Recollections

My first serious struggle with faith came as an undergraduate, when my Introduction to Logic professor introduced me to the logical problem of evil. One of the many books I subsequently read about that (still troubling) subject was John Stackhouse’s Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil.

Stackhouse’s slim volume doesn’t offer a theodicy per se, and I’m not sure what I would think of the book if I read it again today. But some of the book’s small asides have stuck with me over the last ten years. One is when Stackhouse addresses the unstated assumption that lurks behind all discussions of the problem of evil: that if God could offer a comprehensive, morally sufficient explanation for all the suffering in the world, we would be able to understand it. What that assumption exposes is the hubris that often motivates arguments about the problem of evil–the idea that even with our limited understanding, we can understand the basic ordering of the universe better than God can, so much so that we can demand of him an explanation for his actions.

That makes it sound like Stackhouse thinks it’s ridiculous for us to ask God for an explanation of evil, but he’s careful to avoid saying that. Indeed, one of the things that was most helpful for me when I read the books was its argument that God is not offended by our questions. Nonetheless, I think it’s useful every once in a while to recognize the ridiculousness of our posture when we, as human beings who know how frequently we are befuddled and mistaken, to pose dilemmas to God as if we were his intellectual equal.

In this vein, Stackhouse quotes a passage from philosopher Thomas Morris that has always stayed with me:

[Questioners of God are often] people who don’t have a clue as to what exactly they would do about the most pressing problems of their own city if they were mayor, or concerning the greatest difficulty facing their state if they were governor. They would probably be quite hesitant if asked how precisely they would solve the greatest national crises if they were president, but they have no hesitation whatsoever in venturing to declare how they would solve what may be the single most troubling cosmic religious problem if they were God. (p. 91-92)

That’s not anything like a knockdown argument for problem-of-evil questioners, because most of them aren’t saying they know what they would do to rid the cosmos of evil, but only that they assume God should, could, and would know what to do. Still, there’s a useful point being made here, or at least one that has proved useful to me.

This long-ago passage came back to me in a flash over the weekend. Yesterday I worked all day painting a piece of unfinished pine furniture that I bought last week. I had resolved to “distress” the furniture so that it would look antique. So first, I added four coats of milk paint. Then I added a top coat sealant. Next, I sanded the piece in “high-wear” places to make it look distressed. And finally, I added a rosewood wood stain to make the distressed spots stand out. That’s where things went awry. The rosewood stain turned out to be extremely red, and now the finished product looks almost purple–not at all what I had intended.

I know this is facile, but yesterday night as I was gnashing my teeth about all this, the thought did cross my mind: If I can’t even screw up a dresser right, maybe I should think twice before telling God how to run the universe.

In an article in Harper’s magazine last year, Bill McKibben reported this disturbing figure:

“three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.”

Of course, the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” doesn’t appear in Holy Scripture. But it’s only one of myriad cliches that have migrated into the biblical consciousness of Christians anyway.

Another such phrase is the supposed injunction to “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Like Ben Franklin’s dictum, it’s a statement that doesn’t appear in the Bible. (Though it does appear in the works of the Bard, who quipped in Measure for Measure, “Condemn the fault and not the actor of it.”) But also like Ben Franklin’s dictum, the Bible would be a lot easier to live with if it did contain such a pleasing qualification. For both of these cliches artfully dodge some of the most uncomfortable and most central demands of Scripture. As McKibben notes, “God helps those who help themselves” takes the edge off of the radical command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Likewise, “hate the sin but love the sinner” dulls the force fo the even more radical command to “love your enemy.”

It’s telling that Jesus never qualified his commands to love in this way. He did not say “love your neighbor, if he helps himself.” And easy as it would have been, he did not follow his command to “love your enemies” with a fine distinction about which parts of an enemy his disciples were still allowed to hate. It’s striking, in fact, that Jesus never even describes his attitude towards the sins of sinners with the word “hate.” More often, he describes sin as a sickness that needs healing, and sinners as the sick who need a physician–and those metaphors make it much easier to see how one can love a sinner. At the very least, Jesus never used the word “hate” and “sinner” in the same sentence, never allowed those words to get as close to each other as the common cliche does.

To be sure, other parts of the Bible (particularly in the Old Testament) talk about the things that God “hates.” (Although beware about citing these passages as proof texts for the cliche, since there are also verses in the Old Testament that seem to collapse the distinction between sin and sinner.) And there are plenty of passages that urge Christians to “abhor evil” and “cling to what is good” and the like. But in almost every case these passages that come closest to an instruction to “hate the sin” direct our attention to the evil within ourselves. There is no passage that conjoins hating evil and loving the evildoer the way the cliche does, and perhaps there’s a reason. We are usually oh-so-adept at making the distinction between our evils and our selves, but when it comes to regarding the sins of others, we are hardly ever so discriminating.

Although, as I’ve said, Jesus’s teachings offer precious little in the way of support for “hating the sin” and “loving the sinner,” there is a way in which those phrases do describe what God does and who God is. He hates sin. He loves sinners. But a fuller and more accurate description of God is that he hates sin because he loves sinners, and sin both destroys sinners and stands as an obstacle to a reconciled relationship between God and his beloved. If God hates sin, it is because sin is an expression of hatred directed at him–or at least a choice to love something other than God. God hates that his beloved creatures hate him, not because he is an offended and capricious God, but because he craves relationship with sinners so much. For human beings, I suspect that “hating the sin and loving the sinner” serves as an excuse for supping sinners with a long spoon — for their own good, as it were. But for God, hating the sin is only always a sign of his loving the sinner. To hate the sin and to love the sinner are not two distinct attitudes vying with one another for the control of his affections, but two different ways of saying the same thing.

Perhaps the fundamental error in the cliche “hate the sin and love the sinner” is the way it reifies sin as though it were something that could be excised from a person and seen alongside him or her, so that we could regard one “thing” differently than the other. But sin is fundamentally a breach of relationship, as Lee has recently suggested. It is a relational problem that God solves by loving even those who are his enemies, a solution enjoined on us as well in our dealings with our enemies. And perhaps nothing underlines that “sin” is a broken relationship more than this fact: when the word “hates” appears in the New Testament (see here), it is used, almost without exception, to describe the world’s attitude toward God, not God’s attitude toward the world. It is not God’s hatred that needs to be defused in order for relationship with the sinner to be restored; it is ours.

So when we, as children of God, say we hate the sin but love the sinner, there is only one justifiable reason for such a statement: that we long passionately for the loving reconciliation of sinners, first with God and also with ourselves and others. Unless that longing for love is evident in our avowals of “hatred” for sin, I suspect there are darker motives for such avowals — motives that, far from drawing the sinner closer to ourselves and focusing our ire on the sin within ourselves, serve as excuses for avoiding reconciliation with others.

There’s been some recent discussion over at the Think Tank blog about universalism, mostly revolving around Keith De Rose’s compelling biblical case for universalism.

With regards to universalism, I find myself very close to Kevin Corcoran’s position in one of the comment threads: “I hope it’s true, and even pray that it’s true. But I can’t say I believe it’s true.” De Rose gives a careful endorsement of that same position.

There are a variety of reasons why–despite my hoping and praying (and even believing that Scripture provides reason for hope) that universalism is true–I find it hard to banish all doubts about it. One of them that has troubled me lately has to do with the problem of evil. The only theodicy (and it’s not really a theodicy proper) that makes sense to me is to believe that evil has no ultimate purpose, that it represents a willful defiance of God’s will by created agents, and that God will ultimately act to bring suffering, evil, and death to an end. (If you want an impassioned and beautiful articulation of this approach to the problem of evil, read David Bentley Hart’s recent The Doors of the Sea.) Scripture speaks of this ultimate eschatological hope with a variety of images that give me incredible consolation — like the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, the promise of the parousia, and the resurrection of the dead.

But if evil serves no ultimate purpose, and if God will ultimately act to bring an end to evil, then why is God delaying? What’s taking so long? I don’t mean to scoff by asking that: I think I can distinguish my motivation for asking where God is from the motives of the “scoffers” that Peter warns about in 2 Peter 3:

First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!’

These scoffers seem to be taking God’s delay as an excuse for “indulging their own lusts.” But I think there’s a way of sincerely asking God, “Where is the promise of your coming?” And it’s particularly understandable if the victim of intolerable suffering and evil asks that question.

I suppose, though, that I’ve always understood Peter’s answer to the “scoffers” to be an answer to anyone with questions about why God delays, no matter the motives behind their questions. Peter replies:

They [the scoffers] deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgement and destruction of the godless.

The reason for God’s delay, in other words, is God’s patience (a bone that Jason has also been chewing on recently). As Peter goes on to say,

The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

Now, here’s where my problems with universalism arise. On the one hand, nothing about Peter’s passages are what De Rose calls “killer” verses for attacking universalism. On the contrary, God’s fervent desire that all (De Rose’s favorite word) will come to repentance and his equally fervent desire that none will perish seem to speak in favor of universalism. And the reference to the “destruction of the godless,” like so many similar passages in the New Testament, is not knockdown proof that there will be no future chances for repentance even after death. Consider, for instance, that in the context Peter is talking about the Genesis Flood, which is an example of a case where God destroyed the godless and yet gave humanity a second chance. (Incidentally, the Flood myth might be a useful story for the universalist. To any anti-universalist who thinks that God’s destruction of the earth must represent the “final chance” for humanity, the universalist could offer the Flood as a counterexample.)

Still, these passages do (to me) seem to put some pressure on a certain kind of universalism. On their face, they do imply that God is waiting for something to happen — for us to do something, namely, come to repentance — before making good on his promise to come. And they also imply that the reason God is waiting is because he does not want any to perish. Now, if the universalist is right, then God will ultimately see to it that no one will perish. But then why does he delay? If there is a way to end suffering and evil now and for all to come to repentance, then come, Lord Jesus!

As I’ve already said, my concern about God’s delay is not an argument against universalism, but it is a reason why my belief in univeralism wavers. I’m aware there are ways to explain God’s delay without rejecting universalism. Perhaps God’s delay is a point in favor of what De Rose calls “fervent exclusivism” — the position that in order to be saved, one must somehow explicitly and freely accept Christ. In fact, in his explanation of how fervent exclusivism and universalism might cohere, De Rose emphasizes that God can have as much time as he needs to bring people around to a freely chosen repentance. But in the meantime, while God’s taking his time, evil persists in the face of God’s promise that its days are numbered. And if there’s any chance that God might ultimately have to override the freedom of some in order to accomplish universal salvation, then it’s hard to swallow that the freely chosen acceptance of Christ is so important that it justifies the continued existence of a world in which genocides, tsunamis, and child abuse are perennial lacerations.

The anti-univeralist has an interpretation of these passages from Peter that has, in some respects, a better answer to this problem of evil. God is waiting because the evil of eternal torment for millions is even worse than the evils that we presently endure. I’m not saying I believe that account of God’s delay, because it doesn’t help my already fragile theodicies at all to believe that God is ultimately going to consign people I love to hell. But if I deal with that problem by embracing universalism, then I feel left with the problem of God’s delay.

At the very least, I feel I have to amend Kevin Corcoran’s position to this: “I hope universalism is true, and even pray that it’s true. But I can’t say I believe it’s true. And I hope that God will act to abolish evil very soon, and pray with eager expectation that the time is at hand. But I can’t say I believe that it is.”