Chris Neiswonger gives us some mighty fine food for thought today. I wish I woulda had this in class today as I tried to explain the spiritual beliefs of the Puritans (we were reading “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” I really stunk up the place trying to explain things. Not only was I not prepared, but I really got flustered and hence simply confused the students.).
Bottom line: without putting God’s justice front and center, the Gospel makes no sense. Without God’s justice, we appear much better than we are, and God seems petty and just plain odd. Only when we see that our “resume” is instead a “rap sheet” and that God must deal with wrongdoing and evil justly does His offer of forgiveness make sense:
I’m getting a lot of this ‘what a “good god” would do’ thing now in emails and such (backwash from the new atheism).
Try this: Instead of looking supplicant and making excuses for God as if He had been having a bad day, say plainly that “any God that would not judge persons, nations, entire civilizations and even the world would not be a God of any great significance and so unworthy of true faith or sincere worship”.
One way or another we need to face the problem. Either we present God as a mushy glow of love and compassion that would really like to do something about evil but either can’t or won’t, or we present him as he presents himself in scripture and push the problem back at the accuser.
Those without God inevitably absolve the universe of evil in order to avoid the God that judges evil and so make themselves innocent at the cost of moral realism.
