No
Conditions Precedent!
October
1, 2020
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights
reserved.
When I consider
the manifold shortcomings of what popular Christianity has done to itself over
the centuries to get it wrong and make itself so unattractive to so many people
today one thing stands out for me. We insist on making our relationship with
God conditional. We make it an “if/then” proposition. We make it contractual.
Both parties to the relationship, God and humans, have their contractual
obligations. If either side fails in their obligations the other side is
released from its obligations, and we just can’t see how it could be otherwise.
We just can’t see how it really is with God and us.
Civil law has a
concept that perfectly fits what we humans do with our relationship with God[1].
In contract law there is the concept of the “condition precedent.” A condition
precedent is something that one party to a contract must do before another
party’s obligations under the contract come into effect. A simple example taken
from a Google search is that when a painter agrees to paint a house if the
owner supplies the paint, the owner supplying the paint is a condition
precedent to the painter’s contractual obligation to paint the house. No paint,
no obligation to paint. That’s how a condition precedent works. We humans are
forever putting conditions precedent on our relationship with God and God’s relationship
with us. I want here to take a look at just how we do that and just how wrong
it is that we do. We make our relationship with God conditional, that is, we impose
conditions precedent on it, in at least two important respects. We say we will
love God “if;” and we say God will love us “if.” I’ll look at these two ways of
putting conditions precedent on our relationship with God in that order.
Our making our
love of God conditional is perhaps less well understood even by people who do
it than is the conditional nature of salvation, but it has deep roots in the
Judeo-Christian tradition. Psalm 116 for example begins, “I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and
my supplications.” Psalm 116:1. I love God, the psalmist says, because God has
done something for me. This verse assumes this contractual relationship: We are
obligated to love God, and God is obligated to hear us when we pray. The
psalmist of Psalm 116 believes that God has met God’s obligation under the
contract between God and him to hear him when he prays. The psalmist therefore
loves God. The contract is intact. God heard the psalmist, so the psalmist
lives upon to his obligation to love God. The psalmist here considered God
hearing him to be a condition precedent to his loving God.
So what if God
had breached God’s obligation to hear the psalmist or at least the psalmist
believed that God had breached that divine obligation and not heard his prayer?
The way Psalm 116 begins using the word “because” creates the unavoidable
inference that then the psalmist would be relieved of his duty to love God.
That word “because” gives the game away. The psalmist sees his relationship
with God as a contract with a condition precedent clause in it. Like every
contract the parties obligations under it are conditional.
Ancient Israel
almost always thought of its relationship with God as contractual and therefore
conditional. They usually called their relationship with God a covenant not a
contract, so we need to ask here what the difference is, if any, between a
contract and a covenant. The Google search “define covenant” yields as the
first definition simply “an agreement.” The online dictionary meriam-webster.com
comes closer to what covenant means in the Bible. It defines covenant as “a
usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement.” As a second definition it gives
“a written agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties
for the performance of some action.” The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary begins
its discussion of covenant with the definition “a formal agreement or treaty
between two parties with each assuming some obligation.”[2]
It is clear then that a covenant is a contract. It may be a particularly solemn
contract. It may involve some formalities like putting it in writing and
sealing it with a seal. It may even have a spiritual element to it as Israel’s
covenants with God clearly did. Still, a covenant is basically just a contract.
Another way to
think of a covenant is as a treaty. In fact, ancient Israel’s conception of a
covenant came from the ancient practice of a stronger nation entering into a
treaty with a weaker nation under which both nations assumed certain
responsibilities. The stronger nation was most commonly obligated to protect
the weaker nation from attack by enemies. The weaker nation was most commonly obligated
not to resist what the stronger nation wanted to do and to pay some kind of
tribute to the stronger nation. Israel’s conception of its covenants with God
fit that pattern well.
Ancient Israel
actually had more than one covenant with God. I’ll mention two of them here.
God first created a covenant with Noah. See Genesis 8:8-17. God’s covenant with
Noah was basically one-sided. God made a promise to Noah never again to destroy
the earth with a flood (God said nothing about not destroying the earth some
other way) without necessarily placing any obligation on Noah in return. God
also made a covenant with Abraham. See Genesis 12:1-3. God’s covenant with
Abraham (called Abram in these verses, but don’t worry about it) was more
complex. It was two-sided. Abraham has the obligation under the covenant to
leave his homeland and go to a place that God would show him. God has an
obligation under the covenant too. If Abraham does what God asks, then God will
bless him and make him a great nation. We are to infer, I think, that if
Abraham didn’t go God wouldn’t be obliged to perform God’s part of the covenant.
Abraham going where God sent him was a condition precedent to God’s obligation
to bless Abraham and make him a great nation. Conversely, if after Abraham had
satisfied the covenant’s condition precedent God failed to fulfill God’s
obligation to bless him and make a great nation of him, Abraham would, I
assume, be free to return home.
Hebrew scripture
is full of other passages in which the relationship between Israel and God is
seen in terms of covenants with mutual obligations. Consider for example Isaiah
5:1-10. There God uses the image of a vineyard to illustrate God’s relationship
with Israel. The vineyard represents Israel. God has established the vineyard
and has tended it lovingly. God has done everything God could do to make it
possible for the vineyard to flourish. God asks, “What more was there to do for
my vineyard that I have not done?” The question is rhetorical. The answer is of
course nothing. God has fully executed God’s covenantal responsibility to
Israel to do everything these is to do to allow Israel to prosper.
Israel has its
own obligation under this covenant. Isaiah expresses that obligation in terms
of God’s expectation of Israel, but we’re really dealing with more than an
expectation here. We’re dealing with a covenant obligation. God, the text says,
expected the vineyard to produce grapes. Israel’s obligation under the covenant
was to take advantage of all that God had done for it. God did everything
possible to facilitate Israel’s flourishing, to enable Israel to deliver to God
the fruit of a successful, faithful people.
Israel breached
that obligation. Isaiah expresses that breach quite tersely here, saying only
that God’s vineyard produced “wild grapes.” I don’t know just what the text
means by wild grapes, but apparently they are bad grapes rather than the good
grapes God expected. Israel has breached its contractual obligation to God to
produce good grapes. Israel was to be fruitful with all God had done for it. It
wasn’t. Israel breached its covenantal, contractual obligation to God.
This passage in Isaiah
doesn’t give any more information about the nature of Israel’s breach of its
covenantal obligations. We learn from other passages in Isaiah and other
ancient Hebrew prophets such as Amos and Micah that Israel breached its
obligations to God in various ways. The people worshipped other gods. The
rulers and the elite of society oppressed and exploited the poor and the
vulnerable among them. However they saw Israel’s breach of its covenantal
obligation with God, the Hebrew prophets thundered that breach its obligations
to God Israel certainly did.
In law when a
party to a contract breaches a contract the other party to the contract may sue
the breaching party, usually for money damages and occasionally for an order
compelling the breaching party to perform its obligations obligations under the
contract. It didn’t work quite that way with the covenant between God and
Israel, but Israel’s breach at least relieved God of God’s duty to protect
Israel from whatever threatened it. Our passage from Isaiah speaks of the
consequences of Israel’s breach in the metaphor of the destruction of the
vineyard. See Isaiah 5:5-6. We know that Assyria conquered and destroyed the
northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. We know that Babylon conquered
and destroyed the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE. The Hebrew
prophets saw these two disasters as the consequences of Israel’s and Judah’s
breaches of their contract with God. That relationship was conditional. The
people had breached their obligations to God. God was released from God’s
obligations to them.
Ancient Israel saw
its relationship with God as contractual, and Israel breached the terms of the
contract. The consequence was Israel’s destruction. What the consequence of a
breach of the covenant by God would be is less clear, I suppose because no one
in ancient Israel could conceive of God ever doing such a thing. We can assume,
I think, that if God ever stopped loving and caring for the Israelites, which
despite everything God never did, the Israelite people would be relieved of
their obligation to worship only the God Yahweh and would be free to worship
other gods without negative consequences from Yahweh. However that may be,
ancient Israel definitely thought of its relationship with God as covenantal,
that is, contractual, that is, conditional.
OK, but what
about us? How do we see our relationship with God as conditional? Well, the
Christian churches have taught their people that their relationship with God is
conditional in a couple of ways. The teachers of the Christian faith have far
too often over the centuries (even once being far too often) that if their
faith is strong enough, and if they pray hard enough, bad things won’t happen
to them or to their loved ones. That contention is terrible, destructive
theology, but what matters about it for our purposes here is that it makes our
relationship with God conditional. If we do the right things, most especially
if the do the right things of believing and praying hard enough, then God will
live up to God’s obligation to love and care for us by keeping bad things from
happening to us. If we don’t execute our obligations under the contract to do
that, then God is relieved of God’s obligation to care for us and keep bad
things from happening to us. The common notion that we can prevent bad things
from happening to us by believing and praying hard enough makes our
relationship with God conditional.
A great many
Christians complete this picture of a conditional relationship with God, in
effect, by violating their contractual obligation to believe in God and Jesus
Christ when they believe that God has not lived up to God’s side of the
bargain. An untold but enormous number of Christians have given up their faith
when bad things have happened to them, to a loved one, or even simply to so
many people in the world who suffer in this life. God, they think, didn’t
comply with God’s contractual obligation to take care of people, therefore they
are relieved of their obligation to believe in God, or so a great many people
have thought and continue to think. When we conceive of our relationship in
these terms that relationship it becomes perfectly contractual and conditional.
There is however
another way in which Christianity has made our relationship with God
conditional that is even more foundational for the faith than anything we have
considered so far. It is second of the two ways that Christianity has made our relationship
with God conditional that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. We make
salvation conditional. We make our relationship with God conditional when we
say God will save us if. We say we stand in God’s grace if. Different
varieties, what I once heard a wise woman call different flavors, of Christians
have asserted different ifs over the centuries. Some look to Bible passages
like James 2:14-17 with its famous line “faith by itself, if it has no works, is
dead” and say that God will save us it we do enough good works. Others look to
verses like Acts 16:31 with it line “believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be
saved,” or John 3:16 with its “so that everyone who believes in him may not
perish but may have eternal life” and say God will save us if we believe in
Jesus. Either way, salvation is conditional. There is something we must do in
order to be saved. If we fulfill our contractual obligation to God, God will
fulfill God’s contractual obligation to us and save us. That’s how conditional
salvation works. God’s obligation to save arises when the person needing
salvation fulfills a condition precedent to God’s obligation to save by doing
the right things or believing the right things. Christianity really has reduced
the concept salvation to that simplistic, human, contractual way of thinking.
Reducing our
relationship to God to a contract with mutual obligations has consequences for
how we see God. When we make our relationship with God in any way conditional
we fail to let God be God. I once heard a young seminarian say that what she learned
in seminary was that her God was too small. We humans make God too small all
the time. One of the primary ways that we make God too small is by applying our
human ways of doing things to God. We find an example of a prominent theologian
doing just that in Anselm of Canterbury’s book Cur Deus Homo?, the
classic statement of the classical theory of atonement. In that book Anselm
says that God cannot forgive human sin without a price being paid first because
human sin is such an affront to God’s honor. To this way of thinking a substitutionary
sacrificial atonement becomes a condition precedent to God forgiving human sin.
One of Anselm’s essential errors was to apply the human concept of honor as it
was understood in medieval Europe directly to God. In doing that Anselm made
God too small. He didn’t let God be God. He didn’t understand by how much God
transcends our human ways of being.
God just isn’t
that much like we are. God doesn’t do things our way. At Isaiah 55:8-9, we
read: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says
the Lord. For as the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts
than your thoughts.” We humans are so prone to forgetting that profound truth.
We keep wanting to make God as small and petty as we are. I think we’re afraid
of letting God be God, of letting God be as much more than we are as God really
is. When we understand just how transcendent of us God really is we know that
we can’t control God. We know that we can’t even ever fully understand God. We don’t
like not controlling or even understanding God, so we make God like us. We lock
God up in an ecclesiastical institution or in a book. We just seem to be determined
to make God too small.
That’s what we do
when we make our relationship with God conditional. It’s not hard to understand
why we do. Our lives are filled with conditional relationships with people we
want something from. We get paid if we work. We get medical care and education
if we can afford them. People sell us things or perform services for us if we pay
them. Sometimes our personal relationships are conditional too. I’ll be your
friend if you’re nice to me and not if you’re not. Parents may tell a child you’ll
get an allowance if you do your chores and won’t if you don’t. Sadly sometimes
even more intimate relationships are conditional. I’ll love you if you do what
I want and won’t if you don’t. We humans can make almost anything conditional.
So we make our
relationship with God conditional too. We can hardly imagine loving even the
people closest to us unconditionally. We certainly can’t imagine loving people
we don’t like or who we think are evil unconditionally. Jesus told us to love
our enemies. Most of us not only can’t do it, we don’t even want to do it. To
us love must be reciprocal. That is, it is conditioned on love in return. So we
make God’s love as conditional as ours is. To cite an extreme but common
example we can’t forgive Hitler, so we think God’s can’t or at least won’t and
shouldn’t forgive Hitler either. Again and again we reduce God to the human. We
make God too small. We think of God as engaging in the same kind of conditional
relationships that fill our lives. We don’t let God be God.
Well, here’s the
thing. Because God so infinitely transcends the human, with God no
relationships are conditional. With God there are no conditions precedent.
There can’t be because God is so much greater than we mere mortals. Yes, I
know. The words God and can’t don’t really belong together in the same
sentence, but I don’t know how else to express what I mean here. We condition
love. God doesn’t. Our love is limited. God’s love is limitless. Our love is
finite, God’s love is infinite. We think we have to be a certain way to earn
another person’s love, so we think we have to be a certain way to earn God’s
love. We put conditions precedent on love. God doesn’t. Our relationship with
God is perfectly unconditional. It’s way past time for us to stop reducing our
relationship with God to the human by making it conditional. It isn’t
conditional. With God there are no conditions precedent. There just aren’t. And
I for one say, thanks be to God! Amen.
[1] I
hope the legal nature of this analysis doesn’t put you off. I used to be a
lawyer. I took contract law in law school, so even though I haven’t practiced
law for years it’s still easy for me to think in legal terms. I do a good deal
of that in this analysis. I think it works. I hope you think it does too.
[2]
The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996),
208.
No comments:
Post a Comment