Reprobation and the Hatred of God

It's odd to think of fundamentalist pastors like Fred Phelps (of "God Hates Fags" fame) and Steven Anderson (of "Why I Hate Barack Obama" fame) as stabilizing influences, but that has been their effect on me as I study conservative evangelicalism. To explore why, I'll need to pinpoint where Phelps and Anderson (and others like them) depart from most other evangelicals.

Of course, as many scholars have noted (D. G. Hart most effectively), evangelicalism lacks a clear nucleus and a clear outer boundary. Setting up hard-and-fast lines between evangelicals and fundamentalists is practically impossible and theoretically ill-advised. Nevertheless, conservative evangelicals often use Phelps (and, I predict, Anderson to a lesser extent) as foils against which they portray their beliefs as sensible, loving, and mainstream. I want today to locate where and how evangelicals themselves tend to discriminate between themselves and fundamentalism.

As I wrote yesterday, Phelps and Anderson themselves differ markedly from each other on several points of theology and practice. Phelps is hyper-Calvinist and disinterested in winning converts; his church's colorful and offensive protests are meant to condemn, not to convert. Anderson, on the other hand, refuses to align with formal theological traditions, be they Calvinist, Arminian, or dispensational. And while his sermons often feature fire-breathing rhetoric (like the aforementioned "Why I Hate..." that made national headlines), Anderson is a devoted evangelist who values soul-winning as a central component of any legitimate church.

What they share, however, is the utter certainty that they have a deadlock on the Words of God literally and plainly presented in the Bible. Moreover, their readings of scripture lead them to the unpopular conclusion that God is in fact not (or not primarily) a God of love but a God of hate. Where other preachers or scholars will contextualize verses like the imprecatory Psalms (e.g., Psalm 58: "Break their teeth, oh God, in their mouths..."), Phelps and Anderson build whole theologies upon instances of God's wrath, God's violence, God's delight in the sufferings of others, and so on.

To be sure, both men define God's hatred not as a human pettiness or prejudice (both in different ways distance themselves from racist fundamentalist organizations like the KKK) but as a natural and rational consequence of God's righteous perfection. Being God, being the very definition and essence of Good, God will of course be intolerant of--hate--evil. All humans are by virtue of their being human, imperfect. Yet God in God's mercy (Anderson is more apt to say love than Phelps) sent Christ as sacrifice to atone for the sins of imperfect humanity. Humans--at least the elect of those humans--can by that grace believe in Christ and avoid God's wrath. Those who die without so believing are hopelessly subject to the holy, righteous fire of God's anger.

So far, so orthodox, as far as most conservative evangelicals are concerned. God hates sin but loves humanity enough to die on the cross. No disagreement there. Anderson and Phelps diverge from the majority of evangelicals, however, in their words about those humans who while still alive stray irrevocably beyond the ambit of God's grace: the reprobate. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote about "going on to perfection," suggesting that Christians can in this mortal life achieve a kind of heavenly state of holiness. Phelps's and Anderson's reprobation functions as a kind of a perfection in reverse, a going-on-to-perdition. Those who proudly reject God or commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit by declaring the works of God as evil or sinful--God in essence gives up on these people, withdrawing from them all hope of salvation, all sense of right and wrong, hardening their hearts and condemning them to their sinful, violent lusts. Such people are not only unsaved but permanently unsaved.

Here Phelps and Anderson leave much of mainstream evangelicalism. Most evangelicals would be uneasy with the suggestion that any human is beyond saving. Stories of the redemptive power of God for even the worst, vilest offender filled the messages I heard as a Southern Baptist. These and other stories relied on the idea that Christ died "while we were yet sinners"--while we were shaking our fists in the face of God. Our human rebellion did not, could not, overpower the saving grace of Christ. My Baptist tradition in particular affirmed the legitimacy of "deathbed conversions," where even the foulest man or woman could be saved if they truly believed in the last moments of their mortal lives (look, for instance, at the thief on the cross next to Jesus to whom Christ said "Truly you will be with me in Paradise").

If pressed, some evangelicals (particularly those in Calvinist traditions, where reprobation is a well-established doctrine) will admit that perhaps God does sometimes "harden the heart" of people. But even they would urge caution about thinking we can know for sure just who such reprobates were, holding out the hope that even those we think are reprobates may yet turn to Christ. Whether any particular person is an actual reprobate is beyond human knowledge. In other words, regardless of our impressions, we as Christians are to love others by reaching out to them, urging them to turn to Christ (and perhaps to repent).

Phelps and Anderson would not disagree. Phelps and his church maintain that their "Thank God for AIDS" or "Matt Shepard Burning in Hell" displays are acts of love, presenting people with the hard truth about how life really is. Anderson would maintain the same: if he didn't love people, he asks rhetorically, why would he spend hours going door-to-door winning souls in the hot Phoenix sun?

Nevertheless, Anderson and Phelps strongly affirm that reprobates exist and that they can be identified as such. Rebrobates, note, are not merely vile people; Saul was a vile person prior to the road to Damascus. Reprobates are a particular kind of vile defined by an arrogant rejection of God. Once such reprobates are so identified, Phelps and Anderson claim it is wrong for Christians to love them as one loves other unsaved people.

For both pastors, homosexuals clearly represent a case of reprobation. They are people--no, not people, but less-than-humans-- who despise God and for whom (quid pro quo) God has nothing but hatred. The people of God can therefore have no other attitude towards GLBT people than utter animosity. Phelps and Anderson do not advocate personal violence toward gays (again, unlike militant white supremacist groups), but they would certainly support harsh sanctions against homosexuals, up to and including the death penalty. For to them, gays and lesbians (and bisexuals and the transgendered) are not merely non-heterosexual; GLBT people are vicious enemies, consciously dedicated to the corruption and destruction of all that is Godly and wholesome, particularly children.

It's in this sure identification of reprobates and in the endorsement of attitudes of hatred toward them ("Thank God for AIDS," "Break his teeth") that Anderson and Phelps depart from mainstream evangelicalism. Evangelicals themselves typically use examples like Phelps to qualify their own stances against gays (or pro-choice forces, feminists, liberals, etc.). We resist, they say, but do not hate. We hate the sin, they say, but love the sinner. Phelps and Anderson both declare such a nuanced view as unBiblical and unChristian.

And on their own terms, Phelps and Anderson make a better, more coherent case than many of the conservative evangelicals who would be embarrassed by them.

More tomorrow,

JF

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