The Evangelical Counter to God's Unconditional Love

So--relating three Big Shifts in my life and faith that coincided with a transition out of evangelicalism for me, I told about my entry into the world of theatre (and therefore a wholly new way of thinking about what I could do) and my participation in a youth group led by a woman named Paulanne. I credited Paulanne with helping to revolutionize the way I see God.

To whit: she presented a picture of Christianity almost entirely devoid of the fear and anxiety about eternal salvation that had so characterized my early faith. Instead, Paulanne emphasized the idea of God's unconditional, passionate, overpowering love for us both as the prime condition of all existence and as the ethical standard of interaction that anyone who goes by the label Christian should choose as a pattern for life.

I pause here to address the fact that, in rhapsodizing about embracing God as unconditional love, I have fallen right into the conservative-evangelical stereotype of the proud apostate. A cautionary tale advanced by conservative evangelicals since at least the 1800s, the proud apostate is one who falls prey to the siren call of a false gospel--the gospel of God's love-without-judgment.

Practically every evangelist or evangelical ministry that mobilizes the gospel of avoiding hell eventually comes to address the fact that much of their message (i.e., the eternity-in-hell-for-sin part) makes God seem capricious and tyrannical rather than loving and worthy of adoration. Yet practically every such evangelist also has a standard criticism, sometimes bitter and sometimes sorrowful, of any ministry that abandons or mutes the hellfire judgment portion of the gospel message.

As I've explored at length in this blog, conservative evangelicals (generally speaking) refute the idea that God's love can exist at all apart from God's righteousness. Those attributes are, for evangelicals, two apsects of the same Person(ality). God judges not because, like some heavenly Jekyll/Hyde, God changes character from wrathful to loving. God judges because without that judgment God would be neither righteous nor loving.

How could God not judge a rapist or murder, these evangelicals will ask, and be called good? How could he welcome such vile criminals into Heaven and maintain that he loves people? How is that fair to the victims? Besides, the argument continues, God's love for humanity is more than proven by Christ's sacrifice on the cross. What more do you want?

There's a deeper argument from some evangelical circles that I've not really dealt with yet, the doctrine of reprobation. A thread especially prominent in Calvinist traditions, reprobation declares that, in fact, God's love is not as unlimited as the love Paulanne presented to me and that I try to embrace. Instead, goes this line of thought, it is possible for humans to offend God to such a degree through their pride and blasphemy that they drift beyond the ambit of God's grace. They go too far, and God lets them go--forever.

Indeed, insofar as evangelicals believe that the ability of humans to turn to Christ ceases at death or at the Final Judgment (whichever comes first), they set practical limits on the extent of God's love. For most conservative evangelicals, souls burning in hell are there eternally, having by their mortal unbelief abandoned themselves to their sad fate.

The other side of strict reprobation is of course the better-known Calvinist doctrine of election. Here I tread upon ground less familiar to me, but as I understand it, conservative Calvinism interprets most Biblical passages about God's love as referring not to humanity in general but to that portion of humanity that God in God's sovereignty chose to be God's own. That is, prior to existence, God chose (a word whose Latin translation forms the root of elect) which human souls would turn to God. It is for these that God sent Christ. The others--the un-elect--are destined to reject God and are of course not included in God's proclamations of love.

Now, Calvinist traditions boast as wide a range of interpretations about election/reprobation as you can imagine (e.g., for some, election simply means that God knows ahead of time which humans will choose to believe in God and which won't). But just about any way you cut it, reprobation and election in any of their forms suggest a limitation on the spatial or temporal scope of God's love. God either loves all people--but only up to a certain time, after which he only loves those who have believed on Christ--or God loves only a portion of humanity, a portion who conveniently enough are exactly those who believe on Christ. [I can actually see the appeal of a strict Calvinism. It neatly explains away the moral conundrum of God loving a soul that God is ultimately unable or unwilling to spare from Hell]

Either way, God's love is, from an eternal perspective, unconditional for Christians alone. To believe otherwise, to suggest that God really loves all humans without scope or limit, is to replace the God represented in the Bible with wishful thinking.

Like it or not, point out conservative evangelicals, the Bible does not present a God who is totally loving. In the Bible God hates, excoriates, delights in the afflictions of, punishes, kills, destroys, calls for the utter annihilation of, lets go of, curses, drives out, casts into the outer darkness, and abandons altogether those God judges as worthy of such treatment. How, ask evangelicals, do people get around the Biblical witness without ignoring or dismissing it, replacing the Word of God in Scripture with a God of their own imagining. Is this not the very idolatry, the very pride, that defines the reprobate mind?

My response tomorrow,

JF