Our God is Too Small

 

Our God is Too Small

June 5, 2021

 

At 2 Corinthians 5:14 Paul says, “For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.” NRSV When I read that line recently my first thought was, “Good Lord, I sure hope not!” I don’t think I or much of anyone else would fare very well before the judgment seat of Christ. But then I got to thinking a bit more about the image of Christ and by implication God that that line gives us. It is the image of God as judge. It is a commonplace in popular Christianity that God is going to judge all of us after we die. That commonplace usually continues saying that if we’ve been good our souls will got heaven, but if we’ve been bad our souls will go to hell. (As if all of us weren’t a bit of both good and bad.) Paul doesn’t say that explicitly at 2 Corinthians 5:14, but surely we can imply that meaning behind Paul’s words without at all misreading him.

Christians do commonly see God as a cosmic judge who metes out reward or punishment depending on how we have behaved during our life on earth, but here’s the thing. Seeing God as judge makes God too small. When we see God as a judge we’ve taken an image and a role from our human lives and projected them onto God. God as judge is human judge writ large. It’s writ large, but it still makes God too small because it makes God too human; and there is a significant theological problem with making God too human. Theologians often say that God is and must be totaliter aliter, Latin for totally other. Totally other that is from life in creation. God is infinite, and the only way we can conceptualize something infinite is to see it as totally other than us, infinite being the last thing we creatures are. A judge writ large may be different from a human judge, but God as judge still is not totally other than a human judge. God as judge writ large is still performing a function that is the same as the function of a human judge. Judging is a human concept. It is something humans do with other humans. God cannot be a judge without acting like a human being, albeit perhaps applying different standards than a human judge would. God is not and cannot be a human being (other than for the thirty years or so that God was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth while Jesus was alive on earth). So God is not and cannot be any kind of judge.

I can hear people responding to me, “Wait a minute! You mean we aren’t judged after we die for what we’ve done during our earthly lives? How can that be? It means that we can do whatever the hell we want on earth and just get away with it, doesn’t it?” I respond that just as God is not a human judge writ large, so God’s sense of justice is not human conceptions of justice writ large. God’s justice is totaliter aliter from human justice. It has to be because if it isn’t it’s human justice not divine justice. Moreover, we Christians don’t confess that God is justice. We confess that God is love, and just as God’s justice must be totaliter aliter from human justice, so God’s love must be totaliter aliter from human love. We know God is love, but we really cannot know what God’s love is. We just know that God’s love must be so much more than human love that it becomes something other than human love altogether. Human justice demands punishment for wrongdoing. Divine justice can’t and doesn’t demand punishment for wrongdoing. Human love is limited. It is conditional. It ends when a relationship turns bad. God’s love is unlimited. It is unconditional. It never ends. It has to be that way because otherwise it is too human, it is not totaliter aliter. If we think God’s justice and love are like human justice and love, we have made our God too small.

OK, at least perhaps. But doesn’t that still mean that anything goes during our lives because there’s no eternal punishment even if we do really, really bad things? Actually no, it doesn’t. Seeing God this way doesn’t remove all motivation for us to be good, but it does change what that motivation is. The motivation for good behavior in the traditional Christian view of God as judge is fear. We behave ourselves because we’re afraid of the eternal consequences if we don’t. Fear is quite frankly a lousy motive for good behavior. We’re afraid because we’re afraid of God and what God, we think, is going to do with us after we die. Yet we say God is love. Even with human love we don’t use it to make people afraid of us. God doesn’t use divine love to make us afraid of God either. A God we fear is once again too small a God. That God behaves like a human being, albeit a human being writ large. That’s not how God is. It is how God simply cannot be.

So what is our motivation to behave ourselves in this life? When we really get it about God’s love we cannot help but respond to that love with love. Love of God, neighbor (understood as everyone), and ourselves. Think about it. If God loves us totally, unconditionally, eternally (which God truly does), how can we not respond by living the way we understand God wants us to live at least as much as we are able? We can’t not respond that way. That’s the true motivation of a person of faith to live a morally and ethically appropriate life. So yes, when we truly understand God this way our motivation to live decent lives changes, but it doesn’t disappear. It actually becomes a motivation for proper living far more appropriate to a person of faith than fear is.

We humans make our God too small all the time. We project human characteristics onto God in utterly inappropriate ways. We may think that with God our human ways are writ large, that with God they may be in some way infinite, but we still project onto God things that are only human blown way up. When we think that way we make God too small. A small God is not God. When we make God small we don’t let God be God. It’s way past time for us to get over it. May it be so.