Category Archives: violence

For I am God, not man (IV)

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An interlude, giving a few more ‘big picture’ points.


What most drives me in my rejection of PSA is the pastoral consequences of the doctrine. That is, the insistence on PSA as ‘the heart of the gospel’ seems to me to elevate divine wrath and punishment, and therefore the notion of justice and rule following, above the elements of gracious forgiveness within the gospel – and this has very damaging consequences in the life of the faithful. This isn’t just an abstract thing for me – a not insignificant part of my ministry is precisely picking up the pieces of souls that have been smashed by this insistence. The healing is difficult, and takes a long time, and both those parts testify to the depth of the damage done

I don’t have a problem with an acceptance of PSA which sees PSA as a minor element of the gospel, as one image – one METAPHOR – with which to ponder the mystery of salvation. That seems to me to accord moderately well with the importance given to it in Scripture and Church History. In this understanding it is essentially adiaphora – it is something on which Christians may disagree, whilst being united by the much more crucial doctrines (creation, incarnation, resurrection, redemption, trinity…).

The problem to my mind is when that single image is raised up and reified as the defining theory for understanding the work of Christ. When the wider testimony of Christianity and Scripture is conformed and constricted around a metaphysics built upon that image. Hence my remark that penal substitution is what happens when you take a metaphor and turn it into a metaphysics. I had two people in mind influencing that statement – James Alison, who criticises PSA precisely because it is a theory and not something that of itself changes lives, and Wittgenstein, with his criticisms of metaphysics more generally. Sometimes the whole weight is in the picture.

It is rather ironic that PFOT begins with a Foreword from John Piper saying precisely the opposite to this – but for the same reasons. That is, John Piper also sees this as a pastoral issue, and he references Jesus’ criticisms of the Pharisees as an example of how importantly we can take this issue. Piper goes on to say “…if God did not punish Jesus in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.”

That is precisely what I object to, and which I see as a distortion of Christian faith. It is an attitude which has raised up God’s wrath into the determining feature of reality and existence.

To sum up my position:
– I would accept that there are some comparatively minor passages in Scripture which can be construed as referring to something like PSA; however
– I believe that Scripture has many more full and explicit passages which undermine PSA and give a much more healthy and liberating understanding of God and his most gracious favour;
– I believe that PSA is virtually unknown in the early church, and hardly more known for the first thousand years of Christian history;
– I believe that Anselm paved the way for PSA, but that Calvin was the first theologian to give it something like its modern form and place weight on it; more crucially I think Charles Hodge is the thinker with most influence on the way that it is presently portrayed;
– I think the doctrine is intimately tied together with a Modernist understanding of faith; it is a very good example of a ‘doctrine of men’; and I think that as we progressively move away from a Modernist culture so too will PSA lapse first into irrelevance and then it will be forgotten;
– I believe that PSA is a factional and party issue; that is, it is virtually unknown in orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism; it is not actively central in mainstream Protestantism; it is principally pursued by those who are already committed to a Calvinistic perspective on Christianity. It has become a shibboleth separating one Christian from another, and that, in itself, is one of the things most wrong with it.

For I am God, not man (III)

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Continuing the sequence on penal substitution, this time wondering – if there are some who support the sort of doctrine that I am objecting to, what would we expect them to look like? Click ‘full post’ for text.

I should say right up front that I have specific examples from my own personal experience in mind as I write this, but the truth of what I say isn’t dependent on that.

I’ve outlined what I object to in the doctrine of penal substitution, viz:

the doctrine is believed in wholeheartedly and the consequence drawn from the doctrine, within the life of the believer, is that the character of God is fundamentally one of inexorable justice; that the response to any transgression is ‘there must be punishment’; and that the life and witness of Jesus Christ is conformed to this controlling narrative, rather than all other narratives being conformed to the life and witness of Christ.

In other words – there is a distortion in belief, in terms of the prominence given to punishment when describing God’s character (a form of idolatry), and there is a distortion in christian behaviour consequent to this, which (to summarise in advance) becomes a form of ‘law not grace’ – guilt is prominent, and fostered, and forgiveness is underemphasised. Where rules and punishment are given excessive emphasis in the presentation of salvation there will be consequent harm done to the listeners. Where there is paradox – God is a God of justice and mercy/forgiveness – then much depends on how things are presented, if one isn’t to eclipse the other.

I’ll unpack that, as it’s quite dense, and begs lots of questions.

1. The character of God
Advocacy of this form of PSA would emphasise the holiness of God, understood as the utter incompatibility of sin with God’s existence. Such sin would be seen in personal and individualistic terms, and much would be made of the offence given to God. There would be less emphasis upon the gracious and forgiving aspects of God’s character, along with the corporate side of sin.

2. The character of Scriptural witness
PSA would be seen as either the sole or the determining way in which Scripture talks about redemption. Texts referring to PSA would be given the highest possible prominence; texts which give different models would be addressed less; arguments about the character of Scripture as a whole would be downplayed. The teaching of Jesus, eg about the Kingdom, would be considered much less important than the achievement of the crucifixion – understood through the lens of PSA.

3. The nature of preaching and the call to repentance
Emphasis would be given to the way in which humanity has sinned and broken the laws of God; PSA would be explained and the guilt provoked would, instead of being eliminated, be nourished as a healthy response to ‘the truth’. The important thing for a disciple would be to understand the way in which ‘Christ died for you’.

4. The nature of church behaviour
Consequent to the consistent emphasis upon rules and the breaking of rules, there would be an excessive concern to establish and police the boundaries between the rule keepers and the rule breakers, in order to prevent further provocation of God.

5. The tone of advocacy
There will be a shrillness of tone (eg “damn this diabolical doctrine to hell” 😉 associated with discussions on the topic; this will be directly linked to the level of fear of punishment felt by the advocate. There will be little concern to understand the objections to PSA, and there will be a comprehensive rejection of the possibility of Christianity without an acceptance of PSA.

6. The most important: the pastoral character of doctrine
The sheep pastored under this understanding of PSA will remain bound up in guilt and sin; they will not be enabled to experience forgiveness; they will remain emotionally crippled and not enjoy the abundance of life promised. Aware of their own sinfulness they will be reminded of it on regular occasions and not encouraged to affirm their original blessing of being made in the image of God.

Now – obviously! – these are very broad brush strokes, but I think they will serve for the time being. The question is: do such places and advocates exist? That’s for the next part.

For I am God, not man (II)

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Continuing a slightly more reasoned out – rather than ‘ranted out’ – discussion of penal substitutionary atonement. This one is looking at wrath. Click ‘full post’ for text.

I want to flesh out the distinctions that I made in the last post, especially the difference between the second and third ways of believing in penal substitution. (BTW It may help to give more specific labels to these two alternatives (the first is largely irrelevant, and for my purposes simply collapses into the second). Let’s call the first the ‘Tom Wright interpretation of PSA‘ (TW), and the second the ‘Pierced for our Transgressions interpretation of PSA‘ (PFOT)(PSA = penal substitutionary atonement!))

Now there is a way in which ‘penal substitution’ makes sense to me, and it will help to delineate what I don’t like about the PFOT approach. The idea of substitution itself is a noble one – “greater love hath no man than this than that a man lay down his life for his friend”. There are myriad examples of this, and I am very happy for this to be used to describe what Jesus is doing, that Jesus is a substitute for us in this way. A bullet is headed in our direction – Jesus pushes us out of the way and takes the hit on our behalf, out of love for us, and by this we are set free. [I think the most recent example of this I came across was in the last X-Men film which I re-watched recently, when Mystique saves Mysterio]. Indisputably, PSA does not describe a form of this.

The difference between this and PSA is the status of the bullet fired in our direction, which is seen as the direct consequence of our sin, ie it is a punishment for our sin – it is a ‘lex talionis‘ applied on the cosmic scale. God’s holiness and justice cannot allow sin to go unpunished – for this to be the case then God would cease to be God. Tom Wright puts it like this: “if God does not hate the wickedness that happens in his beautiful world, he is neither a good nor a just God, and chaos is come again”. This is God’s wrath. How should we understand it?

A few years ago I attended a conference on the atonement, and I wrote up my notes here. At the end of it I outlined an analogy for understanding God’s wrath that I think is worth bringing up front again:

In studying various species, biologists and zoologists distinguish the genotype from the phenotype. The genotype is the DNA sequence which is found in every cell of the life-form. The phenotype is the expression of that DNA sequence in a specific context, eg the wing of a bird as opposed to the beak, where both have the same DNA but the end-result is very different. In the same way, it seems to me that we must understand ‘God is love’ as referring to his essential nature, his ‘genotype’, whereas we must understand God’s wrath as something which derives from the interaction of that nature with a particular context (our sin), and so is derivative or ‘phenotypical’. The problem that I have with the notion of penal substitution is that it makes God’s wrath part of his genotype (and therefore part of the fabric of His creation), rather than being a reflection of human sin. If we are called to work towards a ‘peaceable kingdom’, as I believe we are, then I don’t think we will achieve it by worshipping a God whose fundamental nature is violent.

This remains my perspective: what I dislike about PSA is the way in which it makes the wrath of God something essential to God’s character rather than something which is a response to our action – that is, a secondary phenomenon. The problem is the idea that ‘there must be punishment‘ – that this is an essential, indeed THE essential attribute of God’s holiness. My concern is that in the doctrine of PSA this is the irrevocable point around which the world turns. To quote Tom Wright again, “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and all because of the unstoppable love of the one creator God.” In other words, it is the love which is primary.

(Note – I don’t have any worries about the use of wrath to describe God’s activities as such; what is at stake for me is the core character of the God whom we worship, and whose image we seek to cultivate). I doubt that PSA advocates would suggest that this is an obligation placed upon the Father by some outside force, for what is at stake is the character of God himself, unconstrained by any external pressure. The core question might be phrased: what is the character of God’s holiness? In what way is God holy?

There is one way of understanding God’s holiness which is manifestly pagan, and that is the sense in which God is simply an irritable human being on a large scale, with a well developed sense of social propriety and honour. Consider – an example I’ve used before – the story of Andromeda from Greek mythology, as dramatised in the film ‘Clash of the Titans’. The driver of her story is that her mother has praised her beauty excessively, and therefore offended the Gods, who lay down a curse upon her city until she is offered up as a PAGAN sacrifice to the Kraken. What makes this pagan is the scale of values employed – the people are the playthings of the Gods and there is nothing noble or humane about the divinities involved. They are simply monstrous human beings. (Note well the role of offence here! I suspect that Anselm’s account partakes more than a little of this pagan approach, but discussing him would take me away from where I want to go.)

Clearly there is Scriptural support for a frightening sense of God’s holiness. Consider Moses on the mountainside, and the way in which even goats who trespassed had to be stoned to death. Yet that has to be placed in juxtaposition with the babe of Bethelehem, born into the animal’s feeding trough and kept alive by their breath. The issue is: which is the determining image? Which account takes us closer to the holiness of the God revealed in Scripture (as opposed to the holiness of the God of the philosophers)?

I would want to argue that the God of the Scriptures revealed and known in the person and work of Jesus Christ is one who seeks repentance and offers forgiveness, who is always reaching out to us in mercy, but who allows us to embrace a wrathful destruction if we so choose. The classic source for this is the story of the prodigal son. I was reminded by my visitor the other day that one of the crucial aspects of the story is that the society in which the father lived would have poured shame and scorn upon the father for acting in the way that he did. The Father absorbs the ‘punishment’ that would otherwise have fallen upon the son; he accepts the loss of his own social standing, his own ‘loss of face’ in order to re-establish a loving relationship and home with the prodigal.

For me, that is the heart and transformative good news of the gospel. God is like that; God is not like Zeus or any other pagan deity. This is what I see as the distinction between the two senses of PSA. Tom Wright worships the Christian God; PFOT is worshipping a pagan deity.

Continued in part three.

For I am God, not man (I)

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I want to develop my position on penal substitution in a more rational manner than last week’s stream of consciousness. Tim commented that the issue has become a ‘King Charles’ Head’ for me – lovely image, derivation explained here – and I wouldn’t want people to think I was tilting at windmills too much. I want to narrow down more precisely what it is that I object to – what I really do consider damning and damnable – and explain why. In this first post I want to make some preparatory remarks about the nature of doctrinal belief and clear away some potential misunderstandings. Click ‘full post’ for text (not very long).


I have often commented (and preached) that there are two forms of belief. One is a purely intellectual and rational construct; the other is embedded within our patterns of life and – crucially – both reflects and structures our emotional commitments, ie what we give value to. (In practice there is a spectrum, but run with the dichotomy for the sake of argument!)

To quickly grasp the difference, consider the difference between ‘Mrs Jones is committing adultery’ and ‘your wife is committing adultery’ – the second is, other things being equal, much more embedded in a person’s patterns of life and will likely have much greater emotional impact when heard and understood.

Theology as I understand it is about the second form of belief, not the first. (Interestingly, the common perception of ‘theology’ is the exact opposite – ‘angels dancing on the head of a pin’ etc – and I’m sure this underlies much rejection of Christianity, the idea that it has no relevance.)

Theology is about the second form of belief because it is the study of ultimate value – it is the language that we use about God, that which is ultimate. Consequently, debate about doctrine is essentially a debate about what is most important in our lives. What is at stake in the question of whether penal substitution is an adequately Christian account of salvation is the nature of the God that Christians worship, what it is that is most important to us – and as a result, the nature of the discipleship and formation that we follow as we seek to reveal the image of that God within us. That is why it is so important.

Peter Kirk put me onto this post by ‘Theo Geek’, well worth reading in full, who wrote:

The difference between “a God who is loving and forgives sins out of love” and “a God who demands justice be repaid but removes this need from himself by Jesus and thus forgives sins out of love” lies only in the semantics, logic and character of God depicted within this statements and not at all in the resultant functionality of these two doctrines or how they relate to our everyday experience of life.

I have a great deal of sympathy with this perspective. It reminds me strongly of Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language. I think it is perfectly possible for someone to believe in penal substitution in two ways with which I would, in principle, take no objection (I think Tom Wright falls into the second of these categories):
– the doctrine might be believed purely as an intellectual matter, ie something which is abstracted from daily life, has no emotional consequences in terms of life lived, is simply seen as a coherent way of understanding the process of salvation etc etc; or
– the doctrine is believed in wholeheartedly but the consequences drawn from the doctrine are precisely those outlined above by TheoGeek: God forgives our sins out of love, and thus the ultimate value preserved by the doctrine in the life and witness of the believer is that of a loving and forgiving Father, revealed in the life and witness of Jesus Christ. Jesus remains the controlling witness and revelation of the nature of God.

My concern is not with either of these two interpretations. My concern is with a third possible interpretation of penal substitution, viz:
– the doctrine is believed in wholeheartedly and the consequence drawn from the doctrine, within the life of the believer, is that the character of God is fundamentally one of inexorable justice; that the response to any transgression is ‘there must be punishment’; and that the life and witness of Jesus Christ is conformed to this controlling narrative, rather than all other narratives being conformed to the life and witness of Christ.

I believe, and my so far not radically wide experience confirms, that this third form of understanding
– is prevalent within segments of the Christian church;
– upholds patterns of behaviour and belief which are destructive of Christian life;
– is in direct opposition to the gospel of Christ; and
– needs to be identified as a problem and struggled against.

In other words, it is this third way of understanding the doctrine of penal substitution that I consider damning damnable. Hopefully this narrowing down will lower the temperature a little, although I don’t expect the discussion ever to be particularly cool!

More in part 2.

Some notes on divine forgiveness

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Jesus teaches us to pray to the Father: forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. My question: is Jesus asking us to do more than the Father is prepared to do? Or is he asking us to share in the nature of the Father?

Let me caricature the diabolical side of the doctrine of penal substitution.

Imagine that there is a school. And the head teacher of the school says to the children – you can make the rules. You can decide on what the punishments will be. So the children work out what their rules are going to be. If you’re late for class then this will happen. If you are rude to a teacher this will happen. And so on.

A rule is broken. One boy steals an apple from another boy. The rules stipulate that the punishment is three strokes of the cane. The children discover that the one stealing hasn’t eaten for several days; his family are so poor. So the one whose apple was stolen says ‘I will take the punishment for you’.

Actually, I’m being naughty, this isn’t a caricature, this was a story told to my children at (the otherwise extremely good and beneficial) Mersea Beach Club last week. But this is so bizarre. It’s probably even worse than the story from Bridge over the River Kwai that Nicky Gumbel uses in Alpha, which portrays the Father as a psychotic Japanese guard.

Why can’t the children just say ‘the rules don’t apply here’? Why not ‘mercy triumphs over justice’ (James 2.13)?

No, for some reason, this ‘stepping outside of the box’ is ruled out. What you have is an understanding of the Father that turns his holiness into a mechanism. The argument runs: God is holy, nothing that is not holy can stand in the face of such holiness, our sin is unholy, Jesus takes the heat so that we don’t get kicked out of the kitchen. God’s justice must stand! Otherwise he isn’t Holy! What this really means is that here is what we see as most holy: justice. Justice becomes God, within which God must act and to which God must conform. God cannot simply forgive for that would be to violate his character. There must be some mechanism by which justice is satisfied.

These rules have been graven in stone and handed down on the mountain.

It is not an accident that a mechanical age has raised up a mechanical God. What intrigues me is that the voices which shout most stridently for upholding Scripture against the culture are the ones most deeply implicated in that cultural idolatry.

Rules as such are holy. Irrespective of source or context. This tells of such a querulous faith.

This is not the God of the Bible. Though our sins be as scarlet yet they shall be whiter than snow. Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more. If we confess our sins he who is faithful and just will forgive us. Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice.

Jesus repeats that quotation twice; so shall I: Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice.

The Father is not a machine in a factory, liable to be hazardous to us, and to injure us, unless we treat it with proper respect. That is the pagan conception. That makes God into King Kong needing a virgin to eat.

Either we believe in a God of forgiveness – a God with the power to make all things new – or we believe in a God who cannot forgive, because his holiness and his justice demand recompense.

Do you think I drink the blood of bulls?

Saying Jesus is the satisfaction simply relocates the problem – either the deity is at war in itself, or else we are now in a protected area but the Father’s fundamental character remains unchanged. That is spiritually corrosive – for how can God’s fundamental character be eternally suppressed? The anger emerges somewhere.

This is a salvation issue. That is, it seems to me – and I have seen much too often – that if the doctrine of penal substitution is heartily believed then salvation is prevented. The believer in this doctrine does not experience redemption and the forgiveness of sins. They may feel better for a short while – the ways of the human heart are undoubtedly mysterious – but this underlying rottenness will come to the surface eventually.

For the diabolical doctrine states: God doesn’t really love you. He hates you because you’re a sinner. But he’s been bought off by the bloody sacrifice on the cross. He’s like an abusive parent kept at bay by a restraining order. There is always the fear that one day he’ll come back. And so the soul remains crippled. God’s true character is obscured and occluded.

In this situation the genuine gospel of forgiveness saves lives and sets the captives free. God loves you. Nothing you can do will make God love you more. Nothing you can do will make God love you less. This means you do not have to be afraid. And that means that you can love – for it is only love that can cast out fear, and when Jesus repeatedly tells us not to be afraid, that is because he loves us. That is what it means to love the Lord and walk in his ways. This is why it is good news.

God doesn’t play the game of blame. It’s not that he plays the game but has agreed to give you a free pass. It’s that this game is worldly and demonic and nothing to do with God at all.

If you repent of your sins you will be forgiven. In other words, a fresh start is possible. The slate gets wiped clean.

This is a spiritual reality. This is not something about some future life after death. This is not about some yellow stain upon the soul needing to be washed. Those are metaphors. Salvation is something that happens in daily life. I have seen it happen. And it is a miracle.

To genuinely believe in forgiveness – and to be genuinely given the spiritual strength to take that dynamic forgiveness out into the world – means to see forgiveness as of the very essence of God. If it is not of the being of God to be forgiving, then neither can it be of the being of humanity to be forgiving. We too will end up pretending, if we believe in our hearts that God is only pretending.

And we will live in a society of rules and law and justice. We will be cogs in the machine. We will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Without forgiveness, there is no grace. Without grace, there is no gospel. Without the gospel, we are still dead in our sins and we are of all men the most to be pitied.

Damn this diabolical doctrine to hell.

Torture and Eucharist (William Cavanaugh)

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This was superb – a provocative and challenging exploration of both the failures of church to resist oppression and the way in which the church can reinvent itself by rediscovering its own history. Centring on the story of Chile under Pinochet, Cavanaugh redescribes torture as the liturgy of the state, to which the liturgy of the eucharist is the essential response. There’s quite a bit about this book on-line, and Cavanaugh is clearly one of the leading lights of present day theology.

Also, as I mentioned before, the one thing that reading this book has done is change my mind about excommunication for unrepentant sinners. The Body cannot BE the Body without it – in a very concrete sense.

PS one very minor caveat – Cavanaugh sees pain as essentially private, something with which a Wittgensteinian would disagree…

Why it’s a GOOD Friday

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I wasn’t sure I was going to post this, but… the notes for my Good Friday sermon are below the fold; they might be of some interest, if you can make head or tail of them

20070406 Good Friday

I would like to explore with you today the meaning of Good Friday – why did Jesus die, and why is today of all days a good day? what i want to say can be summed up quite simply – i believe that today of all days god is revealed as a god of love, a god who opens up his arms to us and wants to embrace us, and that with this god there is no place for fear or punishment

spend time exploring what I think is a very bad theory explaining what is going on, so before I continue, some sensible words from CS Lewis:
“We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself… “

that seems sane to me – i would not wish anything i say today to take away from that

prior question – who is it who kills jesus, who wants him dead?
religious authorities
political authorities
disciples – judas, but what about peter?
crowd
you and me
not jesus – gethsemane

not god
might sound strange – popular theory called ‘penal substitution’, derived primarily from Calvin counts as ‘doctrine of men’ – specifically calvin, via the american theologian charles hodge

– bear in mind that Calvin was a lawyer – goes something like this…
example used in alpha (miracle on river kwai)
question – who is the father in this scenario – the father is the lunatic japanese guard who can’t count
pagan understanding – king kong

bizarre reversal of story of Abraham and Isaac – yes I do want you to kill your son!

punishment in this life interpreted as god’s judgement
cursed be he that hangs on a tree
prosperity gospel – psalm ‘never saw a righteous man begging for bread’
change in understanding over time within scripture – not monolithic

bible is thoroughly opposed; jesus consistently opposes that
tower of siloam
beatitudes – blessed are the poor
isaiah and post-exile – ‘the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief’

so what does the language mean?
1 Peter 2:24 – “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”
christ bore our sins – by his wounds we are healed
i take it literally – jesus is crucified by our sin, when he is on the cross he is bearing the burden of our sin, not in a metaphysical or metaphorical sense, not in any sort of theoretical way – but really, and truly, and physically, and painfully – it is our sin that pounds the nails through his hands and feet

what of the language about sacrifice (hebrews)?
what is sacrifice? originally kopher – thank you – never about punishment
it is about giving back to god the things which are gods – the sacrifice of christians is a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise
‘i desire mercy not sacrifice’ – jesus repeats this text twice in the gospels, surely many more times in reality, a core text for him
LC attendees will have heard me talk about the sacrificial rites of the day of atonement in the first temple period – don’t need to go into detail again now (but do come to the first session of the next LC sequence if you are interested) – the core emphasis to bring out is that the sacrifice in the temple is god taking the initiative to save us, because he loves us, not because he is angry – what most upsets god is not the transgression of a law but the suffering of his children – with god justice is about restoration, not punishment

crucial texts from the Johannine epistles 1 John 4 16-19, where God is identified with love, and living in love is seen as the core christian pattern – and this love is then opposed to fear and punishment – what the doctrine of penal substitution does is reestablish that fear and punishment at the centre of the trinity (and awful things follow)
whoever sees jesus sees the father – god is christ-like and in him is no un-christ-likeness at all – Rev 13 – lamb slain since the foundation of the world

god is love – in our god there is no place for fear or punishment
but what does the language of ‘fear of god’ mean then? shouldn’t think that we can put our concepts of fear and god together to get an adequate understanding of ‘fear-of-god’ – contrast between chased by tiger and standing on edge of grand canyon – fear of god is the latter – it is about awe and reverence – and yes the overwhelming sense of holiness which cannot be in the same place as sin, so if we sin we experience god as wrath – but that wrath is not of the essence of god

god is for us, not against us
as jesus says ‘life in abundance’ – what destroys that is our sin and our wrath
we want to be punished – we cannot conceive of a world without punishment – because we cannot accept forgiveness – we cannot bear the light of the living god – men turned away from the light for their deeds were evil – they are condemned because they do not believe in a forgiving god – ‘condemned out of their own mouths’ – compare with the parable of the talents
jesus is not reconciling an angry god to humanity – he is reconciling god to an angry humanity – by revealing the truth about god and man

ancient understanding
focussed on the overcoming of principalities and powers – the realm of this world – on this day the world speaks – the world kills – the world appears to triumph
the cross is not a divine punishment – it is a human punishment
resurrection is god’s answer – it is an invitation – the resurrection is above all god’s offer of loving forgiveness to all who will accept it – that we have executed him and strung him up on a cross – and yet god remains the same – offering the same love to us – he sends his rain on to the just and the unjust – will we repent of our just vengeance, our own lust for punishment and be reconciled with god?

on the cross judgement is judged, condemnation is condemned
god does not overpower us – he woos us – and he woos us through the cross

today is good because our god wants us to be human – it is about transforming our relationship with him – not mechanical – not a theory – but a passionate embrace – arms reaching out to us all

today is good because our god is revealed as not a pagan god, of whom we must be terrified, but as a merciful and reconciling god, who calls us into a new relationship with him,

today is good because god is love, and there is no place for fear and punishment with him

so
let us give thanks to the lord for he is good
and his mercy endureth for ever

LUBH 5 – The Wrath of God

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Transcript of session 5 of my talks on Christianity and Peak Oil. This one is exploring the nature of God’s wrath, and how it should be understood. Click on ‘full post’ to read the text – it’s about 5000 words.

Good morning and welcome. It’s nice to be back. One practical thing in terms of dates because of the session that was missed [I was ill], I’m simply shoving all the topics back by one and there will be an extra session on 10 March to make up the balance. If you look on the web site there are now slightly retitled talks to make things a bit clearer, so for example, I’m going to have one session on “The Green Bible, one session called “With you is my contention O priest” which gives you a bit more of an idea of what the topics will be.

But this morning I want to be talking about wrath, and I want to convince you really of two things. This is John the Baptist proclaiming “who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” and then you’ve got Julian of Norwich, “there is no wrath in God”. I want to convince you that both these things are true. That there is wrath, that the phrase the wrath of God refers to something real but also that there is no wrath in God, so that’s my challenge for this morning. Now I do have a hand-out, but I do want to hold it back just for the second, otherwise you might see a surprise too soon.

I want to begin with outlining the pagan understanding of sacrifice, this is Andromeda. Anyone seen “Clash of the Titans”? Remember this bit, basically Andromeda’s mum has offended the gods by saying that Andromeda is so beautiful, and the gods are offended, and disaster descends upon the city, a famine, and in order to work out why it is that there is a famine, they go to the oracle and the oracle says, “It’s because you have offended the gods by describing Andromeda as being so beautiful and therefore what you have to do is sacrifice Andromeda to the gods and then all your troubles will be over.” And this is what happens, you’ve got Andromeda chained to the rock and you’ve got the Kraken coming to gobble her up, but of course if you’ve seen the film, you’ve got Perseus coming along with the head of the Medusa which turns the Kraken to stone. But’s that a separate thing.

But this is the pagan understanding of sacrifice, you have got an angry god who needs to be appeased, the gods have been offended and therefore we have to give up something in order to appease the angry god. OK, this is the pagan concept. Think of Aztec sacrifice for example, or think of King Kong. You know, lots of theology going on here, but the understanding that in order to appease this angry vengeful monster, you have to offer up these beautiful virgins for sacrifice. This is the pagan conception, alright? And at the heart of it is this sense of you’ve got to appease, you’ve got to appease a wrathful god. OK?

Now there are elements of it found in the old testament, if you want to go away and look up this passage, 2 Samuel chapter 21, you have a little account of where the Gibeonites are suffering from a famine and so are the Israelites and so the cause is found to be an offence committed against the Gibeonites; who now want all of Saul’s sons to be offered up in sacrifice. And so they are sacrificed at the beginning at the barley harvest and the famine ends. So, you know, it is not something which is foreign to the Old Testament. It is however, not the Jewish understanding of sacrifice. Which is what I want to explore with you.

This is Solomon’s temple and really what I want to do is talk through the ritual of the Day of Atonement as it happened in the first temple period. Now this could get a bit complicated, but hopefully I will do it gently enough to make it understandable. You recognise the rough shape, here you have got the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, this is the main temple area and here of course, only the High Priest can come, this is the priestly area, the men’s area, the women’s area is out here and so forth, you have got a real hierarchy going up to what’s holy, what’s the most holy bit. OK.

Now the Day of Atonement is when the people get reconciled with God and their sins get wiped away, OK, that’s fairly well understood, and there is a particular ritual which the High Priest goes through on this day which I am going to talk through with you, because this is quite important for understanding the Jewish view of God – and how it is different to the pagan. To begin with the High Priest comes in and he sacrifices an ox as propitiation for his sins. OK? So the High Priest, having made that sacrifice, becomes ritually pure, OK, he’s cleansed. And as a result of that the High Priest then puts on a bright white robe, because in a ritual at that point the High Priest adopts if you like the persona of God, of Yahweh. He becomes Yahweh for a day, he acts in the name of the Lord. And the phrase that we have in our Eucharist “Blessed be the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” is taken from this liturgy. So the High Priest becomes the one who wears this bright white robe and he becomes Yahweh for the day, he becomes an angelic figure. He is also called the Son of God at points in the liturgy, OK, so this is what is going on.

The High Priest becomes this bright white figure and he then takes two animals, two sheep or two goats normally, and by process of lot, i.e. chance selection, one is chosen to represent basically the demons, Azazael, he becomes, that goat becomes the scapegoat, of which more later, and the other one represents God, so you have got two goats representing like the good and the evil. And what then happens is that the Priest sacrifices the God goat. OK? In the Holy of Holies. So the goat is sacrificed up in the Holy of Holies and the blood in then sprinkled in the Holy of Holies, and this represents the cleansing of creation. Because the Holy of Holies represents God in his essence as it were. Beyond space and time, beyond creation. So there is the sacrifice of the goat there which represents the cleansing, purifying. OK.

Then what happens is that the High Priest comes out from the Holy of Holies and here you have got the curtain, this is where the curtain is, OK, the curtain that gets torn in two. That one. And what happens when the High Priest comes out he gets wrapped in fabric, the same material as the curtain, and this represents God engaging with the creation. So it is not God in pure white linen, pure purity, it’s God engaging with creation. OK, and he then continues to sprinkle the blood of the goat around this area and around the people gathered, OK? And that is the cleansing of their sins, so you have had the cleansing of creation as it were and expanded outwards the one representing God is coming out into creation and acting to cleanse the people OK? And what then happens – and that represents the healing of the world, the wiping out of their sins – and what then happens is that the High Priest and the other Priest lay hands on the scapegoat, which is the second goat and they drive that goat out. Normally you know, there is a crowd to drive the goat off a cliff and kill it, but that represents the sins being driven out from the community and at the end of this ritual, OK, the people are reconciled to God. So that’s the dynamic.

Now did that make sense just going through those steps?

Because there is one key thing going on here, which is why the Jewish understanding is different to the pagan one, and it is obvious what the difference is. The difference is in the pagan understanding the motion is from sinners towards God, that the sinners do something to appease the god. In the Jewish understanding it is God who is active, who moves towards the sinners. So it is God who is taking the responsibility to overcome sin and estrangement in the world. That’s the fundamental difference. Does that make sense?

Is that a surprise to people? People were aware of this… Now this is quite crucial. For if you are going for example in the letter to the Hebrews, this is what Jesus does, I’ll come on and explain that a bit more in a second. So just to summarise what’s going on. This is the High Priest, first temple period, as I say, the High Priest goes through this journey, this ritual enactment of God’s activity in reaching out towards creation, he goes into the Holy of Holies, represents God, and it is God’s initiative that is being carried out OK, that God is benign. God’s not angry. God is the one actively reaching out in love. You know, there is a profound consistency between this and Christianity, if it isn’t obvious. OK. Now as I say this is where our understanding of Christ’s sacrifice begins, OK? Because this is what Jesus is doing, Jesus is the great High Priest who is acting in the stead of God, obviously the doctrine is developed, but He is the one who is acting as the great High Priest, he is doing this work and He’s not sacrificing an ox at the beginning of the process, He is himself the sacrifice. Make sense?

But the question is, there is this notion of sacrifice going on, you still have got a dynamic whereby there is an angry deity present. But the angry deity is not Yahweh. So who is the angry deity? We are. God is acting to try and overcome our wrath. To reveal it to us and to set us free from it. We are the ones being revealed as the pagans who require sacrifice in order to maintain our sense of identity and social processes, we are the angry ones, we are the ones being revealed as that through what happens to Christ, and the revealing of that and in particular the resurrection, which I’ll come on to in a second, is what sets us free from being trapped in this process. Jesus doesn’t refer to the Old Testament directly very often, but there is one bit from Hosea which he quotes twice, and he says, “Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy not sacrifice.” God is consistent in acting from love, OK? This is the really core fundamental point.

So if God is not wrathful in the sense of this pagan angry deity, “Oh no, you’ve called your daughter beautiful therefore I’m upset.” – you know, that is totally not what the Christian God is about! – what is this language of wrath referring to, because it is certainly saturated in the Old Testament and it is not vanished, it is not absent from the New Testament? Paul for example beginning of Romans talking about wrath, there is a theme in Paul’s writings, but there tends in Paul to be “wrath” rather than “the wrath of God“. I think something like twenty to twenty five references to wrath, only two or three are to the wrath of God. Mostly he refers to wrath as the concept.

So what is it? Two senses. One natural and one human. And that’s really what I’m going to try and describe for you. It is not a divine attribute in the sense that it is not something that is within God’s nature. It’s something that we can experience but it is not intrinsic to who God is, you know, the verse from I think it’s 1 John, “God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.” God is love and in Him there is no wrath. OK, but this concept this language of wrath describes something essential, very important. So the natural, what’s the natural side. Well, we understand that the world is made through Christ, that the world is consistent, it can be understood, and that’s what we call logos. Of course this fits in very neatly with a lot of Greek philosophy, that the world is made consistently. And that is one of the foundations for the development of science in the Western world, that because you can trust the maker of the world to be consistent, therefore you can actually apply scientific method to discern truth. You know, scientific method depends upon some prior theological assumptions. If you’ve got a situation where you have got a panoply of gods intervening willy nilly there’s nothing reliable on which you can base your science, but at any point something really arbitrary can happen. OK?

So this understanding of natural theology, that the world is consistent and bound by laws that we can see and understand, OK, and of course one of the claims made, particularly in medieval theology is that there were two ways of understanding God, you had got the book of nature and the written word, the Bible. And that you can discern the nature of God from looking at His creation; contemplating the creation can lead you to affirm the Creator. It can’t lead you to affirm Christ, that’s the realm of Revelation, but you can through natural reason come to the conclusion that God exists. OK, and it all flows from this.

But if the world is consistent and bound by laws that means that the transgression of those laws has particular consequences. If you put your hand in the fire you will get burnt. OK, it’s simple. But that I think is one of the main ways in which the language of wrath can be applied. Wrath is when we experience the consequences of our actions, and grace is when we escape the consequences of our actions. I’ve talked before about karma, because this is if you like the equivalent concept to natural law, that the world is consistent, that every action has a necessary consequence and it cannot be escaped. That if you do something wrong that wrong will return to you, if you do something good, that good will return to you. OK. Now grace doesn’t fit into that system, but there is as I say, an analogous understanding to karma in the doctrine of natural law. That the world is consistent and has certain effects, and therefore if we break the bounds, if we break the laws, then we will suffer the consequences, unless grace intervenes. So this is a sense, I think one of the most important senses in which we can talk about wrath, even the wrath of God, that when we breach the laws – remember the thing about the Ten Commandments, it is not the Ten Commandments, often we miss out the first sentence, which is “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt.” Again this is this benign God acting for our welfare. And then gives these commandments which set out how to live, and if we observe them we flourish, when we break them we suffer, that’s all part of this process. Make sense?

Another sense in which wrath can be described, coming back to the scapegoat. Human society, if it isn’t rooted in God, in right worship, right relationships with self and neighbour, it will fixate on to something else. Something else will be used to form a society around and that idol, for want of a better word, and that idol will need to be sacrificed to in the pagan sense in order to keep the society together. Perfect example, I know it’s a cliché but 1930’s Germany and the scapegoating of the Jews. A society which is under tremendous stress for all sorts of reasons, seeks to shore up its unity by picking on a scapegoat and therefore you get a unity amongst the majority through denying and expelling a minority. OK? And that this is if you like a fact of human nature. If we are not centred on God then we tend to be centred on something else and that something else becomes an idol.

A little hint, [picture of muslim woman in a veil] some of the ways that our society is trying to shore up its identity because we are also very weak. But essentially it is pointing out the truth about our own unredeemed natures. That we are prone to violence and anger and slaughter and sacrifice, and this is what we need to be redeemed from, and of course what that means in terms of the course of human history is war. And I think this is the second way in which the language of wrath can be used. That wrath is first and foremost about if you break the natural order you will suffer, but it also something about the nature of who we are as a human society when we are fallen, that if we don’t focus our human society on God, on the Living God, we will end up having this process of scapegoating and sacrifice repeating itself, and therefore wrath, in this sense, is something human but it is also very, very real. Can you see the two senses of wrath which I want to hang on to?

Now it comes back as always to Christ, remember that He said He was going to abolish the temple and create it again in three days. The empty tomb now corresponds to the Holy of Holies, you know, God has come out from the place of sacrifice and we are sprinkled clean, instead of the goat, goat’s blood, we have Christ’s blood, which makes us clean and reconciled with God. OK. And there is a feature, the two angels at the empty tomb, correspond to the two cherubim on the Holy of Holies, you know, once you are sort of tuned into this there are all sorts of references being picked up in the New Testament accounts. Of Christ the High Priest who has gone and been sacrificed and who comes out and cleanses us, the letter to the Hebrews is the main one, but there are all sorts of references elsewhere. And this isn’t separable from either the crucifixion or the Last Supper, the three things together, hang together and can’t be separated out. “This is my blood of the New Covenant shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” This is the sacrifice which we are called to share in. OK. We are made clean by the blood of the Lamb.

And the core of it is, it is about aligning ourselves with Christ. Christ is through whom the world was created and in so far as we are aligned with Christ we thereby keep the law. You know, standard Christian sense, standard Christian teaching, but just you know, articulating, linking it in with the process of sacrifice, that when we do this we are aligning with who Christ is and therefore if you like we are keeping the law. And the Eucharist begins, think of our liturgy, the Eucharist itself begins with the exchange of peace. And that is very important because that is what stops the scapegoating, the human wrath, that you are at peace with your neighbour. You are not at peace because you are both righteous, you know, we come to it as sinners, as people in need of forgiveness, we can’t get that forgiveness by our own merit, we are relying on that benign God coming out to us, and therefore because we don’t have any righteousness of our own, we are not expelling anyone else who is unrighteous, because we are none of us righteous. It is a core element of sharing the bread and wine, that we don’t expel beforehand. This is what Jesus is accomplishing. This new Covenant. It begins with the exchange of peace and so we receive the forgiveness and we give thanks for it. That’s what the word Eucharist means. It is giving thanks.

But can you see how this is picking up the themes of what went on in the first temple and is focused on a benign God acting to redeem us, to set us free, can you see the link? Good, good. Right. Swifter than I was expecting!

OK, the wrath that is to come. Jeremiah who I quote a lot and what I have been talking about so far, that we are in a situation where we have been profoundly transgressing the natural laws. And one of the sessions, for example on the green Bible, I will be picking out all the elements in scripture which indicate the natural laws that we have been breaking, and there’s a lot. And because we have been transgressing those laws, breaching the limits, then wrath is going to descend upon us, unless grace intervenes, unless we change our ways radically. But if things carry on the way they are, there will be wrath descending upon us because of these breaches of the natural law. So that’s one aspect of talking about the coming wrath, and the second is, as I say, the human consequences, that this is going to put societies around the world, it already is putting societies around the world under tremendous strain.

Rwanda for example, they have done an analysis of where the slaughter was worse and it was where the population was most dense. They weren’t able to feed themselves and they slaughtered each other and it was actually less to do with Hutus and Tutsis than to do with where the population was most dense. These things have begun. This is wrath. “Come let us return to the Lord for He has torn us and He will heal us.” Another one of my favourite verses. That there is never anything inevitable, that hope is one of the most important Christian virtues to keep us going, and it is a decision, it is not a feeling, hope is always a decision to be made. And we return to the Lord because the Lord is merciful. The Lord is forgiving and compassionate and doesn’t want the death of a sinner but that the sinner should turn from his ways and live. You know this is always what God is calling us towards.

God is not for our punishment, God is merciful. The wonderful passage is Micah, “What shall I do O Lord? He has shown you, O man, what is good, you must do justice and love kindness and walk humbly before your God.” We know what the answers are, the answers haven’t changed, it is that we need to turn back to it. And in particular our imaginations, in particular how we understand God, who we understand God to be, whether we picture in our hearts and minds God as someone angry, seeking to punish and chastise, or whether we see God as someone loving and merciful, seeking to bring us into life. I think this is actually where the real fundamental work needs to be done. Our imaginations need to be renewed in the light of Christ, who He was and how He taught. And that requires us to explore the question of apocalypse, which is next week’s session. Exploring what the language of apocalypse is doing, how Jesus uses it and therefore how we are to use it, because the language is like applying the language of the wrath of God, and therefore how we understand that is quite important. And that was quicker than I was expecting, so a shorter session this morning! Questions, thoughts. Interesting?

What year was Solomon’s temple? About 980 BC, that’s off the top of my head, it might be out by a bit, but that sort of time.

Was it the same as the Ancient Egyptians? Exactly the same? Could well be. I don’t know much about Egyptians, what I find ironic though is that the chapel at my school was also built on that model. It didn’t have a Holy of Holies but it had that sort of structure and shape.

It is quite difficult to explain it now but there is a sort of esoteric significance in the layout of the Holy of Holies which actually corresponds to the temple of the body, the human body... Right. The Holy of Holies is actually the head and the eastern turns of the chapel where the spiritual light comes in and so the curtain actually represents the division between the head area and the rest of the body. I’m not sure that would – in the Old Testament the heart actually does the job which the mind is considered elsewhere, the heart is the seat of judgement, and therefore drives the character, yes but it’s always the heart or sometimes it’s the liver or the guts in the Old Testament which are the seat of decision making. So that’s intriguing but I’m not sure it would actually apply. The Orthodox churches tend to have the screen here which I find problematic. I like lots and lots of things about Orthodox worship but I find the screen which separates off the people from the sacrament doesn’t quite fit with how I understand it.

Can you draw a distinction between personal karma and society’s or world karma? Can grace be selective?

I’m not sure, although I’m using karma as an analogy, I wouldn’t think in terms of karma most of the time, it’s just a useful word for people to hand their understand on. In terms of natural law I’m not sure I would make a distinction between individual and social. Grace, you could understand grace as basically God giving extra lives within the system. That if you like the odds are stacked in favour of mercy, but how it happens to individuals I think that is unfathomable.

Going on from what was said about the Greek Orthodox church and that screen, when Reg and I were in the Greek Orthodox church ourselves, I was not allowed to go behind that screen to see what there was, but Reg was because he was a man. And then I had to admit that when I was in Cyprus I went and visited some of the churches there, out of curiosity I did go into the Holy of Holies and it is absolutely wonderful.

As I understand it in the actual Solomon’s Temple, the real Holy of Holies, there is very little there, in the second temple not the first one, because in the first one the Ark was there, but in the revised temple after the exile when they built it again the Holy of Holies was actually empty, and I think there is something quite useful about that as an image.

I’m a little bit puzzled, I think you mentioned the wrath which is manifested in human life is of human origin.

In terms of human hatred, yes.

So there is only one source of wrath which is human because there is no wrath in God, which baffles me, but what I’m puzzled at is if we talk about the wrath to come, I ask the question, whence?

Well either from natural processes or from human processes but not from divine processes.

So there are in fact two sources of wrath, one of them is a natural consequence and the other is human, in which case that would come together?

Yes oh yes.

They are not God?

I think the heart of it is I think this is really Julian’s insight, that God isn’t concerned about punishment. I think the understanding of God in Christian faith is not pagan, it’s not that we have to appease someone who is angry otherwise we will be punished, that God is supremely love. I mean that Julian of Norwich talks about courteous love. That God is loving to the exclusion of all other attributes. Now this doesn’t mean that what is described as the wrath of God or vengeance or punishment in the Old Testament isn’t describing something real. So it is saying that it has got more to do with how in particular the Old Testament peoples understood it than it has to do with the nature of God as revealed in Christ himself. A wrathful, punishing God wouldn’t get involved in this process of allowing himself to be sacrificed in order to heal.

Why do you think then, that God created wrath in man?

Well is it a creation? I’m not sure it is.

I just wondered.

To describe where it comes from I want to talk about the language of the fall. That before the fall there was no wrath and after the fall there is wrath, because we are estranged from our natural relationship with the environment, we’re kicked out of Eden, and we’ve got angels barring our way back, and our relationships with each other have broken down. And what overcomes that is Christ. So therefore wrath is a result of our sin. Our sin provoked wrath, but it’s not wrath in the sense that ‘you have broken my rules I’m going to punish you’, it’s wrath in the sense ‘this is the nature of the creation we are in’. It’s not that God is angry. God doesn’t take offence. Put it like that. God is always acting with love.

Which would tend to give the impression that at the judgement all will be saved, whereas in fact when we stand before God on judgement day we shall be condemned by our own wrath, because we have disobeyed God’s laws.

Well, God sent Jesus into the world not to condemn the world but to save it and I’m certain that God’s intention is for all to be saved, but I also believe that some people can turn him down. I don’t accept universal salvation as it’s called. So I think there is a hell, to put it in a different way. But I think hell is self-imposed. I think God’s desire is for nobody to be in hell, but some people for whatever reasons, put themselves there. And that applies in this life as much as at the judgement.

Depressing

Posted on by

Have a look at this post which is commenting on some astonishing (appalling) comments by Peter Akinola, inciting violence.

I actually agree with Stephen Bates, despite some of the fine-grained caveats I have about the direction the US Episcopalian church is going in. One side follows a non-violent Messiah, one doesn’t. I don’t think that this is a particularly difficult question to discern.

Sigh.

I’m annoyed

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I’m annoyed because I have become persuaded, very reluctantly, and slowly and against my habitual will… I have become persuaded that the attacks on 9/11 were not perpetrated by Osama Bin Laden, but were instead perpetrated by actors on the inside of the US government.

And it’s annoying because just writing that sentence makes me feel like an absolute lunatic. I feel I’ve just stepped outside of the acceptable bounds of social discourse; I’m no longer a reasonable person. Everything I now say and think will be tainted by a sense of ‘oh yeah, he’s that guy who thinks Dick Cheney blew up the twin towers…’ – and thus my ‘voice’ is eclipsed.

And it’s annoying because I supported the attack on Iraq, and now I wonder ‘have I been had?’

Yet you have to pursue the truth, whatever the temper.

This line of thought was prompted by viewing this video, kindly linked for me by Sven, although it had been building for a while. Too many unanswered questions, which need answering….

UPDATE: for what it’s worth, I no longer believe this 🙂