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.

Reflecting on 'The Love That Matters' by Charles Featherstone (2) Alone

Being the father of a young daughter, there's a lot about Charles' childhood years that stuck with me:

“I did tell my parents once, not long after it started.  It was at dinner, we were sitting around the table, and I remember my father’s response; “People are going to tease you.  You just need to learn to deal with it.”  Not helpful.  My mother’s advice was even worse; she told me I needed to understand that the people who teased me probably had hard lives at home.  Why that was supposed to explain their teasing me I wasn’t sure.  But I quickly determined that my parents could not be trusted.  I may have mentioned the problems a time or two, but I never really talked to them about this again.  In fact, no adult could be trusted.  No one in a position of power and authority could be trusted.  Because they didn’t want to know.  Or because if they knew, they didn’t care.  And they certainly weren’t going to do anything to help.  I was alone.  I was on my own.  This much was clear.”   -p32

“There were a lot of mornings when I would wake up wondering, “Why?  Why do I bother going through all this?  What if this is all there is?  What’s the point of going on?”  Because at the age of ten, I was afraid, truly afraid, that this life of loneliness and fear, and having to deal with abuse on all sides – from kids and adults alike, at home and at school – was all there was ever going to be.  So what was the point of going on?  If this was all life was going to hand me, there was no point.  No point at all.   -p35

“I was simply not wanted by the world in which I lived, by the people who lived in and ran that world.”   -p38

"They sometimes spoke nice words, words of caring and concern - "I Am Lovable and Capable!" - but they never meant it.  Ever.    -p38

**********

My wife, daughter and I were at a birthday party for a 7 year old boy a short while ago, the son of some close friends of ours.  Lots of boys and girls, some still in diapers, running around yelling, screaming and farting.  It was loud and it smelled pretty bad just about everywhere.  It seemed like there were about 50 kids, but in reality there were more like 15. 

Like a lot of 7 year old boys, the birthday boy is into Star Wars.  He’s not just into Star Wars toys books.  He’s into Star Wars in a way that he wants to be IN Star wars.  He doesn’t just want toys, he wants the whole costume.  So we got him a Darth Vader costume – jumpsuit, cape, helmet – the whole deal.  He took a quick break from opening his presents, went in his room to put on the costume, and came back out and finished opening his presents.

Putting on the costume, a little boy simply HAS to play the part of a servant of the Dark Side.  The commanding walk and intimidating presence, the trademark breathing.  The power.  Naturally, sides are going to be chosen and leading to some sort of fun conflict.  In this case, Darth Vader was putting kids in "jail".  Jail was a bedroom with the lights out.

Being one of the smaller (and more persuadable) toddlers, my daughter was thrown into "jail".  Put into a dark room, closed door, no lights.  By Darth Vader.  For the fun of the party.

So she is in the room crying desperately.  My wife and I thought we heard crying, but there were lots of kids running around and everyone seemed to be having a good time.  With all of the noise at the party, we just didn't think much of it.  Crying came and went.  We certainly didn't think the cries belonged to our daughter.

We don't know how long she was in there.  Though it probably felt like an eternity to her, it wasn't more than a few minutes.  Other people heard her crying as they walked by the door of the "jail".  They opened the door and she came running out.  These folks brought her to us, and we picked her up and comforted her in her tears.  You know the type - the hard tears where the person gasps for breath.

She calmed down fairly quickly.  The birthday boy's dad chastised him for what he did, he apologized, my daughter and Darth Vader made their peace, and things mostly went back to the way that they were.  But my daughter still talks about this.  She hasn't forgotten.

Pretty anti-climactic.  So why do I bring this up?  

I don't mean to compare a bit of out-of-control birthday party fun in a healthy environment with friends to Charles' hellish experiences growing up.  They're decidedly not the same thing.  But I just wonder, what would it have done to my daughter if she had been in that room for 15 minutes?  30 minutes?  But what if she'd been locked in the dark and nobody cared?  In the midst of having a good time, what if nobody had really wanted to hear or respond to her cries?  Her parents, the ones tasked with safety (and not just her physical safety) being either aloof or indifferent?  Principled to the point of looking the other way?  And the same with everybody else....a sort of survival of the fittest social environment?

Would she start to lose faith in people?  Could it have been the sort of moment in which a bit of innocence is lost, the moment where a child realizes that the world is not an entirely safe place?  That she might just be on her own?  That her pain was a sort of inconvenience to the ethos of the party?  No doubt moments of loneliness and pain come to all kids, but what do parents do when they come?  She was able to find comfort, but what if there wasn't any to be found?

What if, in her trauma, we had just calmly explained that "this is the way birthday parties are"?

Now remove the particularities, and imaginatively transpose these metaphors to the constant existence of a 10 year old boy.

**********
As the father of a 3.5 year old, the sort of constant fear that characterized Charles' elementary school years breaks my heart.

I recognize that I can’t protect my daughter from everything.  Up to a point, I can’t protect her from struggling because difficult situations may emerge from the best of environments and intentions.  My wife and I have made conscious decisions to let her interactions with other kids play out, up to a point.  We want her to learn to have a humble self-confidence, to stick up for herself, to learn to work through difficult situations with other kids.  

When kids are mean (nearly always unintentionally at her young age), we often tell her that we want her to be nice even to the people that are mean to her.  A "treat people as you want to be treated" Golden Rule sort of thing.  I think it's a good thing to strive for, this proactive growing of the internal capacity for love and good will towards others.

But I think about what Charles needed as a child.  First and foremost, he didn't need practical relationship advice, solid and time tested principles, reality checks on the way things are, lessons in empathy, etc.  He simply needed to matter to someone.  To be known and heard.

As a parent, I really need to remember that.  I'd like to think that I always will.  Hearing Charles' story, however, I cringe at my capacity to offer false comfort.  Things are fairly easy now from an interpersonal standpoint because usually her little issues with other kids are accidents.  She's 3.5 years old.  She has an innocence about her, a pure and joyous way of seeing the world.  I can tell her that sometimes kids just play rough or mean, or that she should try to remember that other kids sometimes have things going on that make them act out a little bit.  It is easy to do this because she is so young.  It is easy because the kids she hangs around are generally good kids.  But it will not always be so easy.

My role as a dad cannot be reduced to abstract "ideals", words of wisdom that float above the fray of actual existence.  The pain or loneliness experienced in the life of an actual flesh and blood person cannot be reduced or dismissed as an occasion to tout principles or learning opportunities.  For a child - for my daughter - to be loved is to know that she matters, in her joys and successes but particularly in her pain, her perceived insufficiency, her failures, loneliness, rejection and heartache.  There's no substitute for that, no program or "life-lesson" that can render unnecessary or fundamental that innate need of value and worth.

You know what?  I don't think we ever really outgrow that need.

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Reflecting on 'The Love That Matters' by Charles Featherstone (1)

I’d like to devote the next few posts to a book that I recently finished reading -  The Love That Matters: Meeting Jesus in the Midst of Terror and Death by Charles Featherstone.

I first became aware of Charles’ (Charles's?) story via a blog post/interview with the author over at Internet Monk.

That interview led me to his website.  And from there to an essay by Rod Dreher entitled "Love Opens a Door", the meat of this essay being Featherstone's response to one of Dreher's earlier essays.

Featherstone's first words hooked me:

But there was a dismissive tone to [your Time essay], to your “Yes, God is love, but…”
And that bothers me. Because it is no small thing to say, “God is love.” Or “God loves you.”

That line grabbed me then and it still grabs me now.

It is no small thing to say God is love.  Thank you for saying this.  Only overfamiliarity and an impoverished imagination make it so.  In the end, eschatologically that is, we suspect that perhaps this love might not amount to much.

I'm talking about myself as much as anyone else here.

I finished the essay and ordered the Kindle version of "The Love That Matters" right then and there.  And it sat in my ever-growing list of unread books since then, gathering digital dust.  But with my recent explorations of Muslim/Christian relations, radicalization, etc. (topics to which I'll return to in future blog posts when I work through another book I recently read - Allah: A Christian Response by Miroslav Volf) my fuzzy recollection of Featherstone's experiences as a practicing Muslim renewed my interest in reading his story.  And at this point it must be clarified that this is NOT a "I was once a Muslim but now I'm a Christian" memoir, the type that crusading Christian apologists love to love.  Featherstone's experiences as a practicing Muslim are indeed a part of the story.  A big part of the story in fact. But they are not THE story.  It is more complex than that.

So the posts that I’ll devote to this book are not a “review”.  I’m not “reviewing” the book.  I wouldn't know how to do so with a book like this.  I’d simply like to acknowledge and attempt to think through a few things from the book that stood out to me.

Having given that disclaimer, a few brief thoughts.

Charles is a very good writer.  His journalistic background is displayed in his ability to craft a sentence and tell a story.  These skills have manifested themselves in a deeply personal and honest book.  It’s not easy to write with honesty and vulnerability.  In fact it's downright hard.  When Chaplain Mike over at the Internet Monk selected Sufjan Stevens’ “Carrie and Lowell” and his “Album of the Year” for 2015, he said “Not since Bon Iver’s devastatingly plaintive For Emma, Forever Ago have I heard an album bleed like this one.”

It bleeds. 

To me, that’s one of the highest compliments that can be given to an artist.  And I think it’s true about this book.  It bleeds.

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