MysteriousFaith

Does God Love How We Love?

Regardless of what you and I believe about life after death, pondering the question of whether or not God loves as we love is critical to our own spiritual maturity. Within this question we will find a deeper respect for those whose self-delusion, pain and mistakes have led them to make horrible decisions. We will see these people as hurting, regardless of how heinous their sin, and we will reach out to them. I care some for theological debates about the truth of universalism; I care much more for what wrestling with this issue could mean for me as an individual. I am confident that as I ask myself to love as God loves, I will come to know Him more fully.

Does God Love How We Love?

My wife is currently dealing with a friend who is proving to be very difficult to love. It had become obvious some time ago that this person needs more help than a shoulder to cry on could provide. As my wife began to urge this individual to get help, to confront her pain in a way that would be productive and hold out promise for getting better, this individual has turned on my wife, causing her even more hurt, stress and general frustration. Naturally, this response has created in my wife and I a desire to pull away from this hurting individual before things get worse. As we have discussed this situation, we have realized that our response to this hurting individual is the antithesis of the underlying ethic of Christian love; we both recognize that Christ’s desire that we “turn the other cheek” applies in this situation. This realization has prompted another thought for me which is, does God love how we love?

The debate over the love of God is as broad and complex as is any other theological issue. On one extreme fundamentalists have a view of God’s love that seems to be at best balanced against their view of His holiness; His holiness accommodates a view of a wrathful God who can do things simply because He is all powerful, not because He has an underlying ethic that He wishes to employ in the world He created. On the other extreme are Universalists who believe that God will never condemn anyone; that ultimately all will be reconciled to Him. This debate falls out typically first within Scripture as fundamentalists and moderate evangelicals are unwilling to set aside the clear warnings in Scripture about punishment in the after-life. Those on the other side reply that they recognize these warnings in Scripture, but do not hold to the same idea as to what Scripture is (i.e. is it inspired, infallible, inerrant?); this flexibility allows them to project their own ideas about God onto their conceptions of the after-life. I find three philosophical questions most helpful in framing dialogue between these two camps: first, why do we so readily assume that God’s grace ends with death? Second, if heaven is ultimately a reality where we retain our free-will, why will we choose any differently than we have in this world? I have explored these first two questions in an earlier essay; my third question has been brought to life in the situation my wife finds herself in, dealing with a very difficult individual whose friendship with my wife is causing enough pain and friction as to hurt our individual lives and our family. My last question is put most simply; does God love how we love?

This is, as I see it, a critical question while exploring universalism. Those who hold to the conventional belief of a dualistic afterlife (heaven and hell) believe strongly in free will. This point is best made by the allegory C.S. Lewis uses in his wonderful The Great Divorce, where Lewis shows that even after death in the ethereal spirit world, the human condition carries on, where people who have said “not Thy will be done, my will be done” essentially slip into a state of being that is limited to the degree of selflessness they achieved in this world as well as their response to God. The idea of our response to God being the final arbiter of how reconciled we are to God is appealing in that it allows moderate evangelicals to drift away from fundamentalists’ view of a damning, angry God whose holiness requires eternal punishment to a God who wishes He could have it otherwise, but cannot tinker with the freedom He gave His created world. For many, free will is the idea upon which the responsibility of eternal destination is placed; this is a convenient decision philosophically as it removes the primary emphasis on why an eternity of anything less than what God could have originally desired is the responsibility of humans and not the responsibility of our maker and His original plan for the universe. Placing the responsibility more squarely on God brings us back to unanswerable questions such as why pain and suffering must exist in this world, and why God would choose this particular world if He knows a future reality exists where pain, death and suffering as evidenced through wrong individual choices (sin) can be removed. I am unconvinced that the emphasis on free will is really because we so highly respect individual freedom or whether or not we fear what we would have to give up related to our quasi-systemized theology about the afterlife if we were to ask our idea of God to withstand these questions. As complex of an issue that free will represents, we are opening up a much more complex question about revelation and the nature of God if we place the burden on our Creator. This is why, to me, the question of whether or not God loves as we love is so essential to our idea about God and our idea about the after-life.

Ask yourself if you would be an evangelical without the teachings of Christ and those about Christ. Obviously, without Christ no such thing as a Christian exists. Walk with me a bit further: could you be a first-century Jew? Could you worship the God as revealed in the Old Testament? Could you accommodate the need to focus on the Law in Leviticus, the rabid nationalism of Israel’s formation as it entered Canaan, the genocidal commands from Yahweh? I for one can be honest enough admit that I would not be a believer. My point is the absolute essential nature of Christ to religious thought in our contemporary world. What has resonated the world-over are the teachings of Christ on love, compassion for those in need, meekness, and the ability to believe that through sacrifice we will come to know life more fully. Perhaps more than any other underlying lesson Christ taught was that the first century Jew’s idea of God was not right. He asked them to call God their Father. He taught a self-less love that even today represents a radical ethic. Two thousand years have passed, but what resonates with people most as they meet Christ are His teachings on loving others. His eschatology and concept of His own Divinity can be widely debated; what can not be debated are His claims as to the absolute centrality of love in a life dedicated to His teachings.

Our systematic theology of the afterlife runs aground when we seek to interpret traditional teachings on the afterlife through the lens of the life of Christ. Why? Because in the moment we ask ourselves about the afterlife we have to believe that God loves how we love. We have to believe that God gives people a limited number of chances, just like we give people a limited number of chances. We have to believe that God has a finite amount of mercy, just like we have a finite amount of mercy. But most importantly of all, we have to believe that God leaves people alone to wallow in the filth of their own mistakes, sin and self-hatred, just as we draw lines in our relationships with others. We draw boundaries around relationships when we recognize we can’t afford to get any dirtier, when a relationship is negatively affecting our own disposition, or the lives of our family. Perhaps this teaching has its place in fallible human relationships, but does a perfect God have these same limitations? Or can he, as Universalists claim, pursue them as the “hound of heaven”? Lewis’s allegory in The Great Divorce requires us to view God as static, a fixed destination that we can come closer to depending on how self-less and how spiritually mature we were at our death. But what Lewis did not explore is that his allegory is poorly matched to his idea on the identity of Jesus. You see, Lewis - as do most evangelicals - held to the belief that Christ was God incarnate. Where Lewis believed that God would physically come to mankind in the form of Christ, Lewis could not take the step of believing that God would similarly come to man after death.

Regardless of what you and I believe about life after death, pondering the question of whether or not God loves as we love is critical to our own spiritual maturity. Within this question we will find a deeper respect for those whose self-delusion, pain and mistakes have led them to make horrible decisions. We will see these people as hurting, regardless of how heinous their sin, and we will reach out to them. I care some for theological debates about the truth of universalism; I care much more for what wrestling with this issue could mean for me as an individual. I am confident that as I ask myself to love as God loves, I will come to know Him more fully. Ultimately, I can not answer any of the three questions I proposed earlier as I have a reasonable idea of what I, as creature, can attempt to answer for my Creator. I am content to believe I was created as a soul by God out of an act of love; that I was conceived physically by an act of human love; that I will be sustained as a heavenly being within a reality I suspect our Creator has much more going on than we can appreciate.

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• December 27, 2004

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