A Metaphor for Grace
Sometimes I occasionally hear a non-Christian sort of person question how God could, to paraphrase, “condemn someone simply for not believing in Jesus.” This strikes me as profoundly missing the point.
Suppose a man has murdered and raped many people, and has justly been apprehended and sentenced to death. He cries to the judge for mercy, and the judge has compassion and says, “I will commute your sentence – if you only apologize for what you’ve done.”
Suppose the man replies, “How dare you condemn me to death simply for not apologizing!” That’s what asking the above question sounds like to me.
Sometimes we forget that Jesus is God.
So, it’s also like asking how could God condemn someone for not believing in God.
This is very interesting to me, that you think these two questions are analogous. I will take David’s comment into account and consider the question: “How could God condemn someone simply for not believing in Him?” But I think the “non-Christian sort of person” is typically trying to ask, “How could God condemn someone for being a good person in every way except for having belief in God?” You compare belief in Jesus to apologizing for one’s crimes. But what of the person who is kind, generous, charitable, generally virtuous… lives a good life, regrets and attempts to fix their inevitable mistakes, is generally an upstanding person — and their only “crime” is that they don’t share your particular faith? Do you think such a thing is truly impossible without belief in your God? Without belief in any God?
I wonder if this isn’t symptomatic of the assumption I see often, that morality is dependent on religious belief. It’s easy to find fundamentalists in particular claiming that if it weren’t for God, everybody would be free to cheat and steal and rape and kill all willy-nilly. In my experience, a lot of more liberal Christians presume this even if they don’t state it so obviously (and offensively). You see why this might be a bit disconcerting for a non-Christian, who has no problem obeying the laws and respecting his or her fellow humans, to find out that Christians see themselves as just *that* close to complete depravity.
I do not believe that “morality” as the world defines it is dependent on religious belief, no. I think there are plenty of “upstanding” non-religious folks and a tragic number of Christians who are not emulating Christ at all. In fact, I don’t know that it should really be that surprising to Christians that this is so – Jesus said he came to call sinners, not the righteous, as the sick need a doctor, etc.
The point here is not that without Christianity everyone would rape and murder, and I do not intend to offend you by suggesting that atheists are all just waiting for an opportunity to go and slay some innocents in a morality-free universe. History has shown that just about any ethical system or faith can do a decent enough job of greasing the gears of society to permit life to go on – “live and let live,” as Stephen Schwartz and Tim Rice would have it in their various Disney songs. But I’m thinking more and more that Christianity is not about greasing the gears of the peaceful society, but about something much greater – something that will occasionally, by necessity, throw a wrench in those gears.
But that may be a bit beside the point. What I was trying to get at with the post is that I feel that a lot of folks, non-religious folks often but even many Christians, don’t see sin the way God sees sin. We kind of feel like, at core, we’re not bad people and we deserve eternal life or God’s blessing in the here and now (if we believe in such things, of course). We feel like God ought to grade on a curve, so to speak. But I think one of Jesus’s main points in his teachings was exactly that God is not impressed with this line of thinking. He punctured folks’ sense of self-justification, leaving nothing but God-justification. The Pharisee that prayed in the temple how thankful he was not to be the tax collector, even though he was a member of the right social class, the right race, taught the right teachings, followed the right laws, and gave extravagant sums to the poor, went away condemned, while the horrible tax collector, because he cried out for mercy, went away justified.
Consider the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, which is not nearly as full of warm fuzzies as I think a lot of Christians take it to be. God isn’t impressed by “I haven’t murdered anyone.” If you’ve insulted someone in anger, your heart was just as far from God’s. Or if you’ve looked lustfully at someone who isn’t your spouse – you’ve committed adultery in your heart. This is troubling to a lot of people, but I think it’s supposed to be – it’s supposed to deflate our personal pride and leave us broken at the feet of Jesus. His whole story is one of people coming to him looking to be justified and going away disappointed and sad, and folks coming to him crying for mercy and receiving it in spades.
Now I don’t have any problem believing that God would reward someone who lived a “good” life but either didn’t know about Jesus or, possibly, rejected him for some innocent enough reason. The trouble is, I think that such a person is largely mythical – when we see “good” as God sees it (as in, “no one is good but God alone”). They may be an upstanding citizen and live and let live, but I believe that God expects more. Consider all the good things we know we should do, but don’t, the injustices perpetuated by the status quo that we do nothing about, the idols of money and security and independence, etc., that we worship over God. And I’m sure that’s just scratching the surface.
I think the natural human response to this is to say that it isn’t fair – that the line for salvation ought to be scaled to where most normal people would be over it. Trouble is, we have no evidence that God works that way. And, as I believe in God’s supreme authority, God’s definition of fairness is the one that wins. But God has offered an outrageous form of mercy to those who renounce self-justification and ask for it – that’s what faith/trust in Jesus seems to mean to me. It means believing what Jesus said, confessing it, and repenting – a continuous, every day kind of repentance.
So that’s why those things are analogous to me. Until we see ourselves as on the same plane as a murderer or adulterer, we won’t understand our need for God, or the extravagance of God’s grace. In fact, someone who has actually murdered has at least one advantage – he or she is under no illusions. Which is why Jesus was able to reach the sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes far more than the fine, upstanding citizens, who didn’t see the need. People can be completely depraved in God’s eyes without everyone being free to cheat and rape and kill willy-nilly.
As always, thanks for the engagement – and I hope you find value in these discussions. They’re certainly useful for me sorting through things. As James says, wisdom from God is considerate and reasonable.