I first came across the concept of offering forgiveness to God in a book by J. B. Phillips — I think — and it was a revelation to me. Not that God is doing wrong things to people that require actual forgiveness, but that people sometimes hold grudges against him that they really should let go. In other words, even if your theology says that God is perfect, your psychology might still be upset with him about something, and you should be willing to forgive those perceived offenses.

Caleb Wilde writes:

“Forgiving God” smacks against the core of what so many of us believe about God: namely, that He is good and that He’s love.  Believing that God needs forgiveness — as though He’s done something wrong — is so far away from our conception about God that we simply don’t talk about it.  …

And whether God actually needs the forgiveness isn’t what I’m talking about here.  Whether or not God needs it is a moot point.  The fact is, many of us need to extend it.

via Forgiving God.

Wilde was inspired to write about forgiving God on the 10th anniversary of a terrible shooting at an Amish schoolhouse. Charles Roberts’ own child had died years before and God hadn’t saved her. Roberts was out for revenge on God. He took the lives of five children before killing himself. I commend the whole article to you.

Cognitive Discopants takes a stab at Mark Driscoll’s “God hates you” sermon. The video has been bouncing around the Christian blogs lately like a ping-pong ball, and CD embeds it in his post if you want to view it for context. It’ll help to know that one example Driscoll uses in the sermon to help us understand God’s retributive justice is imagining our own reaction to a thief who had broken into our home.

[W]hat Driscoll is describing is not justice – it’s vengeance.

As a criminal defence lawyer, I routinely represent people who have broken into other people’s homes (and worse). Most have tragic stories of dysfunctional families, physical or sexual abuse, abandonment, and drug addiction. The prosecutor will often invite the victim to submit a “victim impact statement” to the court. Some victims are just like Driscoll’s notion of God. They want “justice”, by which they mean that they want the offender to be punished. They were hurt and they want to see the offender hurt in return. In short, they want revenge.

The nobler of the victims respond differently. Sure, they recognize the need for consequences. But they are more concerned with seeing the offender rehabilitated. They want consequences that serve a purpose, namely, to see the offender restored to society. Sometimes they even offer forgiveness, unsolicited.

via Driscoll and the God of Hate « Cognitive Discopants.

Great tug-o-war here. Nothing is beyond God’s power, so should we imagine him as better than us at getting the revenge he’s entitled to, or better than us at restoring relationships with those who’ve acted offensively?

Edits:

13 Oct 2011 — I changed the title of the post from “Driscoll and the God of Hate” to “Justice vs. Revenge”. Any prior inbound links were broken as a result.

18 Oct 2011 — I tweaked the last sentence to better compare the aspects of revenge and forgiveness that I’m after.

I always have this suspicion that the term “biblical” has been hijacked by some believers as a power move to place themselves over other Christians, when in reality, its just a particular kind of receiving the Scriptures.

via On Alcohol: Jarena Lee, Moderation and @ScotMcKnight | Political Jesus.

I think I could spend forever drinking beers and worshiping to vaguely spiritual guitar-driven folk harmonies.

Cuff the Duke – Follow Me – YouTube.

To me lately that seems to have become the point of religion: finding a harmony I can sing that’s in concordance with the creation and its creator.

Because I agree to pursue truth – if God creates all truth – I accept similarities between Christian narratives and other religious traditions, and realize that how I approach the world is influenced by similar reasons which cause others to approach the world differently.

Because I agree to seek what’s right, I accept the existence of common moral demands between all great religions, pointing to moral demands higher than any creed.

…

However, I understand how religious people can encounter these same observations and reach different conclusions than I have. I also understand how extensive parts of religious tradition don’t require a black-and-white, literalist idea of truth.

This is another belief I share with my religious brothers and sisters. I understand why someone believes the message of Jesus or the Buddha, not because they know the factual accounts as literally true, but because they carry hope of spiritual truth within them. I also take a leap of faith, and I also carry hope of unseen truth within me.

I carry hope that people of different traditions will peacefully practice their faith, or lack of faith.

I carry hope that all people will recognize the fragile nature of life on this earth, and work together to protect it.

I carry hope that people of faith, or none at all, will pursue social justice – that there’s a moral calling to protect the needy and vulnerable, whether it’s because there’s only one, incomparably meaningful life — or because each person’s immensely valuable in God’s eyes.

I carry hope within me, that people who live after I do … will inherit a better world.

Although none of these hopes may become truths, I understand how I also believe and live through occasional acts of faith. As I live every day to help this faith come alive, I’ve found extraordinary meaning and purpose. While others go, but for the grace of God–I go, but for the grace of hope.

via I’m a Religious Atheist | Unreasonable Faith.

There is a lot of updating that any viable religious viewpoint must engage in if it is to seem plausible to present and future generations. As Carl Sagan wrote, “In fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a God of the galaxy, much less of a universe… I don’t propose that is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it’s important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face to face with an awesome Cosmos that is simply different from the Cosmos of our pious ancestors.”

Our cosmos is bigger than many ancients realized, and more rational and intelligible too, and less full of capricious spirits. And so the really interesting theological questions are not about the attempts of fundamentalists to maintain the same ideas of God today. Rather, the crucial debate is about whether our progress in understanding the world leads to a bigger God, or none at all.

via Torchwood: Small Worlds, Medium-Sized Gods | Exploring Our Matrix.

[Q]uestions of infallibility and inerrancy do not matter, because even if we answer the questions to everyone’s satisfaction, we have only spoken about the text and not the people reading the text. Say whatever you want about the Bible–it will still be read, interpreted, handled and applied by decidedly imperfect people. We will bring our biases, ignorance, and finite capacity to something so much larger than ourselves.

Not because of any flaw in the scripture itself, the practical application of questions about infallibility and inerrancy end up meaning, “The Bible means what I say it mean, and you must agree with me!”

via Someone define inerrancy for me, please! | Near Emmaus.

My religious tradition views Adam and Eve as created with perfect human natures. After their first sin, their natures became “fallen” and prone to sin, and this fallen nature was passed along to all of their descendants, making all of us prone to sin as well. In Jesus’ sacrifice we are forgiven our sins and promised to be restored to a perfect, unfallen nature when this life is over.

In the post What Does Original Sin Mean in the Light of Modern Science? Jason Rosenhouse discusses how evolutionary theory gives a different explanation of our “fallen” natures: primates are species on a trajectory from “animal” to “rational” and we have a lot of dark impulses to overcome when our conscience and our instincts are in conflict. Concerning whether the idea of original sin should be reworked or discarded, he concludes:

In science, it is fairly common to face the following situation: A theory works pretty well and explains a fair amount of data. But then some anomalies arise. Do we need to discard the theory completely, or is it just a matter of fine-tuning a few details? That is not the case with original sin. It is not as though we used to have really good reasons for thinking it is a valid and useful notion, but then modern science came along to provide a few distressing anomalies. Actually all we ever had was an ancient, Biblical account that told a pretty clear story about human sinfulness and its affect on the world. There was never any particular reason to think that story was true, and science now shows it to be completely false. But instead of throwing the idea of original sin straight in the garbage where it belongs, a lot of really smart people tie themselves into knots summoning forth strained reinterpretations of the doctrine. It is beyond comprehension to me that anyone could think this is a valuable use of time, or that our knowledge or understanding of the human condition are advanced, in even the slightest way, by such investigations.

If original sin is discarded, it would still remain true that we are prone to sin and that Jesus lived a perfect life. The Christus Victor model of atonement could still apply.

From the article Love and Justice at Gungor Blog:

Perfect love casts out fear. This is because love is better than fear. Fear gets you to obey the speed limit if you suspect that there may be police around, but love for the passengers in your car makes you drive carefully. Fear can get you to obey rules, but it cannot transform your heart. Religion that is based in fear says things like “well, yes God is love, but….”

No. God is love. Period.

From the post The Bible’s Most Overlooked But Really, Really Important Guy « Cognitive Discopants

Jesus was the answer for fallen Israel, not fallen Adam.

This is the true metanarrative of the Bible. In fact, some have suggested (persuasively, I think) that the story of Eden/the Fall/the expulsion from Paradise is itself a metaphor for the overarching narrative of Promised Land/unfaithful Israel/exile. The gospel story is the story of God’s redemptive plan for a nation that had lost its way – a nation into which God would ultimately graft all of humanity.

If modern genetics casts doubt on the historicity of Adam (and it does), rather than undermine the gospel, this realization may actually help the church to recover the authentic gospel, properly conceived (as Scot McKnight has recently put it), “as the completion of the Story of Israel in the saving Story of Jesus.”