Is Your God a Jerk?
A gentleman with whom I’m distantly acquainted recently expressed his dismay that close family members of his are blocked from eternal salvation because, at present, they are not visible, formal members of the religion to which he belongs. Only by joining the Roman church could they have any hope to join God in heaven. He quotes papal bulls issued over the centuries as the basis for his painful conclusions. He doesn’t even expect children who died before receiving baptism to find comfort among the saints, believing they are destined for some place other than heaven.
With all due respect to my fellow Catholic, his deity is a jerk. As a rule, I don’t take issue with talk that the believers of various religions worship the same God, if with different names, stories, and symbols, but I can confidently say that I don’t believe in his image of God. Nay, I oppose such terrors of the mind.
Here’s an old story: God, who is love itself, freely creates the universe as an expression of his overflowing love, and as part of this creation he creates beings in his image and likeness whose purpose in life is to share in the love life of God by loving and being loved by others. This God issues commandments as instruction on the proper ways to love God and neighbor and stranger. God then incarnates, participating in humanity so that human beings may participate in divinity.
A lovely little myth, this. It’s part of my tradition and I like it very much. It’s not incompatible with talk of sin or even hell, as I can refuse to love or love properly, but it’s not focused on sin or separation. It’s a myth of belonging and hospitality, not primarily one of guilt and punishment. I dare say, however, that it is incompatible with the image of God envisioned by my acquaintance and fellow Catholic. Let’s think this through: God, love itself, creates fellow beings of love destined for fellowship with love itself, and yet the majority of these creations, due to accidents of birth or placement or belief, will suffer eternal separation from this God? I’ve got to call that a big flaw in the design and feel compelled to speak to the manufacturer. Really, if that’s God, creation is an epic fail.
Personally, I’m banking on the hope that God’s not a monstrous jerk or an incompetent lover. I don’t really know what to make of God, but I have a fairly developed sense of what constitutes a healthy relationship, and a relationship with either one of these figures doesn’t qualify.
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As a parent, have you yet encountered a situation where your children would consider you to be a jerk?
If there is more than one of these situations, were the kids right, each time, that you were being a jerk?Report
Yes. No.Report
Are these questions relevant at all?
I mean, it seems to me that, if there’s a god at all, we’re likely to *COMPLETELY* misunderstand what he (or He) might communicate to us.
I don’t know that we’d be able to discern between a loving hand of a deity who is grooming us to one day be a peer of His, a loving hand of a deity who is hoping to groom us to be appropriate pets for His Household, or the loving hand of the farmer who will be eating us as soon as the time for the feast is here.
But if it’s the first of those, I know how much it completely sucks whenever I am in a situation where I am becoming a better person. I prefer the situations where I can coast on how good of a person I already have been forced to become.Report
Yes, I think they’re relevant, even if we suppose that God does not exist. People’s ideas and images and stories about God do exist so far as they go, and sometimes they go pretty far in terms of influencing individual and group behavior. It can matter what kind of god someone worships (or makes)–it can matter for their relationships, for their psychological health, for their cultural and political decisions.Report
You can tell your acquaintance that he is, in fact, incorrect about what the Catholic Church teaches. The only people for whom it categorically teaches that they will go to hell is those who, *knowing* that the Catholic Church is the Church of God, reject it. That is a very narrow definition. For everybody else–non-Catholics, Catholics who go to Mass every Sunday like me, and everybody else–it’s impossible to know in this life.
For the record, it’s even possible to be a Catholic and believe that everybody goes to Heaven (yes, even Hitler) http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/will-all-be-saved-30Report
Agreed, PEG, although my acquaintance would probably retort with Boniface the VIII, who said, “We declare, say, define and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”
Or with Eugene IV, who declared, “The most Holy Roman Catholic Church firmly believes, professes, and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the Sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgivings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.”Report
He could retort that, but he’d still be incorrect, because he’d be picking and choosing only the sources that seem on the surface to support his argument. The synthesis of all Catholic doctrine is more nuanced than the synthesis implied by these two quotations taken alone.
I would have expected you to do a better job of noting that your acquaintance’s stated belief represents only that acquaintance’s understanding of Catholic theology rather than being an accurate representation of Church doctrine. Check your sources. We make it fairly easy, what with the freely available, searchable catechism and all.Report
I took it for granted that most people here would not be under the impression that the Catholic Church teaches membership-only salvation.Report
My God isn’t a jerk but lots of people like to argue that he is. I’m really tired of the “wrathfully, jealous God of the Old Testament” vs. the “loving, peaceful God of the New Testament” debate.Report
Ordering the rape of an entire city generally entitles someone the word “jerk”… at minimum.Report
Amen (though “debate” is an odd word for “ubiquitous unsupported assertion”). It’s as if people had never heard of Amos, Hosea, or Rabbit Hillel.Report
Just so, Kyle.
There is no way to reconcile “blessed are the merciful” with a God who would confine large swaths of humanity to an eternity of material torment, absent a truly staggering degree of divine hypocrisy.
I long ago stopped saying that I believe in the same God as the one I was raised to believe in. (To whatever degree my fluctuating faith of admixed hope and doubt can be described as “belief” at all.) The God I believe in now is (as Jaybird alludes) incredibly hard to know, but is no monster. The god I was raised to believe in is monstrous.Report
Yeah, I can’t see how either believing one is a member of a select saved few or being in perpetual fear that one might be forever doomed leads to a spiritually happy or physiologically healthy life. Theist that I am, I think atheism has a point.Report
Ever since I read The Last Battle, I’ve been fond of Lewis’ idea that if a person does good, they are serving God whether they know it or not. I don’t have a clear theological or Biblical foundation for that, but I prefer it to the idea that only Christians go to heaven. (I’m also fond of the converse, that Christians who do evil in God’s name will be told after death that they were not serving Him, but that also feels like a bit of a cop-out on God’s part. I feel like God should have some kind of responsibility for calling people out during their lifetime if they do evil in His name, and that doesn’t appear to happen.)Report
Katherine, I suspect that God does call us out a lot during our lifetimes. If God is loving and just, then about 20 minutes after the Final Judgment I bet we’re all going to be saying, “well, that was fair”.
The Catholic understanding of sin measures the act on three levels: the severity of its nature, the degree of knowledge, and the degree of consent. An act, even a severely evil act, isn’t considered to be a mortal sin unless the person does it with full knowledge and full consent. That might sound like an “escape clause”, but it’s very human.
I guess the first paragraph begs the question, why should we believe that God is loving and just? Each person has to answer that on his own. We look at the evidence around us, and look at what people claim that God said and did, and decide. We can’t know God’s nature for certain, as Jay notes. When we can’t know something for certain, we consider the evidence and make a decision. That’s what faith is. As in any other case, we decide based on the information and also the information source. When we consider whether God is a jerk, we look at both the messenger and the message.Report
I don’t believe in God, but I’d be more inclined to believe in the God described here than most other descriptions I’ve encountered.Report
In a democracy like most countries these days, there is the tendency in polite conversation to refrain from condemnation, which if taken too far causes one to be tolerant and maybe even approving of evil behavior. This tendency stems from our culture, but I don’t think is accurate. Condemnation of the person, I think, is inappropriate, but I do believe that the Church has a responsibility to teach that indeed there is a “right” path and a “wrong” path. The idea that God cannot be just if he condemns people to hell is a misunderstanding of the nature of God. Since the Enlightenment period of the 18th century, men have been inclined to incorrectly put God as the accused, rather than themselves. This is where this entire debate comes from. God does not have to justify himself to you, me, or anyone else for that matter. He is God. The sovereignty or justice of a God who judges is not quite like what most people think. It is not God who accuses us. That is the devil, whose name in the Bible several times is referred to as the accuser. No, God is the judge. As such, God is ultimately responsible for the judgment, but the antagonist truly is the accuser.Report
There is a word for a being who presumes who stands judgement over us without legitimate mandate, whose power is absolute and against whom there is no recourse. That word is “Tyrant”.
Yes, the idea of judging gods is part of our enlightenment culture, that’s because the enlightenment gave rise to the idea that just rulership required more than mere power, and that a good ruler was more than a glorified warlord.
There is no act that justifies eternal torture, and any being that would create such a punishment for any act is an abomination, the very idea of hell is the product of a diseased imagination.Report
without legitimate mandate
“You’re not my real dad.”Report
Parents do not have unlimited authority over their children. They certainly aren’t allowed to do anything close to hell to their children.Report
No, but they’re sure as hell allowed to do the “Garden of Eden” treatment.
are you sure that’s not worse?Report
Hey, once they’re moral agents capable of making their own bread? Boots to asses.Report
see, you SAY that.
My husband believes that.
Age of five? “boots to asses”Report
I’ll just note that eternal torment as a punishment for improper belief is an invention of the loving God of the New Testament.Report
There’s a sense in which Hell is voluntary. Think of cutting off noses to spite faces. Think of habits we’d rather die than break.Report
I’ve got to call
that a big flaw in the design and feel compelled to speak to the manufacturerbullshit.Good post Kyle.Report
“I’d also like to complain about the monopoly.”Report