Undeception

Then again, as the power that brings about a making-up for any wrong done by man to man, I believe in the atonement. Who that believes in Jesus does not long to atone to his brother for the injury he has done him? What repentant child, feeling he has wronged his father, does not desire to make atonement? Who is the mover, the causer, the persuader, the creator of the repentance, of the passion that restores fourfold?—Jesus, our propitiation, our atonement. He is the head and leader, the prince of the atonement. He could not do it without us, but he leads us up to the Father’s knee: he makes us make atonement. Learning Christ, we are not only sorry for what we have done wrong, we not only turn from it and hate it, but we become able to serve both God and man with an infinitely high and true service, a soul-service. We are able to offer our whole being to God to whom by deepest right it belongs. Have I injured anyone? With him to aid my justice, new risen with him from the dead, shall I not make good amends? Have I failed in love to my neighbour? Shall I not now love him with an infinitely better love than was possible to me before? That I will and can make atonement, thanks be to him who is my atonement, making me at one with God and my fellows!

George MacDonald (from his sermon “Justice”, published in Unspoken Sermons, Series 3, 1889)

One of my favorite podcasts, Beyond the Box, just published an interview with interview with Robin Parry on the subject of the Christian universalism movement of today.

Also known under his pseudonym Gregory MacDonald, Parry (blog) was a key figure in bringing a distinctively Christian, non-pluralistic version of the belief that all souls would eventually be reconciled to God through Christ leaps and bounds closer to the mainstream four years ago with the publication of his book, The Evangelical Universalist in 2006–well ahead of the Rob Bell curve. (Side note: I think Robin Parry was in a much better position to make Christian universalism a palatable option for Evangelicals than Rob Bell was: a lot of the good done by Parry seems to have been undone by the furor over the book written by the already controversial and theologically sloppy Bell.)

I never got around to reading it: I was under the impression that Parry was trying to shoehorn prooftexts into universalist arguments from an inerrantist perspective. I realize now that he is much more nuanced than that and is using the term “evangelical” in its rich, historically grounded sense rather than in its common usage of referring to conservative-yet-not-Fundamentalist Christians. I am now a universalist myself, so I might find it more interesting than I once did; the second edition is up for pre-order.

Anyway, I don’t have much to say about this interview, but I did want to point out a few things to look out for that I found worthy of attention:

• Parry weighing in on his hunch as to what is behind the slow but sure warming of Evangelicals toward Christian universalism
• Some interesting points about exclusivistic vs. inclusivistic forms of Christian universalism (as opposed to pluralism)
• Parry’s response to a question about what theological changes have come about subsequent to his embrace of universalism. Short answer: it wasn’t so much that other aspects of his theology changed with his universalism, but the other way around. It was his view on hell that didn’t fit key aspects of his Christian theology. His soteriology finally caught up to his understanding of God: I find this to be quite true for me as well.
• The discussion about why universalism can legitimately attract both those who laud and those who lament the doctrine of penal substitution

Here’s the link again (direct mp3 link).

Warning: there is some bad Skype audio on Parry’s end.

The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained: that would be to cast out of window the medicine of cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead against the very laws of being. Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistently with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. The idea—the miserable fancy rather—has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.

Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing him God our Saviour, but a God bound, either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him, to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a multitude of teaching men have taught their fellows that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell . . . Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell but by being saved from his sins, from the evil in him. If hell be needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. ‘Salvation from hell’ is salvation as conceived by such to whom hell and not evil is the terror.

George MacDonald (from his sermon “Salvation from Sin” in The Hope of the Gospel, 1892)

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 our 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 reckless 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 thought I was done posting about this subject for a while, but apparently I’m not the only one thinking about this! The following comes from Roger Olson, someone whose views I often find quite compelling. What does he think about the atonement?

…I do think denial of any objective-transactional aspect of the atonement is dangerous to the gospel.  Purely subjective theories fall short; they cannot account for how the atonement takes care of the guilt problem.  They are inextricably tied to an optimistic, perhaps even Pelagian, view of humanity when taken alone.

To me, anyway, the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins in the sense that his death made it possible for God to forgive sinners righteously.  Take that away and the preaching of the cross gradually (or suddenly) fades away.  So does the gospel.

via About the atonement | Roger E Olson

Olson seems to be working from popular but deficient definitions of two words.

The first problematic understanding is of the nature of sin: he still views sin primarily in terms of “guilt”. Then again, maybe it’s his definition of guilt that’s the problem. I believe that sin is real, and that it is the common enemy of God and man. But that’s just it: sin is the enemy, not the sinner. The idea that “the guilt problem” means that mankind with its sinful behavior is a fire that God needs to put out, that is, until Christ died, is the fuzzy logic behind the “objective-transactional” views of governmental and penal substitution theories of the atonement. But it’s not a logic that holds up very well if we take at all seriously the way that Jesus taught us to talk about God, namely as a Father. Any interest I might have in “tak[ing] care of the guilt problem” whenever my young son commits a sin (such as lying) would be nothing less than a perversity on my part. I do care about his guilt, but only insofar as it stems from my real parental concern for his well-being and moral development. He may be an offender, but a good parent first wants to address the fact that his child is a victim of his/her own acts. If my daughter stepped in to offer herself to receive my son’s punishment, and I took her up on her offer, either to demonstrate my sense of “justice” (which sounds disturbingly like the lex talionis superseded by Jesus himself) as in the governmental theory or, admittedly much worse, because I had an otherwise insatiable need to punish someone, anyone, for my son’s misdeeds, I would not be a good parent, much less the wise father of consummate love taught in the New Testament. No, sin is a sickness that must be removed from our souls, not “cancelled” or “paid for” through some clever “transaction”. The sinner must be cured, not left to decay as punishment for being sick. Olson and Piper, as rarely on the same page as they are, unite to disagree with this assessment just as emphatically as I reject theirs. [Note: the preceding paragraph has been edited slightly since publication for clarity.]

The other misunderstanding (puzzling to me in the extreme) that Olson and Piper agree upon is what the gospel is: “…the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins…” Please tell me, then, how Jesus could have been preaching the gospel from the very outset of his ministry! When did he once proclaim his death as the good news? This is massively, bewilderingly wrong, attributable only to the common tendency to allow Pauline theology (esp. from Romans) to trump that of the Gospel writers and their Jesus traditions (in point of fact, I don’t think Paul was so mistaken on that either, but that’s another discussion). The good news of the gospel is of the coming of the Kingdom of God, which was always that God’s heart would soon rule the day: the mighty would be brought low and the lowly exalted. Jesus’ gospel was extremely social; from what we can tell, it was conceived of as a political gospel as well (the return of Israel’s national status), so perhaps it’s best just to say that it was conceived of as a holistic new world order. It didn’t happen quite like they (even Jesus, apparently) thought it would. But in any event, in the Gospels we are never given any indication that Jesus proclaimed that his death was to bring about the Kingdom of God by taking the punishment for our sins. How else could Jesus tell people who called him “Lord” that he never knew them? It was those who “do the will of [the] father,” those who learn to obey their father who take part in the order of the Kingdom. What was Jesus’ solution to the sin problem? In the earliest Gospel’s first statement of Jesus’ ministry in Mark 1.14-15, it was “Repent and believe in the good news!” And notice that “good news” there couldn’t mean “trust in my work upon the cross.”

Olson’s quoted remarks are based on a presupposition: Jesus’ atonement must have been objective, or else Jesus’ death didn’t take care of our guilt. This implies that he is uncomfortable with admitting that perhaps Jesus’ death did not take care of our guilt in a substitutionary fashion, making it possible “for God to forgive sinners righteously.” A righteous father will always forgive his wayward children, will he not? He will punish or love (depending on the circumstance) his children’s misbehavior right out of them; what he will not do is make excuses for it.

Ok, I pledge it: I’m laying off of this subject for the foreseeable future.

They say first, God must punish the sinner, for justice requires it; then they say he does not punish the sinner, but punishes a perfectly righteous man instead, attributes his righteousness to the sinner, and so continues just. Was there ever such a confusion, such an inversion of right and wrong! Justice could not treat a righteous man as an unrighteous; neither, if justice required the punishment of sin, could justice let the sinner go unpunished. To lay the pain upon the righteous in the name of justice is simply monstrous. No wonder unbelief is rampant. Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice. Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism. Pray God I have no righteousness imputed to me. Let me be regarded as the sinner I am; for nothing will serve my need but to be made a righteous man, one that will no more sin.

George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3, “Righteousness”