Who’s Afraid of the Schizophrenic God?

By Joseph Tkach and Neil Earle

Imagine a court room scene. It’s you who are convicted, facing charges. Problem is, you know you are guilty. But as you walk in you notice the judge gives you a reassuring nod of recognition, as if he had known you all your life.

He summons you to the bench. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he tells you with a warm fatherly smile, “I know all about this case. In fact I’m going to be your defense attorney.”

Theologian Shirley C. Guthrie says this is the way we should picture what the Bible calls the Judgment. “Must we talk about the wrath of God?” Guthrie asks. “Yes,” he answers his own question. “But God’s wrath is not like that of the gods. It is the wrath of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self” (Christian Doctrine, page 261).

Is the good news really that good? It seems that for about 1500 years the Christian church has often presented a God who has (to exaggerate for effect) a split personality. We often preach and teach a God who is like a human parent. “I love you but I have to punish you,” says this God, a being built in the image of earthly fathers. Paul himself briefly alluded to this in Hebrews 12:10, a God like human fathers who “disciplined us for a little while as they thought best.”

Weak Analogies

Many of us remember, “Well this is going to hurt me as much as you” or “Since I love you, I must punish you.” And since Paul uses that parent analogy in Hebrews 12 some have concluded that this must be a perfectly acceptable mirror of God. In other words, the God who is defined as pure love in 1 John 4:8 is actually, by this definition, almost a schizophrenic being. “I love you, but I have to punish you!” Even worse, as Christian writer William P. Young argues, this picture depicts a God who is mainly motivated by anger. “God is angry, someone must pay,” says Young. ”So the reasoning goes: ‘If I kill Jesus everything will be all right.’”

Wait! This can’t be true. This picture of God doesn’t hold up even within Paul’s context in Hebrews 12. For one thing Paul uses the weak human father model as a mere launching pad to take his presentation of God to a much higher plane. For Paul, God’s punishment is always redemptive. His correction is “for our good. That we may share in his holiness” (Hebrew 12:11).

Paul shows that God’s punishment is never a result of simple weariness, or robust vengefulness or an impersonal quid pro quo “punishment device” built into the universe. No. Paul shows the loving purpose behind even God’s anger. His wounded emotions, his hurt ego (were there such things) don’t enter into it. This fits the Bible evidence that God’s anger is his “strange work” and not his basic essential nature (Isaiah 28:21). This nature is emphasized in 1 John 4:8. The verse does not say “God loves,” or “God is loving.” No. It states simply and forcefully that God is love and is repeated again in verse 16.

God or G-O-D?

We have to remember that all human-parent parallels – all analogies really – break down when measured against the God of Love (Isaiah 40:18). Any comparisons we want to make with God quickly fail. Otherwise we could end up with God being a rock, a tower or a mother hen.

Consider again Isaiah 28:21. There the prophet reminds Israel of God’s judgment upon the Canaanites in the days of Joshua. He describes such an intervention as “his strange work,” in opposition, say many scholars, to “his proper and congenial work of justifying the ungodly.”

The way we picture God has a lot to do with how we present him to the world as his witnesses (Acts 1:8). At issue is a proper understanding of the popular but distorted doctrine of the atonement. Let’s see what that means.

Theological Strait-Jackets

Before the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, most Christians labored under what could be called the Merit Model of atonement. “To please God, you must do the best you can and merit his mercy.” The Merit Model led to a round of never-ending good works and pious deeds. This usually led to the very kind of religion based upon outward show that Jesus condemned so strenuously in the Gospels. The whole system became so unwieldy that Reformers such as Luther and Calvin were able to poke serious holes in it.

Unfortunately too many of Luther and Calvin’s disciples offered what is called the “forensic” model of salvation. “Forensics” sounds like a legal term and it is. It relies heavily for its theological usage on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The Forensic Model revolves around the twin poles of Sin and Righteousness. The short version reads like this: Human beings have messed up and God sent Christ to atone for us and bring us back to God. Martin Luther himself typically emphasized the joy to be experienced when guilty sinners realized that Christ had paid the penalty in our stead, but this somehow got lost in the translation. Luther taught that Christ’s is credited to our account (Philippians 3:8-9).

This Reformation perspective advanced our knowledge of the atonement quite a bit. It breathes through many of the great hymns of the faith and has proven very effective in the missionary field, in evangelistic crusades and even coffee shop conversions. What some such as William P. Young have seen, however, is that the forensic model makes God the Father a stern and vengeful “Bad Cop” with Jesus being our Advocate and Defender against a wrathful G-O-D. John Calvin being a French lawyer, the forensic model breathes the language of the law courts, of the police station and commercial transactions. It knows little of what Walter Brueggeman calls “cosmic evil,” that dark something out there that is opposed to the will of God.

“In my judgment the contemporary church is obsessively preoccupied with human failure,” writes Bruegemann, “There is an alternative tradition in the Bible that…insists there is lose in the world a real, live, objective power of evil, without regard to human sin or goodness” (Isaiah 1-39, pages 210-211). That, too, is dealt with by God in Christ. So the forensic model appears too far along in the salvation process. It’s all about us! The assumption is that God will punish us for lawbreaking just the way human courts and legal systems would. Remember, in writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul was addressing the no-nonsense “law and order” people of antiquity. (Even our word “justification” derives from iusticia the Roman word for justice).

The forensic model stresses the merits of Jesus Christ applied on our behalf which made it an advance upon the merit theory. Front and center however is God’s anger against sin. It starts or at least equates God’s wrath with God’s love – the schizophrenic God. In some extreme applications of this principle, God actually delighted in punishing Jesus in our stead on the cross. This “offended deity” picture forgets that the first and foremost thing about God is his love, that God is happily occupied in bringing “many sons to glory” and that our salvation was in his mind “before the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8, AV). These greater realities are forced to the background.

The Dream of Adoption

Some theologians have seen the way out of this dilemma. Why not draw upon the atonement as part of the God who is love’s ultimate purpose for us? God is not in the business of training obedient valets but in fulfilling his dream. His dream was summarized by Paul in the word “adoption” (Ephesians 1:4-5). God yearns to adopt us as his children. In bringing many sons to glory he has to intervene at times to keep this plan on trajectory. But any punishment from God is for the purposes of the restoration of his justice.

We see this in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The repentant son is welcomed home and restored to full sonship (Luke 15:11-24). This depicts the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). The death of Christ was not a vindictive act of divine child abuse. It was a divine rescue springing from God’s love for us, an intervention designed to restore a purpose of which we were oblivious in our ignorance and darkness (John 3:19-20).

Set against this majestic purpose, God‘s wrath is surely his strange work. His anger at sin is at that which destroys the relationship he has always intended for us in Christ.

God is not a resentful, selfish parent in an emotional stew because we have not played by his rules. “I am your parent, my anger must be satisfied.” Even the term “satisfaction” very early distorted theological discussions on the atonement. Once again, God’s work in Christ careened towards the kind of abusive and scary God the world has heard far too much about – G-O-D.

Mercy vs. Judgment

God will never be at peace with sin. The great human tragedy is that we have been totally unaware of the reconciliation that has been effected through Christ, that we have loved darkness rather than light, have chosen to ignore what the Father offers us through the Son. We are, in fact, more to be pitied than condemned. The Judge of our souls knows all this. He also knows that his people have not always presented God’s dream for his creatures in a loving and appealing way. Too often we Christians have been the unwitting presenters of G-O-D to the world and the world has – not surprisingly – run the other way.

Through Christ, the disconnect between the world and God has been removed, once and for all. The great majority of unbelievers are simply those who through weakness or ignorance are resisting the influence of the life-giving Spirit, that member of the Godhead who beckons to us to abandon our addiction to darkness and sin. The God who is Love shines through even the stricter provisions of the Old Covenant with its “quid-pro-quo/you do this and I do that” stipulations:

A Question of Emphasis

The Law, the Prophets and the Writings join hands in pitting God’s proper work of love against his strange work of anger. The New Testament’s sometimes dire and apocalyptic language is God’s wrath at the incorrigible rebels, those who stand against God’s purposes being fulfilled. Thus Paul wrote that “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men” (Romans 1:18). Paul alluded to a time when “the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels” when “he will punish those who do not know God…They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the lord” (1 Thessalonians 1:7-9).

Judgment falls on those who go move tragically beyond blindness into out and out resistance to God’s purposes. Joachim Jeremias shows that many of Jesus’ tough statements – “the weeping and gnashing of teeth,” “the rich man in hell” – these were part of his teaching method. They were designed to shock his very religious audiences out of their conceit. “Jesus repeatedly and intentionally uses by way of illustration …methods of punishment regarded by the Jews as particularly merciless,” says Jeremias. He spoke to people whose concept of government was swift retribution from Oriental despots and where democracy was unknown. Jesus spoke within the political realities of his day, where an angry look from a king could cost one his life (The Parables of Jesus, pages 27, 212).

But, as Jeremias knew, Jesus did not just bring good news, he was good news. The overwhelming accent of his teaching was mercy, not vengeance. His hallmark sayings reflect the God who is love, I whose mind mercy rejoices against judgment (James 2:13). Thus, what was in a minor key in parts of the Old Testament becomes major in the Gospels – “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” Jesus’ word pictures show us a forgiving father, a Good Samaritan, seeking shepherds and splendidly generous employers, healings, exorcisms, a Great Physician who pleaded “Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest” (Matthew 10:28).

“Anger is God’s response to wrong and evil-doing,” says William P. Young. “For God to have that response to rape, abuse, greed is only fitting.” Even the scary blood and thunder of the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, is set in a book whose overall trajectory is consistently positive: Christ working to deliver his Church from bestial powers. The beginning shows Jesus steering his churches with the keys of death and hell and the ending is a Hallelujah Chorus of God’s people redeemed and walking in the light.

So what of our schizophrenic God? Are we to represent a God of love but one whose bad side you’d better not arouse? No. The grace notes sound loudly and clearly across Scripture. The salvation theme sounds so loudly that the ultimate fate of the wicked is almost blurred. The metaphors are strangely mixed – fire or darkness, guests locked outside the party, wandering stars versus ashes. God’s emphasis is clearly on salvation, we his creation being readily and lovingly adopted through the Beloved Son. That is God’s proper work, the work of salvation which he invites us to proclaim.