Last time, I posted that though Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Rob Bell, and Tony Jones maintain God is love and good, they cannot preserve God’s justice, for it ends up being arbitrary for them. Yet, to be truly good, a person must be not only truly loving, but also truly just. So, by separating God’s love from His justice, they end up with a God who is not truly good.
Love and justice are partners, for love protects what is good and cared for. If I find that someone is trying to lure my wife’s heart away from me, I will intervene with godly jealousy for hers and my sake, and ours together. God is like this, too; Scripture depicts God as jealous for His beloved, and He too will intervene to protect His children from seductions because they will harm and drive us from Him. God despises sin because it is an affront to His holiness, and also because it steals us away from loving Him. To illustrate God’s jealousy for His people, He had Hosea take a harlot as his wife, as a sign to Israel of God’s faithfulness, yet also of their apostasy.
God is absolutely good, so He cannot act in a way that separates His justice from His love. He cannot act in a way that is just and yet unloving, or loving and yet unjust. Justice requires that God repays each one according to his or her due, due to God’s own just character. When He acts in justice, He acts in proper proportion to the offense. If we use Aristotle’s virtue theory as a lens, we can see God always will act appropriately in justice, never going to an extreme of deficiency by shrinking back from proper punishment or discipline. Nor would God go to an extreme of excess, by exploding in boiling rage. No; God’s “work is perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without injustice, righteous and upright is He” (Deut 32:4).
Yet, for McLaren and others, it seems they cannot tolerate the idea that God ever could act violently. Bell expresses this concern clearly; at death,
“A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.
“. . . If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.
“If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good.”[1]
Yet, in response and conclusion, I think Miroslav Volf expresses well the problems with this mindset:
“My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda of the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”[2]
[1] Bell, Love Wins, 174 (emphasis mine).
[2] Volf, Free of Charge, 139.