Okay, I know it’s a waste of mental energy to blog a response to a preacher on the radio whose name I don’t even know, but I can’t help it—just like I can’t help listening to the Preacher Radio (whatever it’s called) here in Sacramento sometimes. It’s more entertaining than all this crap about Chris Webber.
So yesterday on the way home, I heard this preacher on the radio saying that God is love, and therefore that you can read passages in the Bible and replace the word “love” with “God” and vice versa. He then proceeded to demonstrate this with the following famous passage from Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians (NIV):
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not selfseeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails….
He then proceeded to replace “love” with “God,” and produced a string of seemingly profound—but utterly nonsensical—phrases.
“God is patient, God is kind.”
Now, that doesn’t exactly seem to capture the personality of the Old Testament God, Whose wrath was so great that He wiped out the Egyptian army with the waters of the Red Sea, or Whose laws in Exodus include somewhat stringent punishments (“Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child. If thou afflict them in any wise…my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.” (Ex. 22:22-24) ) or Whose anger in chapter 25 of the Book of Jeremiah is so great that he “will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth,” and “shall roar from on high,” and Who calls for a war whereby “the slain of the LORD shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth: they shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the ground,” or Who was so disgusted at human sin that He flooded the earth and destroyed not only all but a tiny number of human beings, but every innocent animal as well. How kind was God to Job, for crying out loud?
Nor does this sound much like the New Testament God Who allegedly hates gays, or Who “will come in a day when [we] looketh not for him…[a]nd that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes,” (Luke 12:46-47) or Who says “mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” (Luke 19:27). So far as I know the Judaeo-Christian world-view, God is indeed sometimes patient and sometimes kind, but is also often quite impatient, and unkind, and curses people “with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.” (Deut. 28:22)
“[God] does not envy, [God] does not boast, [God] is not proud.”
Yet God repeatedly tells us “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:5), and “thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Ex. 34:14) And boastful? In Job, God spends page after page telling the battered remnants of His favorite servant how awesome He is: “Then the LORD…said…Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.” If God isn’t proud, then the word proud has no meaning (and that is, of course, fine, since He’s supposed to be God, and has all the reason in the universe to be proud. But we can’t deny that He is).
“[God] does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth”? But God makes a deal with the devil to test Job’s faith by wrecking his life, and He hardens Pharaoh’s heart against doing right with the Jews, so that He will have a pretext for bringing plague after plague on the Egyptians. “[God] always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres”? But the Bible is littered with fields of slain enemies of the Lord—whole tribes lying slaughtered on the pages of the Holy Book, with their spears and chariots in a thousand ancient fragments. Did he protect the victims of the Christmas tsunami? (This is not the same as asking why He caused the tsunami. Whether He caused it for good reason or not, He obviously did not protect people from it.) Always trusts? But He is also always watching us, like some extremely serious Santa Claus, ready to bring misery into our lives for our impertinence, and forecasting pain for our own (alleged) good. Always perseveres? Only in the sense that He is immortal. And what about “[God] keeps no record of wrongs”? It seems pretty obvious how that one doesn’t work.
I know there are Christian explanations for the difference between the wrathful Old Testament Monster and the supposedly gentler New Testament Lamb, but the New Testament is every bit as full of fury as the Old: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” (Matt. 10:34) And anyway, my point is not to say that God is a Big Meanie. He is, but He has the right to be if He wants. (And if you question His right to be, like Job did, you’ll be in trouble.) My point is that I respect a good fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone, repent or go to Hell kind of preacher—and so does God: “thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Rev. 3:16) But the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” sort of theology so popular in America today—what I call Marshmallow Christianity, typified by a sign I saw at a book show not long ago: “How to go to Heaven without going to church”—is just ridiculous. Defining God as love is utterly trivial when true, and utterly untrue where it matters.
Update: Slithery D, sharp as usual, notes "the Orwellian dishonesty” of a God Who says "love me and worship me or be damned for eternity.” Orwellian is exactly the right word for it—the power dynamic is just right. In Animal Farm, Napoleon tells the animals that Snowball is a giant, powerful monster who is responsible for all the evil that happens, and that the only safety from his evil clutches is for them to serve Napoleon. In 1984, Big Brother tells the people, you must do as I say, or Goldstein will get you. The message from the church is the same—spook the people with terrifying ghost stories, and then teach them that safety is to be found in obedience.
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