‘We and the evangelicals do believe in the same God, after
all,’ I once feebly told my spiritual director. ‘But do we?’ he countered. ‘I’m
not at all sure we do. When I hear some people on the extreme end of the
evangelical wing of Christianity talking about it, the God they describe is
really quite different from the one I imagine.’
You can
ignore this for most of the time. But occasionally you encounter it stated in
so brutal a manner that S.D.’s reasoning seems no more than the plain truth.
Here is the core of the Christian message, according to a commentator on a blog
post I read the other day.
… both
essential elements of the Apostolic Gospel: the terrible truth and warning
that we all face from birth onwards the wrath and condemnation of God and we
are all born with a nature inclined to evil; and the wonderful, sincere, genuine
command, invitation, and exhortation to all of us to respond to the love, mercy
and grace of God by repenting and submitting to Christ in his atoning
propitiatory death and life giving resurrection, and thus to be delivered from
that wrath and condemnation and to be ultimately conformed by the Holy Spirit
to the image of God’s Son.
Put these
strictures another way and I don’t dissent much from them. It is, indeed, a
core element of the Christian faith’s account of human nature and the human
situation that we are fallen, unable by our own efforts to be holy or to choose
the good, to be anything more than moderately acceptable pagans; that the
sacrifice of Jesus Christ repairs this damage, and that to be repaired we have to turn to him and allow him to do his work. It’s
the same idea, re-expressed. But the phraseology and arrangement of this statement, this creed, is the whole
point of it: to ‘put it another way’ would be to rob it of its power, for those
for whom it resonates. Wrath and condemnation is its emotional crown, and
satisfaction at it the lavish pleasure at its centre. It is, genuinely, a
different imagining of God from mine, and I have no doubt from the great
majority of all the Christians I know who I call, or might call themselves,
evangelicals.
You could
say much about this. The phraseology of divine wrath is there throughout the
Scriptures; we can see the understanding of what it means widening from a
belief in God’s jealous and personal hunger for the loyalty of the people of
Israel through a sense that he will punish not just unfaithfulness and ritual
transgression, but all injustice. Finally, in the writings of St Paul, it
becomes a way of describing an existential state and an eschatological hope,
the knowledge that you are radically estranged from God on the one hand, and
the promise that evil will one day be destroyed and purged from creation on the
other. Wrath refers to both these things. It is not, however, anywhere
abstracted into a neat phrase that imputes to God the human emotion of rage;
still less that he looks on humans with that kind of rage until they follow a
certain specific set of actions. Evangelistically, you wouldn’t use this kind
of language: most human beings, left to themselves, aspire to be nothing more than ‘moderately
acceptable pagans’, and it is waking to the grand love of God which throws into
relief our own unloveliness. Without that, we don’t see the Fall for what it
is: and God’s wholesale ‘condemnation’ of humanity looks arbitrary,
pathological, and unjust. It’s exactly this process that Paul grapples with in
the convoluted, paradoxical 7th chapter of Romans: ‘Once I was alive
apart from law; when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died’. It
takes a revelation of holiness to show us what’s really going on, and God’s
definition of holiness is Jesus. The Church’s proclamation of the Good News
should start with him, not with us. The primary fact of the Christian
revelation is God’s nature, not our need.
Hearing that
‘we all face from birth onwards the wrath and condemnation of God’, many people
will think first of children. Nobody should doubt, or could doubt if they spent
long with them, that small children are as marked by the Fall as grown-ups are;
if they are ‘innocent’ it’s because they’re inexperienced, as yet unschooled in
the dangers and horrors of the world and how they might affect them, not in the
sense that original sin, our common inherited tendency to go astray, doesn’t
touch their acts. But virtually every human being will revolt against the idea
that God looks at children, at their
children in their arms, with rage and
disgust. And that isn’t what we see him doing. God incarnate in Jesus Christ
gathers children in his own arms, children as deeply wounded by the effects of
original sin as any grown-up is, and blesses them. He makes them the measure of the faith of
adults, even though they haven’t made any conscious expression of belief in him
(I can imagine extreme Protestants suggesting they might have done, but such
would be a fond invention and an unwarrantable addition to the holy text). He
does this in Mark 10, and a moment later in that account he can be found
looking with love on someone else who hasn’t expressed any faith in him, either
– except to come and ask him a question, a childlike act too.
The closest
Scripture comes to that ‘evangelical’ creed is a passage in Ephesians 2. ‘Like the
rest’, says Paul in that text, ‘we were by nature objects of wrath. But because
of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ
even when we were dead in transgressions.’ That phrase, ‘objects of wrath’ is
there, surely, yet you see easily how mercy and wrath can, according to the
holy Apostle, co-exist in the mind of God, even if not in ours. There is no
clear, sequential process. To illustrate this with a picture – in fact, to
supersede it by one – which shows God’s expression flicking from contorted
frown to beneficent smile as we pray the Prayer of Faith is to traduce the
Scriptures, and Him.
I would like
to offer that the Gospel is more this: the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ shows us the truth about ourselves and the world; and the truth is,
that the unconquerable love of God is the great fact of all creation, that the
sign of love is the Cross, and that though our first ancestors fell away from
that love, and we are permanently wounded by their fall, he has not abandoned
us, but in Christ reaches to lift us out of death into his coming Kingdom.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
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