The reason for God - An extract from Tim Keller's book

In Christianity God is both a God of love and of justice. Many people struggle with this. They believe that a loving God can’t be a judging God. Like most other Christian ministers in our society, I have been asked literally thousands of times, ‘How can a God of love be also a God filled with wrath and anger? If he is loving and perfect, he should forgive and accept everyone. He shouldn’t get angry.’

I always start my response by pointing out that all loving people are sometimes filled with wrath, not just despite but because of their love. If you love a person and you see someone ruining them — even they themselves — you get angry. As Becky Pippert puts it in her book Hope Has Its Reasons: ‘Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it. … Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. … God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer … which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.’

Wrath flows from love

The Bible says that God’s wrath flows from his love and delight in his creation. He is angry at evil and injustice because it is destroying its peace and integrity. ‘The Lord is righteous in all his ways and loving toward all he has made… The Lord watches over those who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy’ (Psalms 145.17-20).

It is at this point that many people complain that those who believe in a God of judgment will not approach enemies with a desire to reconcile with them. If you believe in a God who smites evildoers, you may think it perfectly justified to do some of the smiting yourself. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, a Croatian who has seen the violence in the Balkans, does not see the doctrine of God’s judgment that way. He writes: ‘If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence — that God would not be worthy of worship… The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only when it comes from God… My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many… in the West. … [But] it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God’s refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die … [with] other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

Nourishing violence

In this fascinating passage Volf reasons that it is the lack of belief in a God of vengeance that ‘secretly nourishes violence’. The human impulse to make perpetrators of violence pay for their crimes is almost an overwhelming one. It cannot possibly be overcome with platitudes, like ‘Now don’t you see that violence won’t solve anything?’ If you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped, such talk is laughable — and it shows no real concern for justice. Yet victims of violence are drawn to go far beyond justice into the vengeance that says, ‘You put out one of my eyes, so I will put out both of yours’. They are pulled inexorably into an endless cycle of vengeance, of strikes and counter strikes nurtured and justified by the memory of terrible wrongs.

Can our passion for justice be honoured in a way that does not nurture our desire for blood vengeance? Volf says the best resource for this is belief in the concept of God’s divine justice. If I don’t believe that there is a God who will eventually put all things right, I will take up the sword and will be sucked into the endless vortex of retaliation. Only if I am sure that there’s a God who will right all wrongs and settle all accounts perfectly do I have the power to refrain.

Imperishable deeds

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, wrote the remarkable essay, ‘The Discreet Charms of Nihilism’. In it he remembers how Marx had called religion ‘the opiate of the people’ because the promise of an afterlife (Marx said) led the poor and the working class to put up with unjust social conditions. But, Milosz continued: ‘And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death — the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders are not going to be judged… [but] all religions recognise that our deeds are imperishable.’

Many people complain that belief in a God of judgment will lead to a more brutal society. Milosz had personally seen, in both Nazism and Communism, that a loss of belief in a God of judgment can lead to brutality. If we are free to shape life and morals any way we choose without ultimate accountability, it can lead to violence. Volf and Milosz argue that the doctrine of God’s final judgment is a necessary undergirding for human practices of love and peacemaking.

Love and hell

‘Ah’, you may say, ‘fighting evil and injustice in the world is one thing, but sending people to hell is another. The Bible speaks of eternal punishment. How does that fit in with the love of God? I cannot reconcile even the idea of hell with a loving God.’ How do we address this understandable recoiling?

Modern people inevitably think that hell works like this: God gives us time, but if we haven’t made the right choices by the end of our lives, he casts our souls into hell for all eternity. As the poor souls fall through space, they cry out for mercy, but God says, ‘Too late! You had your chance! Now you will suffer!’ This caricature misunderstands the very nature of evil. The biblical picture is that sin separates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy and indeed of all love, wisdom or good things of any sort. Since we were originally created for God’s immediate presence, only before his face will we thrive, flourish and achieve our highest potential. If we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell — the loss of our capability for giving or receiving love or joy.

Disintegration

A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire. Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralysing anxiety, paranoid thoughts and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: ‘What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends on into eternity?’

Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centred life, going on and on forever.

Jesus’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16 supports the view of hell we are presenting here. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. They both die and Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks up and sees Lazarus in heaven ‘in Abraham’s bosom’: ‘So he called to him, “Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire”. But Abraham replied, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us”. He answered, “Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment”. Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them”. “No, father Abraham”. he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent”. He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead”’ (Luke 16.24-31).

What is astonishing is that though their statuses have now been reversed, the rich man seems to be blind to what has happened. He still expects Lazarus to be his servant and treats him as his water boy. He does not ask to get out of hell, yet strongly implies that God never gave him and his family enough information about the afterlife. Commentators have noted the astonishing amount of denial, blame-shifting and spiritual blindness in this soul in hell. They have also noted that the rich man, unlike Lazarus, is never given a personal name. He is only called a ‘rich man’, strongly hinting that since he had built his identity on his wealth rather than on God, once he lost his wealth he lost any sense of a self.

In short, hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity.

This article is an extract from The Reason for God by Tim Keller (ISBN 978-0-34097-932-7, £12.99), published with the permission of Hodder & Stoughton.