God is NOT Good All the Time!
The Reason for Writing “God is NOT Good all the Time!”
While injustice and inequality and inequity in our streets prevail and the planet warms, there are actions our churches can and should be making to protest and arrest and turn around this decline. But while that is true, and vital, I fear there is something fundamentally fishy going on in our churches that is domesticating if not emasculating what is actually the thing, the good news, that the church is tasked to do and if it fails to do will leave the world imprisoned and dead. This fishy thing is not knowing the difference between the Law and the Gospel and delivering the Gospel as the Law. This is not new, of course, but still I fear and I feel it is causing the church to be side-lined and seen as irrelevant when it could be the flag-ship of freedom.
Churches like to use the phrase “God is Good All the Time” and answer that in call-back fashion with “And All the Time God is Good.” There was a time when I as a Pastor led this liturgical refrain. I felt awkward doing it then, and would not do it now.
Why awkward? Why not now?
Awkward: because we all know things are not always going well while at the same time the God who is in Control of all Things is Supposed to be Good (that whole concern of theodicy where God is in control but also evil exists and often prevails and the innocent suffer).
Not Now: because even though I was a Pastor (when using that Refrain) I wasn’t clear on what we call the difference between Law and Gospel and instead saw the Gospel as something operating within the one thing that is the Law. I saw God not simply giving laws, but God being the Law and this Law had to be rectified and completed by Gospel so that in the end the Law, being God, prevails. I don’t see or believe that now. God is not the Law. God gives laws, to be sure, but is not The Law. Rather, God is pure and unadulterated Mercy that puts the Law in its place: the place of giving us some civic and civil community instead of chaos and giving us the realization our peace with God comes only from Mercy, not some measly (or even mighty) attempts to sit up and fly right, those ways where Gospel comes to be just another Law. When I came out of seminary and became a Pastor I did not know this distinction between Law and Gospel even though it is the hallmark of my Lutheran tradition and the contribution that Lutheranism makes to all religious enterprise. But not seeing the distinction is not so strange, because even as Martin Luther was alive and in the years after he died before the teachings were codified in 1580 in the Book of Concord this distinction was embattled and in that Book of Concord the distinction is still embattled, this distinction is hard to name and even harder to use in preaching and teaching. Hard to name and use, but not impossible. And I know the distinction now and hope to aid in some small way the whole teaching and preaching enterprise of the church at large to meet the task of delivering the goods so that freedom in Jesus Christ is actually realized.
Introduction
We work hard to keep the Law of God as something Good and Non-Threatening and, indeed, a Blessing. We think, in order to honor God and say that all things of God and from God are good, that the threat we know and feel (“if you don’t do this you will die,” check out Leviticus 26:14-39, Deuteronomy 28:15-68 for starters) is not really a threat, it’s just something we can and should change through how we approach it. We say, for example, that the Ten Commandments are a gift that gives community instead of chaos to the human enterprise, and that if we would just see this and use these Commandments properly they would not threaten us any longer. We say God does not intend to hurt us, God only wants to help us. We say it’s we who don’t get it right and we who need to change in order to get access to the goodness that is there. But what if we stop making stuff up and God really is a Threat and at the same time listen well and discover peace given to us because God really is Mercy given through a Promise?
If We Need To Change, Here Are Our Options
If we can’t change by actually loving by obeying, which we actually find that we cannot and will not, we still have an important and available option: we can change by loving by obeying by doing something we actually can do (but which still provides no solace): hating ourselves so much, and more and more, as to get to that place where the negation becomes, or transforms into, the positive, the place of true obedience to the Law. It’s not actually obedience to the Law but it’s getting to that deep or deepest place where we recognize and admit, with remorse (the place of deep contrition) that we do not obey the Law and it’s this recognition (contrition) that places us in the place where the Law could not possibly condemn us anymore because we recognize the condemnation so well. It’s kind of like in mathematics where a negative multiplied by a negative equals a positive. This all sounds very dark and unappealing on the face of it (feeling sorrowful is no fun) but when it’s all placed in the context of giving us the ability and agency to get closer to God we grab on to it because we want so badly to have that agency to determine our destiny (that destiny being completion and adherence to the Law where we find peace and serenity). There is an important and long Christian tradition of mysticism of the likes of Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius and The Frankfurter, all who found different ways to work on finding more of God through losing more of Self, that place of self-denial and humility and the more the better. All this negation feels and seems right not only because of the personal agency noted above, but also, importantly, because while it still recognizes God as Threatening it allows God still to be Good because we are the ones, not God, who need to change because we just can’t seem to get to that complete place where we see that the Threat is not a Threat but is actually Good.
Steven Paulson writes that Martin Luther discovered a way to engage this perpetual negation and the thing that drives it, this thing that says God is the Law (being Promise only if and when we contribute and participate in the Demand) and not God is God (God = being at the same time both Demand and Promise without our contribution and participation):[i]
“Luther took this perpetual uncertainty seriously, and his first step to freedom was to purge false remedies for it. The first idea he discarded was thinking of divine hiddenness as the ‘inner clarity’ alone that purports to have discovered a revealed law that does not accuse. The problem is not simply subjective feeling that can be altered or transformed by the person receiving God’s threat. The problem of the law’s accusation is not just a feeling, it is an external, divine threat” (The Outlaw God, Volume 2, p. 335).
According to Luther, we do not need to keep working at finding a way to make the Law not accuse us any longer. And this is so not because the Law does not accuse. It does, incessantly and relentlessly. So how is it possible to stop the accusation? And why would we want to stop trying to keep the Law from killing us? Are we masochists? Ironically, no, we are not, even though the negations we go through seem to paint that kind of a picture.
Rather than simply letting the Law accuse, our chosen way, as mentioned above, is to accuse ourselves to smithereens for not obeying and then see if we can find peace there. This way is chosen when the other way to choose, the way of total obedience, doesn’t seem to actually happen, doesn’t seem and is not possible.
So, how do we stop working on finding a way for the Law to not accuse?[ii] We realize that instead of these choices of “going positive” and striving to love and obey but always failing or “going negative” and denying and hating ourselves until the love of God is all that is left, we realize this: we have no choice. God is actually a Threat and actually makes good on that threat. God does kill the disobedient. We can let the Scriptures actually mean what they say when they say God kills the disobedient. We don’t have to make up stories that says that the Scriptures actually mean something else than what they say. God is not Good All the Time, contrary to popular theology and popular belief.
But the Promise (Gospel) Does Not Wait Around for Us To Sit Up and Fly Right, It Rather Attacks the Demand and Threat (Law) and Takes It Out
I know what this sounds like. It sounds like the Fundamentalist Christian Theology that is so prevalent in America (and has been ever since in the West when in the Enlightenment when the Church thought it had to push back against Reason and the Scientific Method rather than push forward along with it). It’s not. Fundamentalist Theology says God is the Law and if and when we obey the Law (by believing correctly even if/when we don’t behave correctly) God will be good to us. What I am saying is not that at all. Rather, it’s this: that God gives Law (not is Law) and that God is good to us by killing the Law by the Promise even as the Law kills us. The Law does kill us. The Promise does not stop the Law from killing us. The Law never does anything but accuse and destroy.[iii] It never blesses.
What the Promise does is raise us from the dead! It does not give a second chance to the living. It gives a new life to the dead. When we say that God raises the Dead, this is what we are talking about. Not that death doesn’t really happen, but that it does and that God does something about it. Nothing stops or defeats the Mercy of God, the Gospel, which breaks in and gives life to the dead. The Gospel wins. In Fundamentalist Theology the Gospel wins when and if we are faithful. In this theology (lets use Luther’s term for it: Theology of the Cross) the Gospel wins because God is faithful and the Promise is Real and God does not Lie. God’s Gospel kills and defeats God’s Law by continuously raising us from the dead as we continually are killed by the Law. It’s God against God, and God wins. Which of the two Words from God (Law and Gospel) from the One God wins? Gospel! How do I know this? Only because it’s promised and God does not lie. Do I see it? No. Do I feel it? No. Do I hear it? Yes. (Romans 10, faith comes by hearing). And it’s too good not to be true.
Instead of making up a theology that tries to get rid of the Law by domesticating it and keeping it at arm’s length and trying to make it our friend, maybe we can listen to God who actually does get rid of the Law, who kills the Law, who kills that very Law that God brings (Demand that is Threat) by bringing that very Gospel (Promise that is Life Itself). Again, faith comes by hearing (Romans 10).
Instead of Self-Denial and Self-Hate or Self-Love We Could Listen to the Promise Given
We simply do not listen to hear this Word of Promise from God. While we know that the way of self-hatred is old-fashioned and anachronistic in our enlightened age of psychological-social therapies and possibility thinking and while even our penchant for being enamored with monkish retreats (especially the spa-like ones) can’t keep us living in any real or consistent self-denial because it’s just too hard and leaves behind too many conveniences, we still can’t give up using our best self to find that way to God. We are in the game and we will not be benched. Rather than recognize and accept the fact that the Threat of God (God simply deciding for us whether we live or die and deciding to kill some of the disobedient, but not all, and letting some of the innocent suffer, but not all. In other words not being Comprehensible in the Law that is supposed to protect the obedient and the innocent) ….rather than recognize and accept this Threat as real and look for liberation and relief in the Promise of God that directly defeats and kills the Threat of God (that thing of listening to the Promise of which I just spoke), what we do is replace that self-hatred with self-discipline. I know that self-hatred, or even its mild form of self-denial, takes a lot of self-discipline. But in this case, self-discipline isn’t used to get ourselves to deny or hate ourselves but rather love ourselves more. So, maybe, to clarify, it’s better to say that we replace self-denial and self-hatred with self-love and recognize it takes self-discipline both to self-hate and to self-love. A small but not insignificant example of this is in the area of personal fitness. I do a lot of fitness work-outs and the instructors are constantly reminding us that “working out is not selfish, it’s self-care” and that we need to get ourselves (be self-disciplined!) to realize this and be okay with the self-love we are giving.
So, don’t self-hate! Rather, self-love! And if you can’t, just get better with the self-discipline to do so!
All this self-discipline is not only in the end not redemptive (the Threat simply shows up again) it is exhausting!
Why would we not simply show up regularly to have the Threat shut down and defeated and killed by the Promise.
Show up? Where?
Church.
Oh boy, not that.
I understand.
There are some good reasons not to show up. A couple of key reasons.
One, confession there is often either eschewed altogether and replaced with a lot of singing that is supposed to get our spirits into a place of paying attention again to God and loving God more or confession is passed off as enumeration of things done wrong or right things not done and so sounds a lot like that self-hatred I’ve already talked here so much about (which not only is wrong-headed but also ineffective) rather than as the straight-forward admission that we don’t love and trust God and never will but will God, please, never-the-less give us again the Promise again so we can be given again faith (trusting God and loving God) while also living in un-faith!
Two, the preaching done is more often not God’s mercy (outside of the Law) directly declared and applied to us but rather a story of how we can and should love God and have faith in God. The story is told with all kinds of references to biblical texts and persons in the accounts so that it often sounds like it should be some kind of freeing or liberating message, but the story is that we have a wonderful God that deserves our love and faithfulness and that we should get busy being loving and faithful because this God is deserving. It’s all Law. Its Demand couched in nice words about God.
In other words, too often showing up to a worship service, showing up to Church, does not recognize the Threat (Demand) nor relieve the Threat (Promise). It does not do the Law right and doesn’t do the Gospel right.
So, what now?
Are you going to throw the Church away because it doesn’t do its job? That’s tempting, but the thing is, this getting of the Promise is not something you can get somewhere on your own. It has to be told to you, it has to come from outside of you, it’s not something you can conjure up or fabricate. The Church has a job to do and it should be doing it and if it’s not it should be reformed and not rejected because we are not going to get this externally declared Promise anywhere else.[iv]
There are churches that are doing their job. I don’t mean to be saying there are not. But, alas, I’m afraid they are few and far between.
So, get on out there and find a church where Gospel is delivered.
And all this not because God is Good All the Time, but because God is NOT Good All the Time but rather Mercy All The Time that raises you from the dead!
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[i] When I say that God is God (rather than God is The Law) I am referring to the how God is one God with two Words, both Law and Gospel, not one God with one Word of the Law. In Christian circles today, as in the past, we construct a theology that has a solution to the problem of the Law never being fulfilled or completed and we call it the Gospel. The Gospel, in this scenario, works within the Law, is part of the Law and makes the Law whole and God only has this one Word of the Law. Differing from this, when we see that God is God (both Law and Gospel) and not God is the Law (only Law but Gospel fixes the Law) Gospel is a separate and distinct Word from God that utterly dismantles and destroys the Law and it’s Demand. God as Promise kills God as Demand. There is God as Demand. No Doubt. But there is also God as Promise. As well, No Doubt.
[ii] This is another way of asking what is chronicled as Luther’s famous question: “How do I find a gracious God?”
[iii] Ok, yes, there is the Law’s value of maintaining civil order. The trouble we get into with the Law is when we think that obeying or disobeying has an impact on God and our relationship with God rather than simply (and profoundly) having an impact on human relationships and human community. But think a little bit more on this with me. We are saying God destroys the disobedient. True enough. While not trying to put lilies on that cross I think we can actually acknowledge that God gets angry enough to kill not because God’s honor is offended (that’s often how we explain the destroying) but because the creation (human and all) is getting hurt when we disobey the Law. Breaking the Law doesn’t destroy the relationship with God that was never depended on human action or belief in the first place (or any place) but always and only depends on God’s total investment in creation’s well-being.
[iv] There is this little thing in history called The Reformation! This 16th century Reformation was not only about stopping church abusive and exploitative practices like indulgences but more radically about delivering God as the Promise that defeats the Law rather God as being the Law that provides space for abuses like indulgences.
