Yesterday I contrasted an image of God defined by unconditional love (from Good Goats) with an image of God defined by uncompromising moral standards promoted by Ray Comfort's 'Way of the Master." I risk breaking one of my own rules of writing about evangelical folk--don't shortchange their sophistication--if I don't point out that most evangelicals are explicitly aware of the the dual (dueling?) images of God as utterly loving and as utterly holy.
I just now ran into a good example of this, reading John W. Sire's latest (4th) edition of The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog (Downer's Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004). In relating the Christian worldview--Christian theism, as he labels it--Sire gives a quick outline of a Christian (actually, evangelical Christian) view of God. Namely, he asserts that God's goodness--the primary attribute of God--plays out in his love on the one hand and in his holiness on the other (28-29).
What Sire in this volume does not acknowledge, however, is that these two concepts seem in tension with each other. As a relational attitude, for instance, love suggests an impulse toward togetherness, intimacy, an impulse understood to work against or through barriers to that intimacy. A parent (ideally) loves his daughter even if she tells a lie. Romeo loves Juliet despite the fact that their families try to kill each other. God so loved the world that God incarnated as Jesus to suffer and die on the cross.
To be sure, human love has limits. Betrayals, insults, or even just mundane passage of time can dim or overpower the impulse toward togetherness and mutual well-being. But here God's--well, God-ness, God's deity comes into play. God, in the faith I was brought up in, loves no matter what; God is not willing that any should perish (and any means all). What can separate us from the love of God? asks Paul rhetorically. Nothing. No power on heaven or earth. We may sin. We may disappoint God. We may even make God angry, but--and on this my Southern Baptist upbringing was clear--God's offer of repentance is always available.
[A quick story from my childhood repository of sermon illustrations: A man lived a long life full of terrible evil. He lied, he cheated, he hurt others, he did just about anything evil there was to do. The moment before he died of old age, he cried out to God in his heart, "Oh, Lord Jesus, save me, a sinner. I believe wholly in you." And then he passed away. Now, this deathbed conversion caused some degree of consternation in Heaven. Various angelic lawyers insisted that, if anyone deserved Hell, it was this man. They pointed out that it was unfair in the extreme to let him off the hook, so to speak, after a lifetime of vicious evil just for a thirty-second conversion at the last moment. "I mean," one said, "just how much leeway do we want to give such a person?" At that point, Christ stood up, and the heavenly conference room fell silent. "We give him this much leeway," Jesus said, and extended his arms wide, creating the shape of the cross on which he died for all. Point of the story? Baptists believe in deathbed conversions. ]
So that's the God-as-Divine-Love side. The Holy God side, however, stresses the fact that God is, well, God. He is holy--literally set apart. His standards (or rather the standard that is God) are uncompromising, universal, and impossible for humans to live by perfectly. All have sinned, we are taught, and fall short of the glory of God (it's one of the Old Standard verses evangelicals memorize). Moreover, the holiness/unholiness line is absolute. One sin--no matter how small--renders you just as unholy as any other. Recall the Way of The Master--even a single white lie as a child makes you, in God's eyes, a liar.
The rationale? God, being utterly holy, can't stand unholiness. Or, as evangelicals would likely prefer it put, nothing tainted with unholiness can stand God. Thus Hell, in some kinder-gentler formations, becomes a place of eternal separation from God; that separation--plus the too-late knowledge of the intimacy you as a human could have had with God--is the real "pain and suffering" of Hell. Other evangelicals, uncomfortable with this soft formulation, insist upon the physical torment.
Either way, though, Hell serves a necessary adjunct to and expression of God's holiness.
The tension for secular folk comes when they realize that, at the end of the day, holiness in this configuration serves as a limit on a supposedly infinite love. God loves you, but that love is bounded by God's holiness. The loving invitation of Christ operates only as long as your physical life on earth, and then--poof!--the holiness takes over. For eternity. Beyond the span of a human life God will not (cannot?) go.
I should stress that I don't suggest that evangelicals are unaware of this tension, quite the contrary. I will suggest, however, that the fight-or-flight evangelism I've been writing about, the evangelism that stresses avoiding hell, downplays or outright covers up this tension. Indeed, this is one of the primary thoughtstops that evangelicalism tacitly imposes: that inquiring too deeply into the tension between holy judgment and unconditional love is itself a sign of disrespect toward God. "Hell only seems unfair to you because you judge with your human standards. God's standards are better." Or: "Job asked a question much like this. You know what God told him? 'Did you create the world and all its creatures? Who are you to judge the mind of God?'"
But there's the problem--the Way of the Master (which serves as a particularly well-articulated set of evangelism techniques) explicitly invites people to use their own standards, to put themselves in God's courtroom and guess what God will do.
When Way of the Master folk lead people through the "good person test" and arrive at the punchline,"Given that you're a lying, thieving, adulterous blasphemer, would God judge you innocent or guilty?" the other person will almost inevitably raise some protest. They might say, "Well, guilty, but I still don't think he'd send me to hell." Or they might even say, "Innocent, because--yes, I've lied a few times over the course of my life, but for the most part I've tried to be honest. And I think God will know that."
The Way of the Master evangelist inevitably has to correct this human view with God's: "Well, actually, you would be guilty and you will be going to Hell."
This standard is unsatisfying because, as it's presented, God's standard is less fair, less loving, than a human imagining of unconditional love and goodness. I almost get the feeling, in some of the conversations I've heard, that the evangelists wish that God were more like what secular folk imagine, i.e., able to forgive minor infractions in the context of a lifetime of basic goodness. That God isn't like that, that God is utterly holy, plants a seed of resentment.
More tomorrow,
JF
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