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Dear Professor Theophilus:
Can I offer you a moment's honesty? I really don't want the
God of revelation to exist, a realization I came to when I still
believed that he did.
The God of the Bible fails the test of ideal love because His
love is particular, far from universal and certainly not
unconditional. What I most deplore about Him is what Christians
hold most dear: His plan of redemption. As Paul says in
Romans 9,
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on
God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, "I will have
mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on
whom I have compassion." So it depends not upon man's will or
exertion, but upon God's mercy. For the scripture says to
Pharaoh, "I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing
my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the
earth." So then he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he
hardens the heart of whomever he wills. You will say to me then,
"Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" But who
are you, a man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say
to its molder, "Why have you made me thus?"
It can be argued that there are also passages that refer to
God's desire to see all men saved and that he takes no pleasure
in the death of the wicked, but if He really does will that some
reject Him, then in defiance of Paul, I do ask, "Why does he still
find fault? For who can resist His will?"
If we are honest, professor, we will admit that the reason
Jesus looks so appealing is that he is so different from His
wrathful father. He is a breath of fresh air after millennia, and in
my case, after pages of erratic and ineffective fathering. That is,
until Jesus talks about one of his favorite topics — Hell. I
know three women close to me who were raped, and in a spirit
of righteous indignation, I might be tempted to torture their
rapists. But upon reflection, I realize these men need
redemption. While they probably need incarceration and counsel,
sheer punishment fails to be redemptive nor lovingly
confrontational. So why does the God of all love see fit to punish
unbelief with an eternity of torment or separation from
goodness? If I were God, I would welcome a bruised humanity
into peace and bliss after a lifetime of struggle and hardship,
not hold them accountable to an impossible standard.
A last measure of screaming honesty. This is far from an
exercise in mere philosophy. I write with a split heart. Discontent
pervades my spirit when I am anywhere but in absolute
surrender to God. More than most who have called Jesus Lord, I
have experienced what the mystics call the "Presence of God,"
and like them, have found it an odd mixture of the unsettling
and serene, and found its outworkings as radically harsh and
separatist as that of the Old Testament God. My heart leapt as a
ten-year-old boy when my aunt told me what I had always
hoped was true, that God loved me. When I learned that I could
be at peace with him through Jesus, it was a no-brainer.
Overnight, my life was given a purpose and a guide. But now I
feel like I am at an crossroads, facing a God for whom my spirit
restlessly longs but at whom my humanity rightfully recoils.
Like Jacob, I have wrestled with this God, but I feel as if I am
finally beginning to prevail. Might I yet find a way to God by
embracing all that is good in my humanity, rather than
denouncing it as fallen and condemned?
But this leaves me with a problem. My greatest question
— which as follower of Jesus you can't answer without
affirming what I've repeatedly denounced — is "how now
shall I live?" Even if, apart from Christianity, I come to experience
a love for humanity, including myself, that I believe to
be glorifying to God, my worldview still lacks that moral
objectivity.
Enough. Thanks for "listening" for so long. I'm afraid you're
the unlucky recipient of something brewing within me that
needed to get out.
Reply
I'm more than glad to listen; let's talk. You raise three
objections to the God of the Bible: That He desires that certain
people reject Him and go to hell; that there is a hell at all; and
finally — have I followed you here? — that there is a
God at all. Behind all three objections is a view of ideal love as
universal, unconditional, and indiscriminate. Following the
objections is an equally grave question: Is it possible to make
love your anchor without this problematic God? This
leaves me with four things to address, and I owe you more than
a casual reply.
In order to deal with your first objection, we have to
consider whether God does desire certain people to
reject Him and to go hell. I can't help noticing that your method
of interpreting the Bible is rather odd. You zero in on a passage
from Paul's letter to the Romans which is notoriously difficult to
understand, then you treat its meaning as obvious, and finally
you use it to push aside other passages that are much less
obscure. Traditionally, Christianity has counseled a very different
approach:
- Don't use obscure passages to interpret plain passages;
instead, use plain ones to interpret obscure ones.
- Don't interpret Scripture according to solitary intuition;
instead, read along with all the centuries of Christians before us,
beginning with those closest to the Apostles, who were taught
by Christ himself.
- Don't select an interpretation which makes different
passages seem inconsistent, pushing aside the ones you don't
like; instead, look for interpretations which make different
passages compatible with each other.
It's important to remember that some passages of Scripture
really are obscure; as the inspired poet says in Psalm 78:2, "I
will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of
old." These "dark sayings" are what make solitary intuition so
unreliable. Take Jesus' statement in Luke 14:26,
"If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and
mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and
even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." If you didn't know
how the passage has traditionally been interpreted and didn't
understand the figure of speech called "hyperbole," you might
think it obvious that Jesus commanded us to dishonor our
parents and commit suicide. Actually Jesus was using an
exaggerated mode of speech to dramatize the fact that any love
which puts Him in second place is idolatrous. Paul's letters are
harder still. Even Peter remarks, "There are some things in them
hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to
their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures" (2 Peter
3:16, RSV). The passage you quote from Romans 9 has
puzzled Christian thinkers for centuries. You treat a particular
view of it as obviously correct, but nothing about it is
obvious.
What is obvious? Which plain teachings illuminate
the passage from Romans 9? I would suggest at least three. The
first such plain teaching is that God desires the salvation of
the entire human race. Consider 1 Timothy
2:1-4: Paul advises Timothy to pray for all men, because
God our Savior "desires all men to be saved and to come to the
knowledge of the truth." This statement ought to make it
impossible to view Paul as thinking that God desires some
people to go to hell, and remember that the Paul who is
speaking here is the same one who wrote the passage in
Romans 9. Though you mention the Timothy passage, you do so
only to set it aside. I'm sorry, but that won't do. A puzzle can't
be solved by throwing away some of the data.
The second plain teaching to keep in mind is that we are
moral beings, genuinely responsible for our actions. As
Moses tells the Hebrew people in Deuteronomy
30, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day,
that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse;
therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live."
How could he speak of "choosing" if we were mere puppets,
jerking as God pulls the strings? You might say that Moses is
speaking here, not Paul, but Paul himself alludes to the same
passage in Deuteronomy, only one short chapter later than the
passage that you quote. It simply isn't plausible that such a
searching mind as Paul's could so quickly have contradicted
itself. You are throwing away data again.
The third teaching I have in mind is that God is
sovereign; His plan provides for everything, and His purposes
cannot be defeated by our sin. You may say, "That's my
point." Yes, but you assume that God's sovereignty cannot be
reconciled with His love or with man's responsibility. Have you
tried reconciling them? I am not saying that the problem is easy,
but in fact, theologians over the centuries have suggested a
number of different ways in which they might be reconciled. For
example, where Paul speaks of God "hardening" a certain
person's heart, he may mean that God plans for that person to
do what he knows the person would have done in any case. Or
he may be using figurative language to say that God leaves some
people to their own self-chosen exile. Other solutions have also
been proposed. Which solution is best is not the point; the
crucial thing is that God's plan somehow provides ahead of time
for our response to His grace. If this is difficult to understand,
remember, planning means something radically different for God
than it does for us. Our planning looks toward a future not yet
present, but for Him all moments of time are present at once.
By the way, the principle of using plain passages to shed
light on obscure ones should be used with any work of
literature that commands our respect, not just the Bible. If
violating the principle produces mixed-up results, that is the
fault of the method, not of the text. The bottom line is that your
first objection to the God of the Bible is based on a deeply
problematic interpretation of the Bible.
But you don't merely object to God predestining some souls
to hell; you object to hell itself. Let's deal with this second
objection. I'll try not to repeat what I've said on other
occasions.
Part of your objection is that hell isn't redemptive. You're
right, it isn't. It can't be, because hell means refusing
redemption. You must not suppose that when God consigns
people to hell, He is doing something to them against their will.
True, they don't like it; nevertheless, it is what they have chosen.
They have made themselves unable to want Him. What they
choose is separation from God, and they get what they
choose.
What would you have God do? Would you have Him force
those who reject Him to seek Him? Weren't you just complaining
that a loving God would honor our free will instead of jerking
our strings? Your complaint was righter than you knew. To
force us to seek Him, God would have to destroy free
will. That means He would have to destroy His own image in us.
Henceforth we would be whats, not whos
— things, not persons. Because our seeking of Him would
have nothing to do with our wills, it would not actually be
our seeking of Him. That means it wouldn't be love,
because love is by nature voluntary. It would have no more
meaning that the actions of machines. Are you so sure that a
God who loved us would destroy the very possibility of human
love?
The other part of your objection to hell is couched in the
language of justice, but it seems more like an objection to
justice. You mention several female friends who were raped.
Oddly, you express compassion not for them, but for the rapists.
You write that if you were God, you would not hold men
accountable to an "impossible standard." Let us be clear here.
The standard you appear to be calling impossible is "Do not
rape." Forgive me, but that standard is not impossible. If you
really think that it is, then it hardly seems that you do believe in
free will, and if you don't believe in it, then I cannot understand
why you blame God for not honoring it enough. God Himself
takes another view of our capacities. True, we cannot fix what is
broken in us apart from grace. We cannot even love purely
without grace. Even so, nothing makes a man rape.
Nothing makes him murder or steal. Nothing
makes him commit perjury or adultery. In that sense,
the standard is perfectly within our reach.
Let us not pretend that we are serious about love if we
cannot be serious about justice. If it is truly God's nature to love,
then He must hate whatever is contrary to love. He offers
redemption to everyone, but He allows us to refuse it. Terrible
as the fact may be, those who refuse it deserve to receive what
they have chosen.
Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS
NEXT MONTH: PART 2
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If you have a question you'd like Professor Theophilus to
consider for this column, please send it to asktheo@trueu.org. Please note, all
questions that are selected for "Ask Theophilus" may be edited
for clarity and privacy and become the property of Focus on the
Family.
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