Christians Divided About God’s Love
In recent
decades, there seems to have been a concerted effort by both conservative and
progressive Christians to emphasize God’s love for everyone. However, there are
expectations throughout the Bible and continuing to the present suggesting people
must do certain things to enter into, and remain in, a loving relationship with
God.
This post
examines the idea of God’s conditional and unconditional love.
God’s
Conditional Love
I was
raised in an era when evangelical Christians were keen on getting people saved.
I’m sure they still are but the approach seems to have changed. The salvation message
was that despite our fine clothes and proverbial Saturday night bath, we were
riddled with sins and must repent. We were on the path to eternal damnation in
a fiery hell should we die. We were so bad that we could not save ourselves. We
needed a savior, which of course is Jesus. If we accepted Jesus as our savior,
we would be fine. We sang “Jesus Loves Me” but what really got our attention
was the horrors of hell. As the saying goes, bad news sells better than good
news.
Many of us
were presented with this “good news” in an atmosphere of emotional turmoil. It
was a classic good news- bad news situation. Unfortunately, after accepting the
good news, we soon learned that there were expectations to be met. There are
strings attached if we still wanted to avoid hell. Theology aside, the reality
was God had imposed certain conditions on this love relationship.
I am
reminded of many Sunday School stories that illustrates the wrath of God for
disobedience. Recall that Adam and Eve were cast our of God’s presence and
cursed with a thorny and painful life. God’s wrath destroyed most people and
animals in the Genesis flood. The horrible killing scenes in the Hebrew Bible
made it clear you wanted to be on God’s side. He may be loving but you sure
didn’t want to make him mad. And there are those stories and speculations about
end times events when people will be separated into those who gain eternal life
and those doomed to hell. Once again, it looked like a love-hate situation.
In short, for
many Christians, God is like a divine lawmaker and judge who can be merciful and
welcoming—even loving— if people repent of wrongdoing but if they don’t, there
will be hell to pay. In this view, God’s justice is retributive—wrongdoers are
punished.
God’s
Unconditional Love
There is
another image of God as love. This is the image presented by progressive
Christians and those with a similar focus on God’s compassion. In this context,
God’s justice is distributive justice—a concern for fairness and right
treatment of everyone.
Another
point made by writers like Marcus Borg is a matter of emphasis. The oft
displayed text of John 3:16 states that “God so loved the world” thus, God did
not limit his love to one group of people like the Jews or those going to
church. Indeed, it sounds quite universal, which is not something conservative
Christians believe.
One
wonders how progressive Christians ignore all those horrible histories like
those mentioned above. One perspective is a focus on Jesus as the one who
perfectly revealed God’s love so that the other images of God were less than
perfect.
How Christian’s Write About God’s Love
Conservative
I wanted
to see how recent conservatives dealt with the appearance of God’s love as
conditional amidst the old imagery impressed on my earlier memories. So, I
looked at a couple of conservative sources.
A 2014 Focus
on the Family response to the challenge of “unconditional” love is as
follows.
As we see it, there’s a sense in which you are
seriously misconstruing the import of the term “unconditional love.” When we
say that God’s love is “unconditional,” we are asserting that there is nothing
we can do to
make Him love us either more or less. We don’t earn His love by fulfilling a
pre-determined set of conditions. He loves us not because of what we are, but because of
who He is
– for God is love
(1 John 4:8). But this is not to suggest that God doesn’t judge sin or that
people won’t have to suffer the consequences of their ill-advised decisions and
actions.
Yes, there is such
a thing as hell, but nobody will go there because God doesn’t love them. On the
contrary, they will go there precisely because they have wilfully chosen
to reject His
love, freely offered to them in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Once they cross
that line, there’s nothing more that God can do for them (Hebrews 10:26). But
this does not imply that He ceases to love them.
He never stops loving even when He is pouring out His wrath, nor does He
abandon the soul that turns away from Him. In some way we can’t fully
comprehend, He is with us even when we make our bed in hell (Psalm 139:8).
https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-qa/gods-unconditional-love/
A popular American evangelist of the 20th
century was Billy Graham. His organization published a 1973 message, “The love
of God,” on May 29, 2018 so, it’s still a current part of their thinking. I
included parts of the message showing a contrast between God as a holy judge
and God as love.
The Bible teaches that God is a holy
God. And because God is righteous and holy, He is also a God of judgment. There
is a Judgment Day coming.
But the Bible also teaches that God is a God of
love.
The reason God created the human race in the first
place was because He loved. He wanted some other creatures in the universe to
love.
But the Bible tells us that God sent
His Son to rescue the world in spite of our rebellion, in spite of our sins.
God said, “I love you. I love the human race; I want to forgive them of
their sins.”
Billy Graham.
https://www.billygraham.ca/stories/billy-graham-the-love-of-god/
I think it
is fair to say that conservative Christians have not set aside the bad news
component of the biblical story. The emphasis is on the good news. God loves
you. But you have a choice. And the choice is not pretty. Perhaps this fear of
an awful after life accounts for the high percentage of people in the world who
identify with a religion or as spiritual.
Progressive
Marcus
Borg was a Jesus scholar who has written much about Jesus as the embodiment of
God’s love. When writing about God’s love, Borg often talks about God in Jesus
showing compassion.
How
much does God love the world? So much “that he gave his only Son.” In John,
this phrase does not refer to Jesus’s death on the cross as substitutionary
atonement for sin, but to the incarnation as a whole. God loves the world so
much that God incarnate in Jesus became part of it, vulnerable to it, partaking
of it. To love the world means to love the world as God in Jesus loved the
world, to give one’s life for it. Borg
in Jesus (pp. 306-307). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
James
Burko is one of the writers for progressivechristianity.org. In a post from January
17, 2019, he wrote about “Perfecting Love.” Here’s a quote from his third
paragraph. Note that he mentions the problem of the horrible things that have
happened.
If God is love, then God is
something we do, rather than somebody or something we try to believe in. If God
is love, then God is a relationship, and not a Guy in the Sky or some other
kind of supernatural entity. If God is love, God is nothing to fear. If God is
love, when we really love someone – even of another religion, or of no religion
at all – God is in that relationship, blessing it. So these three words wipe
away all the theological debates about science and common sense versus
religion. These three words sweep away the problem of evil, the perennial
conundrum of how an all-powerful God could love people while allowing horrible
things to happen to them. If God is love, then God is not in charge of the
universe. Love is extremely powerful, but it is not directive. Love does not
force anybody to do anything, nor to force anything to do anything to anybody.
If God is love, then God is omni-attractive, not omni-potent.
God’s Love — Data
I’m a
psychologist. I worked as a clinician and university research professor. I’m
interested in the psychology of religion. So, in addition to studying the ideas
put forth by religious leaders, I want to understand the views of those who attempt
to live out their faith. Following are some relevant findings from a few
studies.
2006
In
September 2006, Baylor university released the results of a survey. A part of
the that report was titled “America’s Four Gods.” That section garnered
considerable news attention as you can see if you search online.
What the
researchers did was analyze the responses to survey items about God’s character
and behavior. They found two dimensions: 1. God’s engagement with people and 2.
God’s level of anger with sins and punishment. They charted these two
dimensions and created four quadrants illustrated on page 28 of their report.
On the next page, they describe the “four Gods.” My focus in this post is on
Type B: The Benevolent God.
Type
B: Benevolent God: Like believers in the Authoritarian God, believers in a Benevolent
God tend to think that God is very active in our daily lives. But these individuals
are less likely to believe that God is angry and acts in wrathful ways. Instead,
the Benevolent God is mainly a force of positive influence in the world and is less
willing to condemn or punish individuals.
American
Piety in the 21st Century, September 2006 https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/33304.pdf
2012
Two
sociologists and a theologian have written about godly love. The results of a
survey of Americans were released in 2012. Here’s what they found:
“A
majority of Americans (81%) report that they have experienced God’s love,
according to a new study. Even more have felt God’s love increasing their
compassion for others (83%), showing that for many Americans, the experience of
divine love and benevolence are inseparable.” (RNS, December 18).
2016
The Lifeway
researchers provided a more in-depth look at Christians’ beliefs related to
God’s love in a 2016 survey (lifeway.com, September 27). They did not ask about
God’s love in the items I saw, but they did ask about heaven and hell, which
are of course the two after-death consequences commonly proclaimed by a wide
range of Christian groups. I noticed the differences in a desire for a favourable
outcome.
Eighty-four percent of those who hold evangelical beliefs
say hell is a place of eternal judgment, where God sends all people who do not
personally trust in Jesus Christ. Only 30 percent of Americans who don’t have
evangelical beliefs hold that view.
Two-thirds of those with evangelical beliefs (64 percent)
say heaven is a place where all people will ultimately be reunited with their
loved ones. That’s slightly higher than Americans in general (60 percent).
2018
The 2012 paragraph reporting
a high percentage of experience of God’s love is astounding, but we should keep
in mind that only about half (56%) of Americans “believe in God as described in
the Bible,” (pewresearch.org, April 25, 2018). As relevant to this post, 97% of
those who believe in the God of the Bible reported that God “Loves all people, regardless of
their faults.” In general, 93% of Christians believe God is all-loving.
Comments
After
seeing the data, I’m inclined to agree with the headline-grabbing title of Rob Bell’s
book, Love Wins. I
am not saying I agree with Bell’s theology. I am saying that people want to see
God as very loving now and in the afterlife. How they handle texts about
exclusivity when it comes to blessings in this life or events in the afterlife
is obviously quite varied.
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| https://amzn.to/3rUOmdu |
As a
psychologist, I am particularly interested in how beliefs and accompanying
emotions might drive human behavior. In other words, do beliefs about godly
love drive more compassionate responses toward others? My colleagues and I conducted one study
showing a relationship between a group of measures of love of God and
spirituality and two dimensions of love of others namely, compassion and
forgiveness. Self-reported studies are limited when it comes to actual
behavior. My hope is others will continue the search for evidence that those
transformed by God’s love are actually carrying out loving responses toward
others.
I realize
that no psychological study will resolve the question about God’s love as
conditional or unconditional. In some sense, those who fuss and fume over the
meanings of words, especially sacred concepts, have a reason to do so. In the
end, I doubt that anyone who seriously thinks about God would think that love
is so boundless that it can embrace any form of evil. I think that spiritual
people who are also thinkers will just have to live with that conundrum.
Pontificating is not likely to transform lives.
References
Borg, M.J. (2006). Jesus: Uncovering the life, teachings, and relevance of a religious revolutionary. New York: HarperCollins. [AMAZON] [GOOGLE]
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| Jesus |
Love. Love is a multidimensional concept. It’s quite
vague so it can be easy to define love as conditional or unconditional
depending on how you define the concept love. It can get more complicated if
you decide that God’s love is different from human love so we are talking about
different concepts.
If you are
Christian, you likely heard someone talk about Greek words for love (e.g., God’s
love as agape). You might be disappointed if you studied Greek (See Mounce).
Regardless of what ancient Greeks thought about love, we still need to know how
the biblical authors used the words and how people understand God’s love today.
4 Gods. You can find the report containing the “four
Gods” on the Baylor website. https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/33304.pdf
Two Baylor authors have written a book on the subject, America's Four Gods.
SCOPES and Love. Martin Mittelstadt and I
wrote about a multidimensional approach to love some years ago. If interested,
see the Sutton & Mittelstadt, 2012 reference.
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| Four Gods |
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