Love Wins

So--to pick up with yesterday's challenge: If God's essential feature is unconditional love, what about all the angry/vengeful/jealous God parts of the Bible?

I've been relating my life transition out of conservative evangelicalism (Southern Baptist-ism, specifically). Central to this shift was my encounter with a youth leader named Paulanne, who opened my eyes to the possibility that perhaps the miraculous thing about God's love was that it was offered to everyone, forever, full stop. It is good--for nothing. There's no threat of hell for those who don't accept it; there's no particular reward reserved only for those who do. God's all-powerful, insistent love pursues us forever. Death cannot stop it. Our unbelief or rebellion does not cause it to fade. It transcends mortality and attends us in whatever is to come. It is unconditional and unlimited in scope and power. It is stronger than judgment, stronger than sin, stronger than consequences.

To be fair, this isn't an idea entirely unknown to evangelicalism. Donald Bloesch (Essentials of Evangelical Theology) speaks of the possibility that Christ's redemptive, atoning gestures follow us beyond the grave, that Christ reaches out to us wherever we may be. Indeed, so powerful and eternal is that love in this line of thought that it is assumed that, in the fullness of eternity, all human souls will find rest in God, that God's loving openness and patience will outlast even the most stubborn of souls. C. S. Lewis, in his The Great Divorce, seems to endorse a similar possibility, viewing hell as a place of misanthropic self-isolation that souls may choose to relinquish (though in that book and in others--The Last Battle, for example--there is the suggestion that the soul's stubbornness may be permanent).

More recently, many strands of the Emergent conversation, a diverse network of postmodern evangelicals, affirm the power of God's love to overcome traditional theological barriers of mortality and sin. Dan Kimball, for example, tells of how when first presented with the gospel he wondered how powerful God could really be if even the smallest sin could establish a gulf between God and humanity. Or, more simply, Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church makes itself known in Grand Rapids via blunt, white-letters-on-black-background bumper stickers reading: "Love Wins."

And that's what the unconditional love of God means--love wins. But what about divine righteousness? Love wins. What about how the Hitlers and child rapists of the world deserve hell? Love wins. What about those who have never heard and do not believe? Love wins. What about those who believe sincerely, but not in Jesus Christ? Love wins.

It's a simple, shattering answer for conservative evangelical theology, for which judgment and eternal consequences (hell) must follow as a natural fact from human sin. To respond to the contrast of God's perfection versus human's sinful contamination with "love wins" is to nonchalantly dismiss a major part of who God is and what God does. It upends sense, suspends the rules of the universe--rules that God Godself established--it cheats, in other words. Love wins by cheating, declaring the rules void. A just God, cries this theology, would never do that.

But then, but then--is this not the God who in Christ said "the first will be last, and the last will be first?" Is this not the God who in the parable said that God-the-vineyard-owner will pay all workers equally no matter if they labored a full day, a half day, or but a few hours? Is this not the God who told Peter to eat flesh forbidden him, to consort with people forbidden him, to "not call unclean what I have called clean"? "Where is thy victory, o Death? Where is thy sting?" God has rendered all human concepts of sin and punishment void.

Love wins.

But, counters conservative evangelical theology, God doesn't love everyone! Did he love the people drowned in the flood? Did God love the Canaanites that God ordered the Hebrews to vanquish (men, women, and children)? Did God love those the Psalmist insists that God hates and in whose suffering God delights? Did God love Judas? Did God love Esau? Yes, an all-loving God might be nice--but the scriptures point to a God who is not forever patient, a God who can be angered to the point of annihilating cities, a God who can abandon humans. Where is God's love in that?

My answer is twofold: First, as conservative evangelicals may guess, I do not view every word written in the Bible as coming from God's mouth. I can affirm the inspiration of the Bible without overlooking the fact that the various parts serve other purposes: explanatory myths about the origins of the world and of a nation, justificatory narratives about the past strength of a people now oppressed and in captivity, epistolary fragments for churches in specific situations, apocalyptic visions used to frame contemporary criticisms. My convictions about who God is, my knowledge of how Christ lived, my fullest understanding of the Spirit's power in my life--these move me to reject as un-God verses that call for the shattering of infant skulls against the rocks simply because the infants are the enemy's offspring (Psalms 137:8-9).

Or-better yet--to treat these verses not as the literal Words of God or even as the Sentiments of God, but instead as the sentiments of God's people who at that point were hurting horribly. Human, not Godly.

And, secondly, as for other instances of God's abandonment, I turn to Christ, who in quoting one of those Psalms cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" At that point Christ was hurting horribly, having been betrayed and abandoned by nearly all around him, crucified by the people he sought to save. Yet the witness of Immanuel--God With Us--is this: that at that very point at which we are suffering most, at the point where we feel most abandoned by God--there God is, feeling our abandonment with us in the most literal terms. Even when we are lost, God's love wins its way to us.

And I do not suggest that this knowledge magically makes suffering or abandonment or loss disappear (any more than Christ's cry prevented his dying). It may not even be something we feel at the time. I agree with my conservative evangelical sisters and brothers in affirming that the Christian way does not guarantee protection from suffering. But the image of Christ as God's solidarity, God's at-one-ment with us at our most alienated--this is utterly different than the picture of a God who abandons humanity to an eternal torment.

More tomorrow,

JF