Stan was speaking about the notion of an "angry god" and how too many people (i.e., Christians and others who disagree with his tradition's opinions about God) don't take the idea of an angry, vengeful god seriously enough, because, as he is wont to say, "The Bible."
Stan...
So, who makes up this stuff about a God of wrath against sinners? Well, apparently, God does. Apparently it's biblical. Apparently even Jesus believes it.
Look, you can do the happy dance all you want. You can work on fluff and imagine pink unicorns and figure God's not really that miffed about sin and all, but if you do, you do to your own peril because God's Word is quite clear on the subject. Even at the end, it's is Christ who is described as the One who distributes God's wrath.
So you may think that someone is making up this "angry God" stuff and He's really a pussycat, a tame lion. The Bible disagrees and the consequence of being wrong on this topic is nowhere near tolerable.
This line of thinking always raises questions for me and these questions generally go unanswered.
First of all, we need to be precise and clear when we're talking about God's opinion. When Stan says, "the Bible disagrees," he's implying/outright saying that God in the Bible agrees with and teaches the notion of an angry God.
But it's not that the Bible disagrees. It's that some good number of people have interpreted the Bible to read God describing God's Self as a vengeful angry god. It's the OPINION of those who interpret the Bible thusly that think this way, not the Bible or God's own Self. At least not demonstrably.
Thus, as is often the case with evangelical types, they conflate their opinions with "the Bible" and thus, with "God's Word." I'm fine with them holding their interpretations and opinions, but they should be clear that it IS their opinions, and not the Bible.
Whether or not the Bible teaches that God is rightly understood as vengeful and angry is the question to be answered, not the answer itself.
Question begging and all that.
Secondly, Stan errs in making up a straw man that people paint God as a "pussycat, pink unicorns and not miffed about sin." But very few if any who believe in a God think that way. Everyone (nearly) thinks that God is angry about rape, about child abuse, about war, about murder, about deliberately causing awful harm to people. Of course a good God would rationally be opposed to such behavior, even angry about it.
So, nearly universally, believers are agreed upon that. That's not the question.
The question is, is God TRULY so repulsed by any and all sin that the only just punishment for a just God is for that god to get angry about every little lie, every bit of gossip and "rebellion," and that god gets SO angry that the ONLY punishment suitable for these sins is an eternity of torture.
You see, we don't disagree with the Bible. We learn from the Bible that God is perfectly just and perfectly loving. AND we also see places in the Bible where people describe God (or God describes God's own self) as angry at sin, viciously angry at sin. BOTH teachings are in the Bible.
So, finally, this leads to the question I asked Stan that looks at the notion of a perfectly just God and tries to make sense of biblical teaching and just plain reason, especially as it relates to the evangelical teachings about hell (NOT "the Bible's teachings," NOT "What God hath said...").
My two reasonable questions:
So a good God is angry unto vengeful wrath upon all the sins of a five, nine, 12-year old child and this God's justice demands the most harsh judgment upon this child for all their sins, so much so
that this angry god demands
an eternity of torturous hell
upon this young adult for their awful sins of lying, jealousy, stealing two pencils and general selfishness common to people in their first 18 years (and beyond).
A. Can you explain in a rational way how such an extreme (insane?) response is rational, loving or just?
B. Do you at least understand how for many, probably most of us, that sounds like the ravings of a madman, not the response of a just God?
Now, usually, this line of questions go ignored and unanswered, but occasionally some brave evangelical/calvinist will attempt an answer. But that answer is typically,
"Your understanding of the notion of a perfectly just God is not the same as god's understanding..."
Which brings up a third entirely rational question:
C. Says who? Where is the proof for this claim?
The proof, they will say (if they say anything at all), is that there are lines in the Bible that talk about god being angry and vengeful. No one denies that. But there are also lines in the Bible that talk about God being perfectly loving and perfectly just.
Now they will say that we need to reconcile the two extremes. God is vengeful vs God is just. Their answer that I've understood them as saying is that they side on the side of vengeful and explain away the notion of justice (and an eternity in torment/torture for relatively minor sins IS an abomination of justice, as justice is typically understood by humanity) as being a bad understanding on our part. God's sense of justice is just... different than what we normally mean.
Again, Says who?
They are siding on Vengeful but they can never explain why other than just because that's where they side.
The other tact they'll try to take is to say that we "natural humans" don't accurately understand the nature of sin. Even the relatively small "sin" of taking a cookie that doesn't belong to us (for instance) IS A DEVIANT AND GREAT EVIL, because (they say) it is a deliberate and cruel attack on god's sovereignty. It is an attack on God to decide, "I really would like to have this cookie, even if it doesn't belong to me..."
But again, says who? I would wager that most people who would take a cookie (tell a lie, steal a pencil from work) aren't thinking about God, they're just thinking about convenience and being selfish and unthinking. Do they think, "I don't care what God thinks, I SPIT in God's eye and take this cookie anyway!..."? I see no evidence to support such a claim.
So, the idea of them being in open rebellion to God is just not supported, it's an empty claim.
But EVEN IF that were the case... even if the human was selfish and childish and just wanted to satisfy their own sweet tooth (desire for a pencil, the mean wish to gossip about someone...), does that truly warrant an eternity of torture?
If yes, says who? Where is the rational case for this? Because it sounds insanely Un-just... the opposite of justice.
And my final (still unanswered) question was, Even if you ultimately disagree with those who disagree with your hunches about biblical interpretation and an angry god, do you at least understand how crazy it seems to suggest that the 20 year old with a lifetime of typical sins that lead up to that age is "sinful enough" to merit an eternity of torture? Do you understand how un-just this sounds to probably most of the world?
We may never know.
15 comments:
Craig, at Stan's blog, said...
"you’ve been put in your place. Heaven forbid that you argue something insane like taking what scripture says at face value."
1. There was no attempt to put Stan in his place. Indeed, I said as I always say, this is not about Stan, it's about this evangelical line of thinking.
2. What I did was raise reasonable questions. Questions that generally go unanswered, but that I would like to see answered in the course of a rational adult conversation.
3. Craig tries, as Stan tried, to frame this questioning of their position as they are the ones who just trying to take the Bible literally and take words at their meaning and we are the ones who mock that.
This is not accurate in this case. We both are looking at the actual words in the text. I'm looking at the words that say God is just and God is loving and recognizing that as those words are literally understood - one cannot punish someone with an eternity of torture for relatively minor sins. To do so would be a blow against Justice and love as those words are literally known.
The typical evangelical conservative response to this is that we are not understanding Love & Justice correctly. Thereby, they suggest those words have some other meaning than their typical literal understanding. And thus, evangelicals write off the literal meanings of Justice and love in favor of sort of literal interpretations about Wrath and Hell.
Where am I mistaken? These are reasonable questions.
This guy (CRI) at least tries to deal with the problem of hell (that it is an infinitely monstrous attack on justice and paints God as monstrously unjust)...
https://www.equip.org/article/the-justice-of-hell/
...but he fails.
His best excuse for the unjust nature of hell is that God is SO far beyond Good, that such a being would DESERVE, really DESERVE all praise and adulation for their Goodness. And any refusal to bow down and truly worship that God would be an affront to justice, because it's what a good God deserves.
But that's just an unsupported claim that doesn't have anything to support it beyond the claim itself and it fails under a bit of consideration.
One of the great things about truly good people is their humility. They don't think of themselves as worthy of praise (of course!) and they certainly don't demand it nor do they think that any one who opts not to praise them should be tortured for an eternity. Why? Because such a conclusion is horribly evil, not good, horribly unjust, not just.
Also, it presumes that we should all recognize God as A Good God here and now, on this earth, where we can't see or measure God or God's goodness in any objective manner. AND, if we don't recognize and acknowledge that God's goodness (and do so in a very specifically Evangelical Christian manner), then we lose and "deserve" to be punished by torture for all eternity.
Again, the punishment just doesn't fit the crime. It's WAY out of line and so far out of line to be grossly unjust.
Is there anyone who DOES try to make a good argument for the problem of hell?
I've looked and this sorry circular reasoning is the best I can find.
Here is Focus on the Family's failed (I think, clearly failed) attempt to try to deal with the problem of hell (the problem of a just God acting unjustly and a loving God acting unlovingly).
There’s certainly an emotional component to the objections, too.
For instance, doesn’t eternal hell seem like cosmic overkill? Couldn’t God reform bad people or just annihilate them? After all, why punish people forever for one limited lifetime of behavior? And wouldn’t annihilation be preferable to eternal suffering? These objections may seem reasonable at first glance, but as we will see, they ignore or fail to understand key aspects of God’s nature as well as human nature.
1. There may well be an "emotional component" to objections, but the primary ones I'm dealing with are rational reasons. For a punishment to be just, it must not be overly harsh for the crime. An eternity of torture for a few years - even a lifetime - of relatively smaller sins (lying, taking pencils, eating a lunch that's not yours, etc) typical of most people is just overkill. As the author states above. Can he deal with this incredible overkill?
Let's see...
God has made efforts to reform people. Each of us is given a lifetime to reform and embrace God through Christ. Unfortunately, some reject God and His truths, choosing their own path rather than God’s. As for eternal suffering being overkill in reference to limited or temporal behavior, this fails to understand the nature of sin and its relation to a holy God.
2. He says that, but where is the support?
Continuing...
couldn’t God have created a world without hell? Any answer to this question is somewhat hypothetical. However, given that God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, it is certainly possible that He could have created such a world. But would such a world be the best possible world? To create a world without hell would require impinging on human freedom, essentially creating a world of robots or a world where our choices would be forcibly altered in order to avoid sin as an actual (such as in deed) or a potential (as in thought).
3. Wait. What? How so? WHY must we be robots with no choice OR be sent to hell? What's the rational support for that?
Again, so far, just an empty claim.
Another aspect of the doctrine of hell that is key to understanding it has to do with the nature of God. He is all-loving, but also completely sinless, holy and just. This means that anything unholy cannot enter His direct presence. As a result, those who fail to accept His truths must reside somewhere else (i.e., hell).
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/faith/is-hell-real/
4. Bullshit. Says who? "Anything unholy can not come into God's direct presence? What sort of voodoo jambalaya is that?
Hint: IF God is omniscient and omnipresent, THEN God is everywhere, including in the presence of "the unholy" (presumably he means just regular people who are imperfect and sin.)
The problem with this view of God is it's a rather LOW view of God, and the Bible. This god is a wimp, unable to tolerate imperfection. What sort of omnipotent God would that be?
And that's it. His entire argument are just four empty and unsupported claims that don't stand up to reasonable questions.
I get that it's just an article. Maybe the author or FOTF could do a more robust job in a deeper article.
I'm just not seeing it anywhere and haven't in lo, these 57 years of my life so far.
It seems a routine oversight on your part...whether intentionally or not I won't address...there is never a link given for any of your posts from other blogs, so as to provide for your readers the full context surrounding that which compelled your post. I always link to your blog...to the specific post, in fact...when I critique your stuff. In my case, I have no fear anyone would find I wasn't accurately presenting your case. It seems to me a gracious service to provide.
Stan loves Romans 1. But only part of it.
He moves swiftly passed the part of Romans that he first links to, though: "For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” He zips passed that to get to the doom parts. Is Stan's preoccupation with judgements and doom, living by faith?
Stan can't read Romans 1. Not all of it. He neglects Paul's whole argument because it wars against his sectarian Calvinism. Paul sets the stagey by saying that all humankind could - and did! - recognize that all creation is steeped in love: "ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, HAVE BEEN UNDERSTOOD AND SEEN THROUGH THE things he has made.
The things he has made have worked as sacraments to steep in and live by both their own worth as food, as vistas, as breath, as poetry, as lovemaking AND as representatives of the presence of god. This beatific truth about god's creation is as far from Stan's faith as scripture is from that leather book he keeps missing.
And what's more, after bathing ONLY IN THE JUDGEMENT PARTS OF Romans 1, Stan stops. Why did he stop? Paul's letter doesn't stop. There is no Romans 1 and Romans 2 for Paul. After all the description of life for those who refuse to live as so many others have lived since creation - those SOME part of humankind who refuse to love, to see others and all creation as precious - Paul drops a hammer on the satisfied smirking with Stan's schadenfreude:
"Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. You say, “We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.” Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God?"
Stan reads and acts judgment on himself by his own terms. He won't let Romans direct him to praise and love and treating everyone and everything as precious. He judges others.
Paul and God don't like that.
Marshal, I don't usually cite Stan's website - or others with less trustworthy content - because I don't want to promote it. But there's nothing hidden, I've cited the pertinent quotes.
Here it is, though.
http://birdsoftheair.blogspot.com/2020/09/who-makes-this-stuff-up.html
As always, the point is the IDEAS being discussed. Which is why I cite the words and then talk about the IDEAS. It doesn't matter who is saying it, because it's not about Stan (or you or whoever), it's about the ideas.
Big thinkers talk about ideas, little thinkers talk about other people, or however that saying goes.
"Pertinent quotes" is the problem. Without linking to the original, readers cannot know if your "pertinent quotes" are truly representative of the point being made by Stan or whomever. No doubt you bepieve you're honestly and accurately conveying his meaning. It's that you insist readers take your word for it, rather than be totally open and prove it with a link. In my experience, yours is a poor track record with regard "getting the point". My linking to the posts of others leaves no doubt. Thus, to link to the original shows whether or not big thinkers like you are discussing actual IDEAS someone such as Stan expressed, and not your poor understanding of them.
As to promoting Stan's site, that's a lame excuse. If he sucks, those following your links will find out for themselves based on their own standards.
As if that wasn't enough, even with your corrupted understanding of what Stan says, saying his name at all belies your claim that it doesn't matter who said what. If it doesn't, why mention him at all?
Puro blah blah blah Marshal. You’ve pedantically said nothing in order to avoid everything.
Do you have ANYTHING to say on topic? Am I misrepresenting Stan's quotes, for instance?
Feel free to talk on topic, Marshal. I'm giving you that leash.
Stan, today, tries to tie pedophilia to LGBTQ+ rights.
But his own link re a "pedophile side" in the US uncovers his hateful lie. These are the known groups:
Project Truth. One of the organizations which was expelled from ILGA (INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANS AND INTERSEX ASSOCIATION) in 1994 for being a pedophile organization.
Childhood Sensuality Circle (CSC). Defunct by the mid-1980s.
North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Considered to be largely defunct.
René Guyon Society. Defunct by the mid-1980s.
Stan is a gutless liar.
On topic:
"But it's not that the Bible disagrees. It's that some good number of people have interpreted the Bible to read God describing God's Self as a vengeful angry god. It's the OPINION of those who interpret the Bible thusly that think this way, not the Bible or God's own Self. At least not demonstrably."
Here, you again confuse "interpretation" with the clear reprinting of what Scripture actually says. If Scripture says, "...and he sat in a chair", there is no "interpretation" required to know that what is being stated is someone sitting in a chair. Scripture, as Stan rightly points out, refers to the wrath of God over and over again, in both Testaments. To then pretend that wrath...or "anger"...is not a part of God's nature requires something just as clear in Scripture that disproves that reality. So, where in Scripture do we learn that there is no wrathful aspect to God's nature? Please post chapter and verse. Stan did.
"Secondly, Stan errs in making up a straw man that people paint God as a "pussycat, pink unicorns and not miffed about sin." But very few if any who believe in a God think that way."
Not in so many words, but by your rejection of the clear teaching of Scripture with regard to God's wrath, you and others like you deflect from that reality with every tired expression of "God is love", as if that's the end of the story.
"Everyone (nearly) thinks that God is angry about rape, about child abuse, about war, about murder, about deliberately causing awful harm to people."
But Stan isn't referring to what people think, but what Scripture actually and clearly says with regard to the wrath of God. He also refers to the rejection of this truth when speaking of how people like prefer to think of God.
More coming...
"We learn from the Bible that God is perfectly just and perfectly loving. AND we also see places in the Bible where people describe God (or God describes God's own self) as angry at sin, viciously angry at sin. BOTH teachings are in the Bible."
Look what you're doing here. That which you prefer to believe you describe as that which we learn. That which doesn't sit well with you is described by you as that which is what "people" in Scripture have described God as being. YOU are making a distinction between two aspects of God's nature that is described in Scripture and giving one aspect the honor of something we're taught, while denigrating the other as simply that which some people in Scripture have said. Never mind those in Scripture include Jesus Himself.
More later. Gotta go.
Scripture refers to the wrath of god toward societies that do not take care of its marginalized and wounded people. Widows, orphans, foreigners.
Marshal votes for policies that make widows, cages children, mistreats foreigners. Marshal wants a nation that further brutalizes the marginalized.
Marshal will know god's wrath.
With your indulgence, Dan, I am posting here my responses to Craig's question about seeking god's justice that I wrote in that brief moment when Craig feigned a readiness to hear things he may not like before that shutter of his blind pride closed it. This is part 1 of 3 parts and the only one I've written so far.
___
Craig, there are three questions that you leap over to get to the question of whether we will give over to God’s justice.
1. “May we be a people that seeks…” What is it to seek?
- It doesn’t say find. It says seek. There is something about god’s justice that must be sought. To seek god’s justice is to be seeking, always. There is something about god’s justice that we must be a people who continuingly seeks, and never actually finds it all – as you admit for all of us when you say, “I will fall short.” To fall short but to be about seeking god’s justice means that we do not stop when we fall short. So, seeking is about continuingly learning and never choosing to cease to seek.
- Seeking already has to do with right intention. “May we be…” We must be willing from the outset to act in such a way that we have faith we will find, more and more all the time, god’s justice, AND that we intend to let what we find change us – otherwise we are no longer seeking.
- Seeking already has to do with right action: “a people that seeks god’s justice.” Seeking is acting in all the ways that seeking knowledge involves: observing; thinking; reading; asking; testing; a humility to learn; AND behaving in accordance with what is found. If I cannot begin to act on what I’ve found, then I have quite seeking. This is the comital you have isolated in your questions, but being a people who are seeking god’s justice already necessarily means we will act in conformity, ever more and more in accordance to our ever more growing capacity. If we cannot do the justice we find, then we are not truly seeking.
Your desire for an answer about comital is given already in taking seriously the act of seeking.
- But more than that, there is a system to seeking that involves our inward thinking and our outward acts: the intention to seek includes asking of ourselves action, and the action of seeking necessarily reshapes our intentions as we learn more and more about what we find. Seeking is the continuing life of shaping act by right intention and shaping intention by right acts – even if the right act is finding out that my action was wrong and with that information reshaping my intentions so my action is at least better.
- Lastly, as you admitted for all us that we will fall short, that admission includes the seeking that is intention and not just the seeking that is action. We will always fall short both in knowing and doing. So, right seeking is an intention to not let our falling short stop us from learning just as much as right seeking is not stopping when we err in acting.
To sum up:
1. God’s justice cannot be fully found. So, we are on a never-ending moral journey.
2. To seek means we accept changing ourselves. Answers your comital question.
3. To seek means we keep moving onward, growing, learning, doing. Answers your comital question.
4. So, to seek necessarily means we will be changing what we think (intention) and do (action), and that we will not stop seeking to know more and doing better.
Right seeking answers your question: What if a commitment to seek God's Justice, requires that we sacrifice the idol of our ideas about Justice? Right seeking means we will always be surpassing the ideas we hold – as we learn and do more, our current ideas are superseded by… learning and doing more. That is simply what it means to seek god’s justice as a Christian who keeps coming up short – but in better and better informed and behaving ways, according to our capacity.
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