Richard Dawkins wrote in ‘The God Delusion’, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” I hope we might disagree with him; but while we might be able to come up with many Old Testament quotations which showed God in a wholly different, more just and loving light, there are we have to admit times when we may feel not a little embarrassed by its presentation of a God who might occasionally remind us of Richard Dawkin’s depiction. How does a sometimes angry, judgmental and aggressive deity square with our picture of a loving and forgiving God?
It helps I think to ponder first why we are now so troubled by that question. It has for some time been an important question for modern liberally minded Christians, and one of the reasons why that is so is that we see people as individuals, more so perhaps than at any time in the past. In our social lives we may categorise people, we may even be prejudiced against certain types of people, but when we look at these categorisations and prejudices our moral conscience leads us to feel ashamed and guilty. We should always see people as individuals and not as categories, which is why we find it difficult when the Bible seems to condemn and even kill off whole groups of people, (pace Abraham’s argument with God about the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18:16ff).
Furthermore, the liberal conscience when confronted with an individual guilty of an evil or wrong action will often want to look at the reasons why such a person may have acted in that way. We look at what has shaped that individual – the influences in his upbringing, his parents, his education, his social circumstances. The blame is not entirely with him we feel. And that leads us to want not simply to punish the offender but to try to reclaim and heal him.
Or again we are deeply moved by stories of victims in prisoner of war camps or concentration camps who try to forgive those who are treating them cruelly. We respond to the thought that we should look into the eyes of the torturer and try to see the child whose mother once loved him, or the creature whom God created and loves. And we want to believe that perhaps our forgiveness, our attempt to love, our refusal to hate, may have a converting power over the torturer. So we want to believe that God’s love and mercy works like that and that God cannot hate or punish or reject. And that is why parts of the Bible embarrass us.
And yet we must also recognise that my attempt to forgive and even love the torturer may not be responded to. My love cannot have the same power over the torturer as he has over me. You cannot force someone to be good for that undermines what we mean by the good; goodness may be prompted, inspired, copied, suggested, taught, but it cannot be forced or it ceases to be good. And when the good has been done the good person grows both in the capacity for goodness and also in the sense that somehow they are becoming more themselves, more of what it means to be human. Goodness carries with it the sense of fulfilling a potential.
Evil is different; people have often tried to use as a mitigating excuse the idea that they were forced to do something. So after the holocaust the excuse was made that people were following orders, they had no choice. And yet we still call what they did evil, we still require them to take responsibility for what they did. So we might say that evil remains evil whether you are compelled to do it or not. Good has to be freely chosen and if you are forced to do it – it somehow ceases to match up to what we think of as good. If God forced us to do good and to love him – that would undermine our understanding of what is good and loving.
What then is evil in relation to God? If we are created by God, it is God’s will that we should fulfill all the potential of that divine createdness. We are as it were pointed towards God and everything good in us and done by us brings us closer to God – it increases the godlikeness in us. Every evil act distances us from God, and we might say dilutes the godlikeness in us. In willfully distancing ourselves from our own conscience we distance ourselves from the creative energy of God – we fall away towards nothingness. Self destruction is the existential consequence of the evil act which distances us from God. The divine mercy means there is always a way back but as we become more and more a shadow of what God created us to be, so it becomes harder to see the hand of mercy extended to us. That is one way of putting it, one way of trying to understand the Biblical picture of God hating and destroying what is evil, all that rejects God.
And yet the question remains open – does God allow anything he has created ultimately to fall away from him?