People complain that God is unfair. Why should the good suffer while the bad prosper? Wouldn't it be better to have a solid set of rules with a solid set of consequences we can see?
My mother once said that humans have suffered under a spiritual mondegreen. The good news is "God is Love", but we have misheard it as "God is Law".
The idea of a God who loves us is difficult to accept. Even "churched" Christian, raised in an envionment of faith and repeatedly reminded of the Gospel find it hard to really believe.
We still believe that if there is a heaven, it's a reward for being good, and if there is a hell it's a punishment for being bad. And if we can't accept that, then we deny the existance of heaven or hell.
So we try to find a way of justifying ourselves before God. Or conversely, we try to pretend that we don't care that we are unjustified before God.
But God's love is not conditional. Paul's epistles are very clear that we are justified before God by faith through grace, so that no one can boast. In short—none of our fine accomplishments are good enough to justify us before God. And none of our terrible sins are bad enough to keep us from being justified before God. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through our saviour Jesus Christ. (Rom. 3:23)
Heaven is a relationship with God. Hell is separation from God. And all receive not what they deserve, but what they choose.
And this is the secret. God is unfair. But unfair in our favour.
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3 comments:
"We still believe that if there is a heaven, it's a reward for being good, and if there is a hell it's a punishment for being bad."
My impression is that a thousand years of preaching said exactly that. The church often used hellfire scare tactics to keep people in line (some sections of it still do, in a big way). C.S. Lewis aside, it wasn't about 'our choice' - it was about a wrathful God's judgement.
So we can't really blame people for thinking about heaven and hell as they do.
It's not about blaming anyone. It's just about being surprised and impressed with how difficult the concept of a loving God really is to grasp.
However, I think I need to take issue with your impression. To begin with, there is a real sense in which the teachings of the ancient church are not a factor in the theological assumptions of the average person today. No living person has lived through a thousand years of preaching. None of us today lived in a pre-reformation church, nor can we approach Christianity from a pre-reformation standpoint. We (including Catholics, by the way) are indellably influenced by Luther's perspective on grace and salvation as a free gift.
Secondly, the teaching of the church has ALWAYS been that justification comes through forgiveness and faith, not through works. Even at the height of Catholic Indulgences, the theological grounds was penetance to purchase forgiveness, not works to earn favour with God. From Augustine and Ambrose to the 95 Theses and the Ausburg Confession, orthodox Christianity has always taught that salvation comes from God not from our own merit.
It seems to me that people's ideas about heaven and hell come an awfully lot from popular culture and word-of-mouth transmission, too. So these older ideas do get passed on. Look at Catholicism as it shows up in comics and movies (Constantine, for example.) It's got a very medieval flavour.
Also, while orthodoxy HAS always taught that salvation comes from God, there's a strong current in Christian thought (in Calvinism particularly) that God will only chose the elect anyways, and since that's all predestined, you might get sent to hell in any case, regardless of your choice!
Don't get me wrong, I agree with your original post, I think it's faithful to scripture - I just think that the church hasn't always done a great job of explaining it that way. While it preached a doctrine of grace and love, and has technically remained the same on these doctrines, the public discourse has certainly changed emphasis. Look at all the grotesque Hell-tapestries-and-paintings in the Middle Ages, intended to say: "Hey, if you do this or that, God is going to condemn to an eternity of being ripped to bloody chunks!" (To paraphrase 'Constantine.')
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