Romans 2

  I remember the first time I read Romans 2 I was so excited because it affirmed what I had been thinking for a long time - that God is at work in the hearts of all people, regardless of what culture or religion they are part of. But when I went to look up the passages in various Romans commentaries I found that they either gave it very cursory treatment or ignored it altogether. I wish people were exposed to this text at least half as much as they are to John 3:16.
One thing I think we should do when reading Paul’s letters where he makes the contrast between Jews and Gentiles is to read it as Believers and Non-Believers. Because that is essentially what it was at that time except for a small handful of Gentile converts. Jews were the ones who believed in Yaweh, the God of the Jews, while Gentiles were essentially everyone else, the people who believed in other gods. We have such a hang-up today with those terms that I think it would be good if we recognize that Paul does not approach it in the same way. He does not assume that all non-believers are bound for hell. He does not insist that all non-believers become believers before they can be accepted. His message is that Jesus has come to establish a new kingdom for Jews and Gentiles alike and God does not show favoritism based on which culture you grew up in. People already know how to gain entrance to the kingdom - those laws are written on their hearts. One must be humble and meek and kind and loving and gracious and forgiving and repentant. Today we act like none of that is important. The only important thing is that you “believe” the doctrine and swear that Jesus is “your lord and savior” even if you don’t know what any of that means. All the rest is just frosting on the cake as far as we’re concerned. Nice if you want to do it, but not really necessary. 


In Christ alone Part 2

  I think our whole understanding of salvation is flawed because of our emphasis on ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ over ‘love’ and ‘grace’. We have turned the whole gospel story into a rehash of Noah’s Ark with all of humanity dangling over a pit of fire and only a small number who can be saved by climbing aboard a boat, which in this case is the church. 
If that is our idea of “good news” then it’s a pretty hard sell. But I believe that is a fundamental misreading of the role of the church. It should not be viewed as a boat to collect up all the lost souls and save them from drowning or burning in hell. Rather, it is God’s outreach station to the rest of the world. Joining the church should not be seen as the end goal, but just the beginning. Rather than seeing it as crossing a finishing line, I got my ticket to heaven and now I can relax…. How about seeing it as God’s version of the Peace Corps and now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work spreading God’s love and grace to the rest of the world?
But back to our current reality…. It’s understandable that people would recoil from the hardline exclusionist doctrine with horrifying visions of infant damnation, but when you still insist on maintaining the idea that God’s default is to send everyone to hell unless they ace their correct dogma belief test then efforts to carve out exceptions inevitably creates more problems. For example, if we are going to say that the unborn and babies are exceptions, then we have to determine where the cutoff is. Where do you draw the line? What age is the point where your protection from God’s wrath is withdrawn and you become susceptible to the ‘believe in me or else’ rule? And if we set an age limit… 12? 14? 16? 18? 21? …. what is to prevent tragic situations where a mother decides to kill all of her children before they reach that age so that she can guarantee they will go to heaven? I mean why risk having them get older and tempted to do something bad and then end up in eternal hell? Even if it means she sacrifices herself to a hellish fate, who could blame her?
Or what about people who never heard the gospel? Do they get an exception? And if so, then does presenting them with the gospel just risk their damnation if they don’t immediately accept it? How is any of this supposed to be good news?
It’s not. That’s why I think there is more to the story than this. 

Augustine’s emphasis on the sins of the first Adam over the saving act of the second Adam is a key problem. I think we can see the results of that in the church today where we treat Original Sin as something that is much more powerful than the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. How so? Consider that original sin infects everyone regardless. No one gets a choice in the matter. You are just born with it and it is very difficult to get rid of. It envelops and blankets the entire world and sends 69% of the world population straight to Hell - according to Augustine. By comparison, Jesus’ saving act of grace on the cross is very weak and ineffectual. It does not apply to everyone automatically. You first have to jump through a series of hoops and “believe” in the correct dogma. In some cases you have to get baptized and confess your sins and belong to the correct church. And unlike original sin which is nearly impossible to get rid of it is easy to lose your salvation by doing something wrong later in life and failing to seek forgiveness or sanctification.
Original Sin is the iceberg that sank the Titanic while Jesus’ sacrifice is the lifeboat that only held a handful of people. At least, that is how we look at it today if we are being honest.

In Christ alone Part 1

  I think a lot of people struggle with this issue but are too intimidated to talk about it. 
I think I have been some kind of Christian universalist for as long as I can remember, long before I had ever heard of Rob Bell or David Bentley Hart. The idea that God would send billions and billions of people to eternal hellish torment simply because they were born in the wrong part of the world and grew up in the wrong religious tradition has always repulsed me. I was raised in traditional, mainline Baptist and Methodist churches. There was never a time when I did not believe in God or Jesus. The first time I remember this being an issue for me was when I was in junior high and a friend who was Catholic told me that anyone who did not believe in Jesus was going to hell. My immediate reaction was to say “What about Moses?” My friend didn’t have an answer for that.
A few years later when I was in high school I went to a church camp and someone was passing out those little Chick Tract comics that had cartoon images of angels throwing hundreds of people into a huge lake of fire because they didn’t “believe” in Jesus. Once again, I was repulsed. I did not find it at all persuasive and rejected it. But I did not reject my faith, just this interpretation that kept being thrown at me. 
It was hard enough trying to rationalize a place of eternal damnation for truly bad people - I mean, how many years do you need to torture Hitler? A million years? A billion years? - but now it was not just bad people going to hell but lots of good people too whose only crime was not believing the correct political dogma. The unforgivable sin of incorrect belief! That just didn’t seem right. Is that really why we are here? To ‘believe’ the correct dogma so we can get an A on our test and earn our golden ticket to heaven? Nonsense!
As I went through my deconstruction/reconstruction phase over the next few years I held firm to my belief in God - life doesn’t make sense without a creator - and to my love of Jesus. But where I finally landed was the determination that love is ultimately the most important thing - more so than faith or belief or anything else we try to prioritize ahead of it - just as Paul states in 1st Corinthians 13:13. God wants our love most of all. He is not that concerned with what we think we believe about things. The Great Commandment is in two parts for a reason. The first part is to love God. But how does one love God? That’s where part 2 comes in - Love your neighbor. If you do that, then you are showing your love for God. You are following the Great Commandment. You are, in essence, “in Christ”.

Is Evil necessary?

 Generally we pair love with hate in the same way that we pair good with bad. So where does that leave ‘evil’? If I say someone is bad (and not in the Michael Jackson sense), you might be wary of them. But if I say they are evil, that takes it to a whole new level. I think we see evil as involving malicious intent. I can do something bad and not necessarily mean it. For example, I step on your foot by accident. That was careless of me and thus bad, but I am very sorry and you would not say it was evil. Or maybe I stepped on your foot on purpose just to be obnoxious, but did not realize it would hurt you as much as it did and again I am very sorry. But if I intentionally step on your foot seeking to cause you pain because I derive pleasure out of the suffering of others - that would be evil.  

So can we get to a point where we can eliminate evil? Maybe so. In fact, I would hope so. But I don’t think we can ever be at a point where we eliminate the possibility of bad, because by definition that kind of world simply does not make sense to us. That would be like creating a world where there is only up and no down; where you can only go forward, but not back; where you can only turn right, but not left. It does not fit with our sense of reality. Did bad come into the world when Eve ate the apple in the Garden of Eden? I would say no, bad had to be around before that. When God created the word and declared that it was ‘good’, at that point there had to be ‘bad’ for that statement to make any sense or to have any meaning. If we do not have at least a concept of what bad is, then how would we know if something is good?

For anything to be true, there must also be that which is false. For anything to be beautiful, there must also be that which is ugly. For anything to be good, there must be that which is bad. Otherwise, how would we even know what is true or beautiful or good? But what about evil? Can we ever eliminate the malicious kind of bad that we term as evil and still maintain free will? I would argue that maintaining free will is necessary to have any meaningful sense of love. Love that is not freely chosen does not have the same meaning as love that is forced. Would you rather be loved by someone who freely chooses to love you? Or by someone who only loves you because they cannot choose to do otherwise? I think we would all choose the former and I believe that is what God desires as well. 

As for evil, I have tried to define it as the complete absence of love/good. As long as the world is filled with love, there is no evil. But love requires action, whereas evil can get by with passivity. Indifference can be just as bad as malicious intent. Remember that a baby requires more than just not being punched in the face. God wants us to choose love everyday. It requires our constant attention and focus. It’s not easy. We screw up a lot and miss the mark often (sin). So we require constant forgiveness and grace from God. And all God asks in return is that we show that same love and grace to others. If we all do that there will be no evil. But it is a lot of work. Are we hoping that Heaven is a place where we won’t have to work so hard to keep evil at bay?

Thought experiment

 Here is a thought experiment relating to biblical inerrancy.... I know it's a ridiculous premise, but just play along.... What if tomorrow you woke up and news had broke that someone had proven definitively and beyond all doubt that the entire Bible was a forgery made up by some monk in the 15th Century and all the characters from Abraham to Moses to Jesus were fictional.... (I told you it was ridiculous).... What would be your reaction? Would you lose your faith in God? Would you have no basis for your understanding of who God is and what he wants from your life? Is your entire faith and relationship with God based on and dependent on a 2,000-plus year old collection of books? Or does your faith go deeper than that? In Romans 2:14 Paul says that Gentiles who do not have the "law", by which he means the Bible, still have its rules etched on their hearts and do by nature what it requires.

God is not a couch potato

 What I have concluded is that what we are calling evil is a necessary component of a loving world where everyone has free will. Evil comes from making bad choices (natural evil is a different discussion). If we did not have the ability to make bad or wrong choices, then we could not make good or right choices either. How would we even know what is good or loving without the contrast of the bad or evil? Imagine a world where there is only light and no darkness. We would all be blind? Without the contrasting shading and shadows of darkness we could not see anything. Imagine a world with only sound and no silence. We would all be deaf with no way to distinguish one sound from another. If there was only love and goodness in the world and nothing bad or evil, how could we even recognize it as good without the contrast of something bad? There would be no need for compassion or empathy. No need for forgiveness or grace. No need for loving or caring for other people. How would any of that work? If there is a 'Satan' then it would be an entity who has made a lot of bad choices, not a being which is somehow evil incarnate. God did not create 'evil.' God created us in his image and gave us the free will to be able to distinguish good from bad and choose to love. I don't know what philosophical category this definition puts me in. But this is what makes the most sense to me. I reject determinism because it puts God in the role of a spectator, like he is just sitting back watching his favorite move play out on DVD. Or maybe like a play that he wrote where he gets to play a part, but it is always the same. I don't see God as a couch potato or a theater actor - he is an active participant in his ongoing creation. Without free will, none of it makes sense. As to the thought experiment about the all-powerful demon, y'all used the analogy of a basketball game and predicting whether a shot would go in. To that I would say if it was a team of robots that had been programmed to play basketball, then maybe that determination could be made. But with a human there are too many variables because the player is making constant choices that would change the variables for making physical calculations. Does the player shoot the ball now, or hesitate and shoot a split second later, in which case all the variables have changed.

Defining terms

 I tend to think a lot of what people assert about God's nature is just speculation sometimes better left to mystery. Otherwise, I fear that we are just constructing boxes to put God in so that we can better comprehend him with our limited intellects. The one thing I do believe about God is that he is bigger than anyone has ever dared to imagine. The idea of God being outside of time is intriguing, but if to imagine that means sacrificing free will (either ours or God's) then I think we have taken a wrong turn. I can't imagine that God would be happy being confined inside of a deterministic universe where everything is already known and nothing ever changes. I have speculated that God's motivation for creating the universe is his desire for love which is freely given and thus requires free will. I cannot know this for certain and I base it on my belief that I am created in the image of God and thus my own desire is the only clue I have as to what God's desire may be. The idea of God being outside of time is difficult for us to imagine. Does that mean that God sees me as a baby, a child, a teen, an adult and an old man all at the same time? If I do something bad when I am 30, is my 29-year-old self guilty and deserving of punishment in God's view?

I don't really buy the idea of a first "Fall" so I am not that concerned about a second one. I don't believe that 'evil' is a thing that was introduced into the world by Satan or created by God. I think it is the alternative to or absence of love. If we did not have the ability to make wrong choices, then we could never make right choices. Either we have free will or we don't. I don't see a third answer here. I think we tie ourselves in knots trying to grasp the eternal nature of God and end up playing semantic games. If God creates something, did he also create the nothingness that was there before there was something? Do we need the contrast of evil in order to see or make sense of love? If there was only light and no darkness we would all be blind. If there was only sound and no silence we would all be deaf. If there was only heat and no cold we would all be burned up. Will Heaven be perfect? Yes. Because there is perfection in grace, forgiveness and healing.

 The problem I have with the idea that our moral decisions are made in our material minds - the result of neurons firing in our mushy brains - is that it would all be very mechanical and formulaic. Can Love, Truth and Beauty be quantified as simple equations and programmed into our materialistic minds? Can we put it in a bottle and sell it? We'd make a fortune! There's your answer to the problem of evil - drugs! :-) Seriously, though, that is a bridge too far for me. I don't think love can be programmed and I don't think our creation arena is limited to the physical realm, though that is an important part. My personal theology is rooted in the idea of love. I think that is what God desires for us and from us above all else and if he could simply program it into us then it wouldn't be all that special to begin with.

Why evil?

 You ask how a good God could create a world that allows for evil to persist? One answer put forth is that evil is an unfortunate byproduct of giving people free will. Maybe free will is not worth it then. Take away free will and no more evil! Why doesn't God do that? But then what about love? Isn't love also a byproduct of free will? How can we have love without free will? Let me ask this... would you prefer to be loved by someone who chooses to love you of their own free will? Or would it be just as good to be loved by someone who is forced or coerced into loving you? Is that even love? If a robot has been programmed to "love" someone is that real, meaningful love? If someone has a gun to their head and told they must love you or else? If someone loves you because they think they will get a reward? No. Meaningful love must be chosen and not forced. That is the kind of love that we all desire and so, I would submit, that is what God desires as well. Why then is there evil in the world? Because without at least the potential for evil, there could be no real, meaningful love. If everyone chose to follow the path that Jesus showed us, there would be no evil. But if God forced everyone to follow the way and gave us no option to choose for ourself, it would not be true love. 

Evil is not always as direct as punching a baby. There is also the evil of indifference. I can't think of anyone who would actually punch a newborn baby, but how many people would see a mother sitting on the side of the road clutching a baby crying from hunger with her arms outstretched begging for alms and would then pass by on the other side thinking to themselves "Not my problem."? I believe it is our free will, our ability to choose good from bad as moral agents that makes us in the image of God. Our ability to choose to love is what gives love its meaning. As in the Kierkegard story of the Maiden, the King realizes that the only love worth receiving is that which is freely given. And he is willing to give up his kingdom to get it. I can't imagine that Heaven is a place where our free will is stripped away from us and we become mindless robots strumming harps. Does that mean there could be evil in heaven? What I'm saying is that I don't see how there could be true love in heaven without at least the potential of evil. I think we haven't adequately defined all the possibilities of what evil is. I think you touched on the idea that evil is not a thing but rather the lack of a thing - that thing being love. But I don't think you delved into it too deeply. When you take away love, we are left with a void that we call evil, whether it is an active form (punching babies) or inactive (indifference). It is like darkness when there is no light. It is like silence when there is no sound. It is like the deep cold of space when there is no heat. But my next question is more troubling. Do we need evil as a contrast to love to fully appreciate love? If there was only love in the world and no evil, would we even recognize it? Would we be able to appreciate it without knowing what it would be like without it? I don't think we can ever completely get rid of evil or at least the potential for evil, which is also why I believe that grace and forgiveness are so important. I think we will continue to need grace and forgiveness even in heaven.