Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought - Thomas Talbott (5): Restricting the Scope of God's Love

The Inconsistent Triad

These posts relate to the article "Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought" by Dr. Thomas Talbott as published in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  

This essay strikes an excellent balance between being concise and being thorough in laying out the arguments and viewpoints of various Christian schools of eschatological thought without resorting to caricatures.  His project is careful to present each of these viewpoints at their strongest, for only then can productive dialogue occur.


Return to Part 1
Back to Part 4

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Let's now look at how Talbott addresses the Augustinian notion of God's "restricted love".

The Augustinian reasons as follows:

God's saving grace is irresistible in the end, and yet everlasting torment in hell will nonetheless be the terrible fate of some; therefore, God does not love all created persons equally and his (electing) love is thus limited in its scope.

In the end, it's fairly simple.  Grace is "irresistible" (proposition 2), yet everlasting separation is true (proposition 3).  Therefore, it must be the case that God does not love all people equally in the sense that God wills their salvation.

If a person is not saved it is because God doesn't want them to be saved.  His electing love, being irresistible, cannot and must not extend to them.  Period.

For some people this salvation equation is sheer theological fact.  "Mysterious" as to the reasons for God's "free" choice to save some and not others, but not mysterious in it's sheer necessity.  On the other hand, for those who either (1) come from a tradition that doesn't hold to the Augustinian version of "irresistible" grace or (2)come from a tradition that does view salvation through the lens of the Augustinian version of "irresistible" grace but didn't realize the necessity of this limited scope of God's salvific will, this is a scandalous assertion.  Shocking.  For some, heretical.

The assertion naturally leads to some important theological questions like:

What??  

God doesn't want all people to be "saved"?  

How and where do we see such an idea defended philosophically?  Biblically?  Theologically?

What about those parts of scripture that would seem to indicate that God does indeed want all to be "saved"?

1 Timothy 2:4 is one example of an isolated verse commonly used to affirm God's desire to save all people without exception:

who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (NRSV)

For a person who needs to restrict the scope of God's (electing) love and sees this verse as holding some sort of authority, this verse is a problem.  What can be done?  But here is how Augustine explains it :

"the word concerning concerning God, 'who will have all men to be saved,' does not mean that there is no one whose salvation he doth not will...but by 'all men' we are to understand the whole of mankind, in every single group into which it can be divided...For from which of these groups doth not God will that some men from every nation should be saved through his only-begotten Son our Lord."  (Enchiridion) 

So for Augustine, "all" must merely mean "all kinds" or "some" individuals from "every group".  This is the necessary exegetical move.  God simply cannot be said to will the salvation of all people (as defined in proposition 1) and maintain any Augustinian theological coherence as defined by the acceptance of propositions 2 & 3.  So any Bible verse that seems to say otherwise ("all" as meaning literally "all people") cannot really be doing so.  It must be shoved off to the side or dismantled.

The logic of it is not difficult to see.  Simple.

Now some proponents of the Augustinian view of "limited election"argue, quite simply, that God does not love the non-elect at all.  Others, like the contemporary philosopher Paul Helm don't argue that God doesn't "love" all people or that "love" is not of God's very essence.  Instead, Helm seems to dismantle the connection between God's love and God's salvific will.  Helm argues that God's loving nature or God's loving actions towards human beings do not necessitate that God's redemptive love extends equally to all people.  The argument goes, just as there are differences within the created order (male/female, etc), there can be differentiations with respect to God's redemptive purposes.  Essentially, God being love in God's essence and being loving towards God's creation does not mean that this love is necessarily and finally redemptive in nature.

Helm does not here seek to throw out the language of "love" but rather to rework it's semantic content to fit into an Augustinian framework by:

1. creating a special category of "love" called "redemptive love" and arguing that the former does not necessarily entail the latter
2. viewing divine love on a sort of sliding scale, the minimum level of which may be called "love" but doesn't include the will to save

Jeff Jordan takes a similar approach.  He argues that God's love need not be maximally extended for it to be love.  He finds the idea of "equal love" to be an impossibility because love is not defined by uniformity.  In other words, divine love need not be salvific in it's aims for it to be divine "love".

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A lot of foundational things to work through here.  Personally, I'd prefer to see the language of "love" thrown out all together than see it's semantic content be reduced to a rubble of Augustinian equivocation.  Preference aside, the implications of going down this path are, I think, stunning and disastrous.

For me, the questions that arise out of this section are:

1. When does "all" mean "all"?
2. What is the connection between who God is and what God does?
3. We may very well be dealing with definitions of "love" that are are semantically different.  So what do we mean by the word "love"?  
4. Does God being "loving" entail that God wills the ultimate good of the object(s) of his love?  Or can "love" will something less (and far worse) that the ultimate good of the beloved and still be called "love"?
5. What are the protological (in-the-beginning) implications of a limited love?

continued

Is God "Primarily Angry"? (6) - Conclusion (and the answer is "No")

This is the 6th and final post in a series centered around the question of "Is God primarily angry?"

Previous posts are here:
Is God "Primarily Angry" (1)
Is God "Primarily Angry" (2) - Defining Our Terms
Is God "Primarily Angry" (3) - Trinity
Is God "Primarily Angry" (4) - Cross
Is God "Primarily Angry" (5) - Eschatology

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"Is God primarily angry?"

That was the question posed in a sermon several months ago.

Initially, my intent in writing this series of posts was to simply address the fact that people often believe God to be "primarily angry" because the God that they are presented with from a variety of sources and in a variety of ways is, in fact, "primarily angry".  That's all in my prior posts, though, and I don't want to rehash it all here.  But this series turned into a good deal more for me, and for that I'm grateful.

So after a good deal of rambling in these 5 posts over the course of several months, how shall I conclude?

Perhaps I'll return to the beginning.  As I stated in an earlier post, we live in a semantic universe.    What do we mean by the term "primarily angry"?

Does the term "primarily" suggest that God has "parts" and that we're attempting to identify which of these parts is the more fundamental?  Does "primarily" expose a sort of tension that our theology demands within the heart of God?  Are certain traits at war with one another?  A tension between love and justice?  A god whose mercy and righteousness war for the right to be "primary"?

What do we mean by "anger"?  Is divine anger in the interest and for the good of the object of anger (think discipline) or in the interest and for the satisfaction of the offended party aka God (think retribution as an end in and of itself?)  These aren't the same thing after all.  And I think people frequently defend God's anger using the former, but effectively mean the latter.

Now all that said, I absolutely love the way that the question (a loaded question for sure) was posed to the congregation and it inspired me to wrestle with it for myself.  After all, the semantics cannot obscure that the question itself is fairly easy to apprehend at first glance.  It does it's job.  Do I believe deep down that God looks at me with anger or disappointment at my behavior, lack of faith and gratitude?  Is God impossible to please?  Does God love reluctantly and through gritted teeth?  Do I use the word "love" but actually mean something else?  Something more sinister?  Something that isn't consistent with "love" at all?

The way that the question was phrased reveals our propensity to perceive a sort of tension within the heart of God - justice vs. mercy, love vs. holiness, etc.  And we need to get on God's good side.  Where does this come from?  And why does it so stubbornly persist?  Is it true?

There is a lot that I might have said but didn't.  I didn't mention Biblical violence (Old Testament genocide) at all.  I didn't mention personal experience at all - that sense that "God is out to get me" after going through a rough stretch of loss and pain.  This is completely legitimate and I have great sympathy for it.  I suppose that I chose not to address it here because there are many people who believe in an angry God even if things are going well.

I've argued that, in our time and place, common theological understandings of eschatology and atonement reinforce and even require a "primarily angry God".  Our anxiety that God is primarily angry comes from them and not in spite of them.  This isn't isolated to the theologically minded.  I think all Christians, rightly or wrongly, have a basic idea of "why Jesus had to die" even if it isn't wrapped up in fancy language.  And these things may work deep below the surface in the heart and mind of the individual and be so integrated within the ethos of a faith community as to go virtually unnoticed, but I believe such things whisper to us.  They shape how we formulate our conceptions of the nature of divine love, anger, forgiveness, and our own worth. They have for me.

One sees a "primarily angry God" emerge because they do believe what they're told, not because they don't.  Returning to my post on eschatology, for example, how could a person be told that "Revelation is the worst book ever written if you're not on God's side" and not consider if God might be primarily angry?

So what matters to me, in the end, is not whether we assert that "God is not primarily angry".  It's whether the underlying theology supports such an assertion.  And I don't mean "theology" in an look-at-me-I'm-a-smarty-pants-theologian way, but in the practical truth that everyone thinks about God, whether they do it with fancy language or not.  Whether God is "primarily angry" is bound up with the answers to many other questions - of that I am sure - and the relevant questions matter to us regular people.

I am thoroughly convinced that an "angry God" is the natural result of (some of) our theology, and so we must either (1)discard that theology that causes it or (2)discard the notion of a God who is not "primarily angry".  I suppose that sentence is the summary of everything that I was hoping to say in this series.

Their is a strong temptation to avoid the cognitive dissonance that this creates.  I hate cognitive dissonance.  I really do.  But the place of seeking and wrestling with these questions is the place where the soul reaches for God, and so I'm less and less afraid to wrestle even though it's lonely and it hurts.  The journey of faith requires it, even if the wrestling leaves me limping like Jacob.

I conclude with a quote from Thomas Merton:

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

Let us hope and believe that God is eternally good and loving and greater than all our thoughts about Him.

Return to 1st post

Is God "Primarily Angry"? (4) - Cross

This is the 4th in a series posts centered around the question of "Is God primarily angry?".

The 3 previous posts are here:

Is God "Primarily Angry" (1)

Is God "Primarily Angry" (2) - Defining Our Terms

Is God "Primarily Angry" (3) - Trinity

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I believe that God’s disposition towards humanity is revealed in Jesus' cross (though the cross can't be viewed independently of incarnation and resurrection).  It's ground zero.  Start here.  Many Christians would confess as much, yet what is actually intended and communicated by the assertion to "start here" isn't without ambiguity.  

“To know if God loves us we must look to the cross.”  But what do we see?  When we hear that “God did not spare His Son but gave Him up for us all”, what exactly do we hear?

Many modern Christians have been indoctrinated into a way of thinking about God in which He IS primarily angry.  This includes me.  I've had to come to terms with that, rather reluctantly at first but then quite relentlessly and unapologetically.  

Despite assertions to the contrary (assertions which, at times, seem to me to be quite empty) the way that the cross is understood often subconsciously (or quite consciously) displays a God who IS angry, who’s default position towards humanity is anger that is purely retributive.  Rather than holding on to a “primarily angry” God in spite of the cross, we hold to an angry God precisely because of the cross, because the way that the cross is theologically interpreted actually requires an angry God.  It makes little sense without one.

Now I realize that the (large) majority of people probably don’t think they even have an atonement theology, and/or that excessive talk of it is irrelevant and impractical gobbledygook.  But that's not true.  Everybody has some sort of "atonement theology", and I catch hints of it regularly. 

“Jesus died for your sins.”

Ok, what does that mean?  It’s not actually as unambiguous as it might sound at first, though the ambiguity might be well hidden due to deeply embedded and largely unchallenged ways of hearing it.  And that deeply embedded view (within western theology) is usually clarified like this:

“He died to pay the price for your sins.”

Again, not as unambiguous as it might sound at first.  What is the “payment”?  And to whom is it “paid”?  What does it mean to say that "It's finished?"  How does it all work?  Is it just "magic?"  I think the answers to these questions are so prevalent and assumed within popular theology, contemporary music, etc. as to be basically invisible and largely unquestioned.


When working it all out, the whole thing is conceived as a sort of economic transaction that goes something like this ("quotations" intended to call attention to our presuppositions):

God has rules.  Humanity as a whole and each of us individually broke and continue to break these rules.  This creates a “debt” with a God who is holy and all-knowing and thus keeps track of every single breaking-of-the-rules, every single failure, every single careless word, every failure to live up to goodness.  This rule breaking makes God infinitely angry.  It brings humanity under the condemnation of God's judgment and it forces God’s hand.  He’s bound by the law and by “justice” to exact retribution because retributive punishment, in the end, is what it means to “take sin seriously”.  God cannot "just forgive."  

Now, the verse “the wages of sin is death” means that because of sin, humanity is under the active judgment of God.  Judgment is not a mere "natural consequence" - it is an active and retributive wrath.  These are God’s rules being broken, so the “debt” that is created is infinitely higher than a human being can “pay”. The cross, then, is Jesus somehow transactionally and metaphysically "paying the price" by “becoming sin” and being punished in our place.  Jesus becomes a substitute, and God, "in his mercy", turns away from, forsakes ("why have you forsaken me"), tortures and kills Jesus rather than humanity.  

So God kills Jesus, thus fulfilling both divine justice and His own wrath.  God is now "satisfied".  His wrath has been appeased.  He is propitiated.  Justice has been done in the form of Jesus "paying the price".  The "payment" of the atonement is then "credited as righteousness" to the believer through faith via a transactional exchange.  Instead of seeing dirty old me, God's sees Christ's "righteousness."  IF you "have faith", and what "faith" entails varies.

That then is the meaning of "pierced for our transgressions".  Pierced BY GOD.  He "suffered the retributive wrath of God in our place".  The death of Jesus, thus understood, is a “payment” for sin - the suffering, death, and blood being the “currency” which effectuates the possibility of divine forgiveness..... if we "accept the payment."  And the suffering itself is an important part of the “payment terms” (lest the suffering of the cross be unnecessary gratuitous violence independent of the “payment” of death).  


This represents a distinct way of viewing the Christian narrative and the plight of humanity and a particular way of viewing the cross, one that is supported by a number of pillars (allegedly).  We might point to the OT sacrificial system which is viewed as a systematic way to appease God, a system that (so it goes) was pretty much right on in that God needed to be appeased, but that a sacrifice sufficient to appease God on our own just hadn't been made available.  We might point to the suffering servant of Isaiah 53.  We might point to the blood, wrath, and retribution in the Old Testament.  We point to any number of isolated verses that speak of “sacrifice”.  We might point to a handful of verses in the New Testament - "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins", etc.  Perhaps more than anything, we simply trust the principle of retributive punishment that rules our world.

Note this tweet by John Piper:

That says it all.

For another helpful visual of this particular view of atonement theology, see this chart.

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A few qualifications or clarifications might be needed here or there, but this represents the dominant narrative of the cross in the mind of many people, is in many a church "statement of faith", in books, etc.  This is not a caricature.  I'm not portraying something that nobody actually believes.  LOTS of people in the pews of the church that I attend understand it this way.  It's all rather logical after all.  It fits our pre-existing understanding of retributive justice, I guess.

To return to the original question of if God is "primarily" angry, is it really believable that anger/wrath is not a primary ingredient here?  

No.  This widely accepted view of the cross simply doesn't make sense without anger....primary anger.  It's predicated on anger.  The entire thing is conceived of as a forensic solution to a forensic problem, a way to escape the wrath of an all knowing despot who had to kill and torture his own Son in order to gain the necessary capital to forgive.

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In my own life, the wrestling with a vengeful and retributive God has led me to the cross.  The cross is either the end of this angry, retributive God, or the ultimate and eternal affirmation of this God.  It is HARD to think through these things.  It can be scary.  It might feel like "losing your faith."  It's been all of these things for me.  

But there are many out there who have helped me.

Many are familiar with CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Well, God is not the witch.

We intentionally ask the question of "Who Killed Jesus?" and "How Does Dying For Our Sins Work?"  We look to "The Crucified God".  Only if we ditch the retributive and forensic models of the cross entirely (not even grant them status as "one facet") can we can assert that "God Is Not a Monster" and that "Jesus Died for Us...Not for God".

If you dare to, witness the vitriol in some of the comments of these posts.  Note the accusations of “making a God in your own image.”  Again, these simply point out the degree to which an angry God is vigorously defended and even needed for the cross - and therefore the entirety of the Christian narrative - to make sense.

Bottom line, I don’t think there is much possibility of truly believing, unequivocally, that God is love and light without a robust, well understood, and liturgically practiced way of understanding the cross that eliminates “appeasement” and the literal nature of “payment” all together.  We can't simply say that "the cross displays love" but still retain that forensic "God-punished-Jesus-so-that-he-could-forgive me" thing.  There is no actual "forgiveness" in this transaction after all.  There is only payment.  What sense does it make to speak of "forgiving" a debt that has been paid?

Simply calling a thing beautiful (the cross) doesn't make it so.

"Oh, yes.  They say so.  And then they tell you something good about him that isn't good, and go on calling him good all the same.  But calling anybody good doesn't make him good, you know."

---Robert Falconer (by George MacDonald)

I speak from experience here.  This is hard for me, and is very much an ongoing process.  The groundwork for the above "penal substitutionary atonement" model was laid early and deep.  It is not dug up easily.

In the end though, it's necessary to either (1) prayerfully challenge and deconstruct ALL that implies that the cross is a payment that appeases an angry God and then reconstruct deeply understood ways of thinking about the cross non-punitively, or (2) concede that God IS "primarily angry" and stop pretending otherwise.  

Continue to part 5 - Eschatology