The Single Disposition of God: Some Thoughts on Derek Rishmawy's Review of Brian Zahnd's "Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God"

Derek Rishmawy recently posted a long (in his own words, stupidly long) review of Brian Zahnd’s recently released Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.

I think everybody who cares about the issues germane to Zahnd’s book should read Rishmawy's review.  The review is wide-ranging, direct, and articulate.  There’s a lot of food for thought.  Much to agree with.  But there is much that I disagree with and a lot that struck me as presumptive, condescending, and is itself a gross caricature.

Rishmawy gets to the meat of his critique right off the bat by addressing (what he labels as) a false dichotomy:

“God is wrath?  Or God is love?”  This dichotomy printed in bold on the back drives the argument of Brian Zahnd’s new book, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.

True, Zahnd probably didn’t do himself any favors in the "dichotomy" area with that wording on the back cover.  (*** Correction, Brian did not write what's on the back cover....which makes more sense).  The thing is, I’m familiar enough with Zahnd’s work to know that his argument re: wrath is nuanced.  That’s why there’s a book.  As presented on the back cover, the “dichotomy” surrounding the usage of the word “wrath” has to do with the particular vision of divine wrath that’s exemplified by the infamous spider-dangling-over-the-fire analogy taken from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.  It is that definition that provides the dichotomy. 

But regardless of the context or my own background knowledge, it should be readily apparent that Zahnd is not operating from a place of wrath-as-dichotomy…once wrath is properly defined. 

The evidence of this?  Three things in particular:

First, the back cover of the book itself poses this question: Is seeing God primarily as wrathful towards sinners true or biblical?

We have that word primarily.  It’s an important word.  What is being asked or alluded to with that word primarily?  Does God have parts?  Is God just a bigger and better version of humanity, subject to warring passions?  Do justice and mercy war with one another in the eternal mind of God?  I wrote about some of this last year when the hypothetical question of God being “primarily angry” was posed in my church.  The 1st post in that series is here.  Of particular relevance might be the 3rd post in the series which looks at protology and impassability (my own disclaimer of ignorance as to “defining” Trinity is here).   Rishmawy has similar thoughts – God does not change and is not comprised of competing or contradictory “parts”.

Secondly, Zahnd provides a definition of wrath early on in the book.  His vision of divine wrath is clearly not that wrath is not a thing, but that it has been wrongly understood.

But here I need to make something very clear: that God’s wrath is a biblical metaphor does not make the consequences of sin any less real or painful.  The revelation that God’s single disposition toward sinners remains one of unconditional love does not mean we are exempt from the consequences of going against the grain of love.  When we live against the grain of love we suffer the shards of self-inflicted suffering.  This is the “wrath of God”. (p 18)

Third, Rishmawy himself spends ample time talking about Zahnd’s distinction between “passive wrath” and “active wrath”.  I thought Rishmawy had some great stuff to say in that section.  Lots to think about.  The thing is, you can’t really pile on Zahnd by saying that the wrath dichotomy “drives the argument” when the review itself spends a substantial amount of time critiquing Zahnd's definition of wrath, a definition that intentionally seeks to eliminate the dichotomy.  Can’t have it both ways.

Ultimately, Rishmawy doesn’t believe there’s truly a wrath dichotomy.  Zahnd doesn’t believe there’s a dichotomy.  And I don’t believe there’s a dichotomy.

So where is the disagreement? 

Well, in many ways it’s a matter of semantics.  What do we mean by these words “wrath” and “love”?  What is “justice”?  How do they relate to one another?  That is where the differences lie.  And those differences are significant.

Ultimately, Rishmawy’s review isn’t as much a “review” of the book as it is a defense of retributive wrath as occasioned by Zahnd's book.  Retributive wrath is very, very important to Rishmawy, and to lose that understanding of wrath is to lose everything – it is to censor and ignore the Bible, it is to misrepresent Jesus, it is to distort the Gospel, it is to portray God as indifferent to evil, and it is to lose the faith. 

It’s very, very important here to note that a retributive understanding of wrath does not automatically make one a sadist.

No doubt that there are various visions of divine wrath – those eschatological visions in which the saved delight in the misery and everlasting conscious torment of the damned – that are so twisted as to be thoroughly incompatible with the Gospel.  Full stop.  Delight in the misery of another is not a virtue but a defect, and does not reflect the perfection of God.  But while such extreme examples are far from being fringe and are important to acknowledge, a substantive discussion demands that we not linger on them for too long.  It is possible to proceed in good faith while leaving important discussions about the variety of ways that our understanding of divine wrath and “justice” influence our world for another time.  So let’s do that as best we can.

Zahnd’s book covers a variety of interconnected topics – the Bible, atonement, hell, etc.  I’m not going to dive into any of those issues specifically.  They are important, for sure.  Here, I simply want to state how I see the love/wrath relationship differing between the two lines of thinking exemplified by Zahnd and Rishmawy and to examine them in the light of “justice”.

To do that, however, we need a basic shared definition of love.  This should be achievable because the differences between Zahnd and Rishmawy lie more in the nature of wrath and the relationship between wrath and love than in the definition of love.  So for these purposes, lets define love as follows:

To love is to will the good of the other – to be devoted to, patiently work towards, and encourage the flourishing of the other.  It is to give one’s best to the other, being rooted in a deep affection.  It is to live with the loveliness, beauty, and worth of the other in view, always and forever.

This definition isn’t imposed on God from without, Hallmark card kitsch projected onto God because I happen to think God should be “nice”.  No.  Is this a comprehensive definition?  Of course not.  Full of analogy and anthropomorphisms?  Probably.  (I mean, what does it really mean for an eternal God to be “patient”?)  Is the definition overly simplified?  Sure.  But is it sufficient to identify the difference in the love/wrath relationship between these two approaches?  Hopefully.

Now, how does Rishmawy connect love and wrath?

Let me put it this way: Is God love?  Yes.  Is true love righteous?  Well, yes.  Is it not righteous to promote good and oppose evil?  To stand against evil?  To even hate evil?  Yes.  I mean, that’s what Paul tells us to do (Rom. 12:9).  So if God is the sort of love that is righteous love, will his love not include a white-hot opposition to evil?  Yes.  Well, there you go.  The love that God is involves God’s inherent, innate opposition to, hatred of, and will to oppose sin because the love that is the life of the Triune God is a love which is righteous.”

To Rishmawy, a God without retribution is a God of passive indifference.  It is a God who lacks justice and righteousness.  Righteousness is synonymous with retribution because “white-hot opposition” is conceived only in terms of retribution. 

This deserves careful consideration.  This is where the differences between restorative justice and retributive justice become quite apparent.

Notice Rishmawy's list of crimes and criminals.  Slavery.  ISIS.  Oppression of the poor by the rich.  Militarism.  Etc.  It is a sobering list and it could be much, much longer.  Such things warrant God's "wrath".  We hope for God's "judgment" on such things.  

But did you notice what is missing from this retributive version of justice?

The restoration of the victim.

Having provided their witness to evil, the victims themselves play no further part in the definition or fulfillment of justice.  So long as the sinner is punished, “justice” as "white-hot opposition" has been accomplished.  

While retributive justice is focused on the punishment of the offender, restorative justice is first and foremost focused on the victim.  Within a framework of retributive justice, the focus is on offenders getting what they deserve.  Within a framework of restorative justice, the focus is on putting right what has gone wrong. (The Little Book of Restorative Justice)

Back to Rishmawy's quote.  Let's look at his by way of two contrasting citations from Mark Driscoll and George MacDonald.

Compare Mark Driscoll from his infamous “Got Hates You” sermon:

“Some of you, God hates you.  Some of you, God is sick of you.  God is frustrated with you.  God is wearied by you.  God has suffered long enough with you.  He doesn’t think you’re cute.  He doesn’t think it’s funny.  He doesn’t think your excuse is meritous.  He doesn’t care if you compare yourself to someone worse than you, He hates them too.  God hates, right now, personally, objectively hates some of you.”

To George MacDonald:

“For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected--not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine.”

“He is against sin: in so far as, and while, they and sin are one, he is against them--against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes; and thus he is altogether and always for them.”

For Driscoll (as with Jonathan Edwards), “God hates you” is rationalized and justified by God’s love.  That is, God is vindicated as “righteous” in his hate because he is a God of love. 

For MacDonald, God’s opposition is likewise grounded in love.  God’s being “against you” is, paradoxically, God for you.  

Do you see the difference?  Each of these represents a “white-hot” divine righteousness, but they differ in fundamental ways.  

What does the "white-hot righteousness" of God look like, and what is it's ultimate purpose?  This is the form of the "wrath" dichotomy that needs to be addressed. 

Let’s go back to that definition of love.  If a person were to stop doing the things that constitute “love” – stop encouraging the flourishing of the other, lose patience, give up, only see the failures of the other, etc. – we wouldn’t continue to call it love.  We wouldn’t say that it’s a “different kind of love”.  We wouldn’t say that love, if it is to be a truly righteous love, requires that a person effectively stop loving another should the situation call for it.  This is abstract nonsense.  No, we’d just say that the person no longer loved the former beloved.

While we must be careful to protect the analogous nature of language when it comes to describing the being of God, we cannot allow language to become equivocal.

As John Stuart Mill said:

“To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology that God may possibly not be good?”

Or in the words of David Bentley Hart:

“When we use words like “good”, “just”, “love” to name God, not as if they are mysteriously greater in meaning than when predicated of creatures, but instead as if they bear transparently opposite meanings, then we are saying nothing.  And, again, the contagion of this equivocity consumes theology entirely.”

We cannot allow the word "love" to become so equivocal.  Rishmawy and Zahnd would certainly agree on this.

Where they differ, I think, can be best summed up in the following sentence from Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God:

The revelation that God's single disposition toward sinners remains one of unconditional love does not mean we are exempt from the consequences of going against the grain of love."  (18)

It's a point that Zahnd brings up again and again.  An axiom.  God's single disposition.

The entirety of what I've attempted to say is wrapped up in those three words.

Human sin does not thwart God's single disposition of unconditional love, for God is perfectly free.  Words like "justice" and "wrath" simply cannot be understood apart from that single disposition.  For a Calvinist like Rishmawy (who I assume holds to something akin to double predestination, or who at least believes that the damned are damned, in the end, because God simply does not will their salvation) this particular singular disposition is incoherent.  Perhaps he understands a singular disposition in terms of "God willing his own glory" or something similar.  Those are word games and dark theological necessities to which I reply:

"The glory of God is man fully alive." -Irenaeous

God's wrath can only be understood in light of God's single disposition.  And through all ages, God's singular disposition cannot be extracted from God's glory as man fully alive.