The Nature of God: Conversations With An Atheist

One of my atheist friends, Touchstone, and I have been participating in a discussion on whether theology (and Christian theology in particular) is abusive.

He makes an outstanding case, I think, for interrogating Christianity as it's been classically articulated, and I don't really disagree with him.  But I want to offer a few thoughts as counter-reflections to his.

Touchstone's basic case is that Christianity's coerciveness stems from its idea that God is responsible for our nature.  We are "free" to choose our own damnation in the Christian system, but only within preconditions that more or less ensure at least partial if not global failure.

Thus Touchstone:

If I created living, sentient beings, and one of them killed another in spite, the offense isn't against me -- I'd be a pompous ass to take that development that way -- the offense is against the victim, and his family and the community that now suffers because of the violence and loss. I can lament and despair that it happened, but *I* am in NO WAY injured or in a position to lay moral claim to some debt owed me by virtue of that.

(Touchstone's claim is not as insubstantial as many Christians would like to believe.  The implication of it is, as he points out, that you either have to give up the idea that God's damnation and salvation are just or you have to give up the idea that God is omnipotent in the sense that he has total power over all of creation, its nature, and its laws.)

My reply:

How would this paragraph change if god were coextensive with creative love? In that event, while the psalmist would be exaggerating to say "Against you and you only have I sinned," he would be telling a truth through hyperbole, yes?

My question redirects the Christian "defense" away from protecting the omnipotence of God as it's usually defined ("the power to do anything") and towards the idea that God is all powerful to act according to the nature of God, which is the power of creative love.

And while the idea that God is love is derived directly from scripture (1 John 4:7-8), and while I think it's consonant with (most but not all of) the New Testament in the contexts in which it was written, I do not think that the implications of it are consonant with post-Nicene orthodoxy and the denominations that derive from it. 

To adopt an idea that God is all powerful is, as Touchstone rightly points out, to take on a rather awful burden.  All people are in the position of Pharaoh in Exodus, of whom God says, "I will harden his heart" (Exodus 4:21) so that one is punished for failure to do what God has not allowed one to do.

While I've read a tremendous amount of theology on this, I don't really see a way around it.

And I cannot agree that it would be just, or that such a god would be worthy of worship.

Notice a few things, though, that the Christian notion of God-as-love implies.

If God IS love (and that is not the same as saying "God has the attribute of love" or "God is characteristically loving" but that God and love are coextensive), there is such a thing as non-god in creation.  Which accords nicely with both the gospel of John and the early epistles of Paul at least.  It mirrors the first creation account in Genesis 1, where the breath or wind of God is a sustaining feature of creation.

Furthermore, it accounts for why "hell" might not after all be a meaningless doctrine.  The person who willingly dwells in non-god / non-love is allowed the dignity of that choice, here and now.

And the person who does not choose to dwell in non-god must be delivered.  Not by any means necessary, but by those means which accord with love as best one can discern it.

Then too, what that means is that all sin is social: an offense is an offense against love (see the entire book of 1 Corinthians for corroboration) or it is no offense at all.  So the Psalmist is right, in a hyperbolic sense (though not a literal one): Against love, and love only, has he sinned, because only love is capable of taking offense in the way that he means. 

Touchstone replies:

Yes, assuming that "creative love" is something the Psalmist here has chosen to exalt and to hold to as a standard for himself. The language is anthropomorphic ("you and you alone") but
as you have it, it would be "failing one's principles", which is a setup I of course fully understand and see as healthy, the lament and guilt one suffers from failing to adhere to one's own chosen principles.

This is a view which does not seem abusive at all. There isn't a power relationship where man is punished for not serving god's interests over his own. Instead, (this) man has come to see creative love as his ideal. He has failed himself when he fails to love, and this is a healthy, moral basis for thought and action.

Touchstone, a libertarian, looks to consistency in the individual's ethic where I think that I tend to look at the structure of one's relationships with and obligations to others (that is, community).  But both of us have in view the idea that love is an energy that creates and sustains lifegiving relationships between animate (? or inanimate) things.

And if God is herself the flow of such energy, then yes, there is such a thing as non-god.  One can become it, and so offend against one's higher self.  The psalmist unquestionably anthropomorphizes this.  John, on the other hand, writes stirringly, "God is love, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."  Strong words.  Mighty words.  Mightier by far than "God can do anything."  More just, and more worthy of worship.

It's my experience that such love is personal.  That is, it's self-consciously relational.  It's what Christians call the Holy Spirit but which goes by other names in other places.

It has a desire, and an agenda.

It cannot do everything.

But it can do mighty things, according to its nature, according to the nature of love.  There's some freaky shit deep in love's heart.

And when it's apparently killed off, it has a strange way of not staying dead.