wonder some among us have more of an interest in transplanting wasps’ nests up to Glory Land than they do for alleviating the suffering of the wasps’ deservedly baneful existence!

Incredible.

To get much out of this post, you need to read or already be familiar with the following story from 2 Samuel 14.1-14:

Now Joab son of Zeruiah perceived that the king’s mind was on Absalom. Joab sent to Tekoa and brought from there a wise woman. He said to her, ‘Pretend to be in mourning; put on mourning garments, do not anoint yourself with oil, but behave like a woman who has been mourning many days for the dead. Go to the king and speak to him as follows.’ And Joab put the words into her mouth.

When the woman of Tekoa came to the king, she fell on her face to the ground and did obeisance, and said, ‘Help, O king!’ The king asked her, ‘What is your trouble?’ She answered, ‘Alas, I am a widow; my husband is dead. Your servant had two sons, and they fought with one another in the field; there was no one to part them, and one struck the other and killed him. Now the whole family has risen against your servant. They say, “Give up the man who struck his brother, so that we may kill him for the life of his brother whom he murdered, even if we destroy the heir as well.” Thus they would quench my one remaining ember, and leave to my husband neither name nor remnant on the face of the earth.’

Then the king said to the woman, ‘Go to your house, and I will give orders concerning you.’ The woman of Tekoa said to the king, ‘On me be the guilt, my lord the king, and on my father’s house; let the king and his throne be guiltless.’ The king said, ‘If anyone says anything to you, bring him to me, and he shall never touch you again.’ Then she said, ‘Please, may the king keep the Lord your God in mind, so that the avenger of blood may kill no more, and my son not be destroyed.’ He said, ‘As the Lord lives, not one hair of your son shall fall to the ground.’

Then the woman said, ‘Please let your servant speak a word to my lord the king.’ He said, ‘Speak.’ The woman said, ‘Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again. We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished for ever from his presence.’ [NRSV]

David was heartsick over his son’s estrangement, but apparently he believed that accepting Absalom would be an unjust response to his son’s violent revenge. After all, Absalom had had his half-brother killed.

Nathan advises King David (image via Wikipedia)

Joab did not try to argue that there was a problem with “banishing” or somehow punishing a wrongdoer. But by appealing to David’s nature as a good king and as a loving father, traits of God that Christians would later emphasize, Joab suggested through the Tekoan woman’s charade that making any such punishment final without the ultimate intent to restore was in contradiction to something David believed about God’s own nature. Two chapters earlier, David had learned through a similar ruse by the prophet Nathan that God would go through drastic measures to restore David to righteousness. So in the end, Joab revises David’s opinion that his justice must exist in tension with forgiveness — and he does so by appealing to the nature of God Himself.

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My arguments above are fairly convincing, I think. At least I was convinced when I first wrote it all down.

But then things broke down for me. I looked back at ch. 12 (Nathan the prophet’s indictment of David’s sin), which is obviously linked to ch. 14 here: in both chapters, David is tricked by one of his advisors into making a judgment against his own instincts, etc. The thing that destroyed it for me was “God does not take away life”: in ch. 12, that’s exactly what God did with Bathsheba’s first son! This made it look for all the world as though David was actually getting duped by Joab, tricked into ignoring the lesson in the Uriah/Bathsheba incident, the lesson that God punishes life for life. By this logic, the brother in the “widow’s” fake story should have been killed. Moreover, the heeding of Joab’s counsel here appears to have had the deleterious effect of enabling Absalom’s treason in the next chapter. This made my take on the passage look like a classic case of confirmation bias: I had liked Joab’s message because I agreed with it. And so this post you’re reading languished in the scrap heap for three months.

Today, however, when I began thinking over it again, I began to revert to my original interpretation. I might personally believe that “what God did with Bathsheba’s first son” amounted to “taking away life” – but would an ANE writer/reader have put an infant in the same category as a mature adult?  I really don’t think so; children were no doubt doted on as they grew, but in such societies they were viewed much more as objects, commodities, and hence as signs of blessing. Read in this light, it appears that Joab may actually be appealing to (exploiting, perhaps) the example of the Uriah/Bathsheba incident accurately: God did not take away David’s life in compensation for his killing of Uriah, but “devised a plan” to restore David without taking [what the original audience would have considered] a full-fledged person’s life away. Punishment was necessary, but God would be satisfied with less than equal compensation in the interests of restoring “an outcast” into “His presence.” This would mean that here we have another voice in the Old Testament crying out that God’s punishment is restorative, not retributive.

The other misgiving I had on my second reading, that Joab’s counsel was proved wrong by Absalom’s later traitorous actions, is actually answered somewhat easily by the context. Absalom’s treacherous behavior should probably be seen as the result of David’s failure to adequately implement the plan of restoration, which should necessarily have included addressing the issue rather than ignoring the problem: when Absalom returned, David gave the order that the two should not come into one another’s presence, which in essence was only a superficial amendment of the policy of estrangement that Joab was trying to change. Things remained this way for two more years (vv. 24, 28), and the situation was finally resolved only by Absalom’s desperate scheming, which again went unpunished. We are left to infer that Absalom’s discontentedness with David’s rule and desire to reign in his stead were at least exacerbated, if not caused (we see no political ambitions on Absalom’s part before the Amnon/Tamar incident), by David’s unwillingness to address problems, which should be seen as a recurring criticism of David’s administration by the author: consider that Absalom’s revenge on Amnon for raping Tamar was only necessary because David refused to punish him (2 Sam 14.21).

How do you interpret Joab’s message to David? Was the audience supposed to view it as essentially correct? Or am I merely guilty of confirmation bias?

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.

Michael Patton, a man I respect immensely, has just reminded his readers that, “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.”

This is a principle based in logic, of course. As a case in point (which was probably also his post’s inspiration), he brings up many Christians’ emphasis on the love of God disproportionate to their acknowledgment of the wrath of God. He defends the Reformed view of God’s nature and character by his playfully caricatured example of an objection:

“God’s love? Oh yes, give me two helpings of that. God’s wrath? Pass. I don’t have enough room and it does not sound good. God’s grace will be great, but I will have to skip the atonement—too bloody and odd. Predestination? Sovereign election? No way!”

In the end, he admits that, “For the most part, I find Christianity very palatable. Grace, love, righteousness, our future hope, the restoration of all things, etc. are all doctrines that I would gladly take from a smörgåsbord. But,” and this is his main point,

when it comes to things that are not quite so palatable and lovely, I must take them too as my final authority is not that which is reasonable to my taste buds, but that which God has revealed in His word.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. That sentiment is fully consistent with a view of Christianity that views the Bible as the final, crystalized, and most importantly complete version of all truth, revealed personally by God. But if we are more consistent in the typical Evangelical belief in “progressive revelation”, which despite arguable limitations correctly acknowledges mankind’s understanding of God as a trajectory, jet-powered and steered by the example of His Word, Jesus of Nazareth, we find less justification to ignore the nuanced sense of God found in the New Testament even in the interests of bowing to the authority of texts that speak of God as a wrathful deity perpetually on the warpath against those who transgress His moral code.

There are certainly plenty of those texts. And let’s be clear: the Old Testament repeatedly describes God as merciful, overflowing with lovingkindness and tender mercies, and in the New Testament we do indeed hear much of a coming judgment said to be officiated by Jesus himself. But who can doubt that the understanding of God in the New Testament has developed more fully into a God for all humanity and not only Israel, a God who sends His shepherd out to seek and save the lost?

“Ah, but there is still judgment against sin, even in Jesus’ own teachings.” The point I am making does not erase the wrath of God, but it does focus it on things other than mere abstract moral transgressions or ritual violations, and instead seems to target particularly those things which are harmful. Can we miss the fact that the judgment described in the Olivet Discourse is characterized as a punishment of specifically those who, even despite their outstanding morality and fidelity to prescribed rituals, utterly fail to fulfill God’s primary mission for them, which is revealed to be ministering to God by working in the interest of compassion? An intolerable system that fleeced the poor and obstructed the worship of the needy seems to have been the source of Jesus’ sole example of “wrath” in the Temple. (Note also that those endlessly tortured in the lake of fire in Revelation are not disobedient humans, but otherworldly forces of evil who have offended God most grievously by leading humanity away from Him.)

In a guideline largely alien to the Old Testament, Christians are told that they must imitate God’s character as nearly as possible. Yet although we are sundry times called to do so specifically by loving and forgiving one another, we are never told to be wrathful, to hold people to standards too high to reach, or harbor unforgiveness of those who have actually committed grave sins. We are instructed to be holy as He is holy, but are never led to demand holiness from one another except for the purposes of restoration. Paul tells the Corinthians to judge within their congregation, to be sure, but remediation is stated as the goal for church discipline in 1 Cor 5.5. If we are to judge those “inside” our community (v.12) in the hopes of eventual reformation, is it unthinkable that God should exercise His judgment on those “outside” (vv. 13) for the same reason, and more successfully?

So even if Michael Patton agrees with many other theologians among the Reformed that there are Scriptures that depict God as intent on inflicting a singularly loveless, hateful pain upon those who offend His standards, shouldn’t any theologian trying to understand God’s heart use the whole tenor and testimony of Scripture in order to do so? Are we not justified in being loathe to characterize God as a tyrant, individual scriptural illustrations of God’s anger notwithstanding? Should we put God’s love on par with God’s wrath as though one arm were extended to embrace the wayward son and the other to pitilessly strike him down?

Here I am being influenced by, or perhaps rather I am finding my lifelong suspicions unexpectedly articulated in, the ideas of George MacDonald. This passage from his sermon Justice (already referenced on this blog) makes the point that God would prefer us to err, since err we must, on the side of the most loving view of God we can imagine:

The lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God’s sake is to be against God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have him say, God could not do that thing, than have him believe that he did it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would be, ‘Then there must be something about it I do not know, which if I did know, I should see the thing quite differently.’ But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus. Where there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God, which I could not be a man and believe right in my fellow-man. I will accept no explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. [emphasis mine]

This reminds me of one observation highlighted by Rachel Held Evans in her delightful new book Evolving in Monkey Town. “His ways are higher than our ways” is an oft quoted justification for claims made about God’s inexplicable behavior. What Evans notes is that this verse actually showcases God’s desire to show mercy, once that verse’s context within Isaiah 55 is identified: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are you ways My ways,’ declares the Lord” (vv. 7-8). Evans explains:

Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God’s justice, because it suggests that we have it backward — the mystery lies not in God’s unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. (p. 136)

And if this weren’t enough dynamic quotes for one post, I can’t resist recapitulating another that I posted as an entire entry a few days back, this time re-situated amongst the thoughts that prompted me to publish that entry in the first place. It’s from none other than the true father of the Reformed, St. Augustine, who nonetheless understood these points I have made and voiced them more succinctly and profoundly by far:

Whoever thinks he understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it. Whoever has drawn from scripture an interpretation that does fortify this love, but who is later proven not to have found the meaning intended by the author of the passage, is deceived to be sure, but not in a harmful way, and he is guilty of no untruth at all.

Without assuming, as the inerrantist must, that every Scripture speaks univocally, we may still recognize a clear emphasis upon love and forgiveness throughout the NT that we should not feel guilty about focusing on. In the Synoptics, Jesus is depicted identifying the greatest commandments as a love for God that is somehow codependent upon love for our neighbor; in John, the “new” commandment Jesus gives is to “love one another” as exemplified by his own love; in Paul, the greatest of all virtues – above faith itself – is “love” for one another after the model of God’s selfless love toward us; the author of 1 John feels comfortable defining God’s very nature in this way: “God is love”; another well known and perhaps only apparently contrastive description of God is found in Hebrews 12.28, where He is described as a “consuming fire” — but surely we must see in that metaphor the OT motif of a fire of refinement that eats away the impurities for the purposes of purification, not destruction.

If after all God’s wrath is a force of His nature dueling with His love, not subject to His love as MacDonald insisted, then surely we will be forgiven for upholding the noblest view of Him possible, that of a God who is, at bottom, Love personified — especially since such an understanding is securable by the deafening testimony of Scripture. Beyond our beliefs or our incredulity, our faithfulness or our failings, the greatest of these is still love.