Over at Sunshine Mary’s place, there has been a conversation that turned to if one could indeed worship a God that was evil. I answered that this is no. Van Roonieck, who is a better man than I am, said that the will of God is irresistible…
At times as a Christian I’ve been so dissatisfied with my life, so frustrated with the way things turned out, and felt I was being led down a path by God that I’d rather DIE than follow, and with the choice of giving up Christianity looming as a quick and easy “out”…. yet having NO choice, knowing the truth…. that I must say I’ve felt that way about Christianity sometimes. Christian author CS Lews addressed this —
“What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend.”
Truth be told, there have been times when I obeyed, if at all, only through fear. How do you resist an omnipotent enemy? Stross’s waiting-for-God-with-a-shotgun wisecrack notwithstanding, there’s no 2nd amendment in the spirit realm, no hope of winning such a revolt. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated….
Eventually you come through the other side and realize that God isn’t bad after all. But at times that’s very, very hard to see.
Now, I can see where VR is coming from. There is no way that I can say that living a Christian life has been triumph and joy all the way. I fail. Daily. I have learnt to keep short accounts… but at times I deceive myself that I am righteous when I am definitely not.
But we forget that holiness is not merely keeping the commandments. They are difficult at times — for covetousness gets us all.
You are not indeed to understand, that no difference whatever can be known between right and wrong without the law; but that without the law we are either too dull of apprehension to discern our depravity, or that we are made wholly insensible through self-flattery, according to what follows, — For coveting I had not known, etc. This is then an explanation of the former sentence, by which he proves that ignorance of sin, of which he had spoken, consisted in this — that he perceived not his own coveting. And he designedly referred to this one kind of sin, in which hypocrisy especially prevails, which has ever connected with itself supine self-indulgence and false assurance. For men are never so destitute of judgment, but that they retain a distinction in external works; nay, they are constrained even to condemn wicked counsels and sinister purposes: and this they cannot do, without ascribing to a right object its own praise. But coveting is more hidden and lies deeper; hence no account is made of it, as long as men judge according to their perceptions of what is outward. He does not indeed boast that he was free from it; but he so flattered himself, that he did not think that this sin was lurking in his heart.
Now, we are insensible to what is truly good. We know good most of the time when we see it, and we are aware that what is good for us may not be what we want. I do not want to diet. I do not want to go to the gym — and I am certain that a person with cancer does not like their chemotherapy. But those things are good for us.
In our sense of self righteousness, our confidence in our piety, however, we can do evil. And we need to repent from it. As Peter states.
12When Peter saw it, he addressed the people, “You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? 13The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. 14But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, 15and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. 16And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you.
17“And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. 18In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. 19Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out,20so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus, 21who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets. 22Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you from your own people a prophet like me. You must listen to whatever he tells you. 23And it will be that everyone who does not listen to that prophet will be utterly rooted out of the people.’ 24And all the prophets, as many as have spoken, from Samuel and those after him, also predicted these days. 25You are the descendants of the prophets and of the covenant that God gave to your ancestors, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your descendants all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ 26When God raised up his servant, he sent him first to you, to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways.”
What wee the people of Jerusalem to repent of? Well the obvious answer is the death of Christ — which they yelled for as a mob. But not all those in the temple were in the mob — as many have said about prime minister and president “I did not vote for that”. However, if we look again at Calvin’s comments, we all have our own sin and our own burden.
When Peter was telling them to repent, he was speaking about that as much as what had happened in Jerusalem but seven weeks before.
Now, this is one reason why we should preach the Law. We should listen to our Jewish friens about the meaning of the Torah, and use the Law as a Plumb line — because awareness of the law makes us realize that the very parts of us that we thought were right with God are not.
We have no power in our piety. There is only one class of Christian. And that class is classified as needy, only in fellowship with Gog by his love and righteousness, demonstrated by Christ’s death on the Cross.
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Chris,
I very much enjoyed this post. Even as an agnostic/atheist, I relate to much of what you discuss. In fact, suspect that the vast majority of people, whether Christian or not, want to do the right thing. People mostly want to be good and decent. But the problem lies in identifying what the right thing is and guarding against the tendency to rationalize our own desires, even when they conflict with what is good.
So anyone who is concerned about doing the right thing should AGONIZE over how to identify what the right thing is. It’s not easy and we often delude ourselves, a fact that is one of Christianity’s great insights. But I will always remain skeptical of Christianity because I see it as an all too human belief-system that thus contains both wisdom and error (including self-delusion) in equal measure. The Bible’s endorsement of and rationalization of male dominance is naturally the key example that occurs to me. In the end, the problem is epsitemological as well as moral. While it is tempting to look for answers to what is right in the word of God, rather than in one’s own fallible human reason, we are still constrained by our human fallibility in determining whether God even exists, in identifying the word of God (is it the Torah, the entire Bible including New Testament, or the Koran?) and in interpreting it.
While those who are aware of my sexual liberalism may mock me for this, I am known among my friends and famiy for worrying excessively about the moral implications of most of my decisions in life. What it comes down to for me is: “Am I causing harm to others in some way? Am I doing enought to contribute to the wellbeing of the world to the degree of which I am capable? Am I letting myself off the hook too easily?” Naturally, the devil is in the details. The issue of what things constitute “harm” and “wellbeing” is complicated, of course. But I am stuck (as everyone is in the end) relying for good or ill on my own reason, because I can’t know anything, whether Christianity or anything else, apart from my own understanding. That said, Christian thought (as well as Jewish and Buddhist thought) have been very influential on my moral outlook, but I tend not to accept any creed whole cloth.
I thought you might enjoy one of my favorite quotations of all time from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I suppose Ralph is to folks like me what C.S. Lewis is to traditionalist Christians!
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will … abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negation between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.
Cheers!
The dveil, at least the legalistic one, lives in the details. This reminds me of a conversation that does not occur now, but used to.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s a certain notorious theologian (Francis Schaeffer) ran an open home in Switzerland. Lots of ultra keen Christians came to visit. There would be often conversations about what was sinful and what was licit. A set of rules would be made — and once beyond do not kill, steal, commit adultery and lie, there were supplementary ones — do not wear a skirt with a hemline above this, do not gamble, do not drink….
And the rules contradicted each other. Schaeffer reminded them of the rabbinical simplification — Love God, Love your neighbor.
But when people are left with those they found that the standard was so high that they could not keep it. It was safer to be a legalist. For that law shows us all up.
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