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A commenter recently remarked,
“Rather than “love,” this seems more like “making distinctions among yourselves” – a practice upon which the James to which you appeal would surely frown. To judge is not to love.”
Let us break this down. So basically, if to judge is not to love, love and judgment are irreconcilable, correct? If this be the case, then it follows, that God can either be one or the other at a given moment, as if God had multiple personalities in the tradition of modalism, or God revealing godself in different modes (albeit emotional states of being rather than just modes of being).
As a bible-affirming Christian, I cannot help but notice the dualism already inherent in such a statement. The commenter makes a common error. We either want are g*d to be bloodthirsty evil, conniving, and self-obsessed, or we want a deity that is super super nice to us, and affirms everything, rejecting nothing. I simply do not find value in either of these two worldviews. The first of which leads to dualism and absolute binaries (black/white, rich/poor, calvinist/arminian) while the other leads to universalism that seeks to eradicate differences between human persons (after all, that is what the hegemonic imperialist logic of universalism does). I find it no coincidence that the aforementioned commenter uncritically defends the Founders of the U.S., as if he speaks for them (I mean, along with all the other Tea partiers out there who have never read a lick of Alexander Hamilton, btw, otherwise they would shut up about states’ rights– another day, another time). After all, the Founders all are about the universal rights of white propertied men and the economic interests thereof.
Me thinks that arguments that appeal to love over and against justice are calls for sameness and uniformity, in the end, you see, for to act justly, in the biblical sense, to act in love on behalf of those who are different. Liberation theologians, for this reason, consider justice to start with God’s universal love for everyone by bestowing God’s grace on the oppressed. In the Hebrew Bible, time and again, the Israelites are commanded by God to take care of the widow, the orphan, and aliens in their midst. We see God reveal God’s majesty through the women in Elijah’s and Elisha’s lives, we see God choose Gideon, and subsequently Jepthah, and Saul, men who were of the least favored tribes of their days. It is not the outside (our material possessions, our reputations, our good looks) that matter, but what is on the inside, the heart. The God of the Bible has a heart for the impoverished of the land, because God’s eye is on the sparrow, and God examines every detail of society, and has compassion for those whom society rejects. The reason we cannot separate God’s love from God’s justice is because we must recognize God as Creator, and that God in the capacity of being our Creator, has rights over us, but God’s rights come as an extension of God’s love for us, in the act of creating us as free creatures to worship God. Human rights, which flow from the Creator for the purposes of the Creator, must necessarily be acknowledged as deriving from Love, which crowns humanity with freedom, who then in turn, has the right to life as a free gift from the God of the Living, above all.
This is why I must side with theologian James Cone in saying,
““Love without righteousness is unacceptable”
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Rod, your post here is all over the map so it’s hard to interact with it. Therefore, I will limit myself to your initial thrust.
I agree with you that God has both the right and the responsibility to judge us. And I also agree that this is fully compatible with His love for us. You took my quote out of context (where I was speaking of human beings judging one another in the way that Jesus and James condemned) and therefore you have only set up a straw-man argument between us on the initial point.
To stick with the direction you have taken the discussion, however, let me say that while we agree that God’s love is compatible with His justice, we disagree about how those two characteristics dovetail. You seem to say that that judgment triumphs over mercy because you do not seem to believe that everyone goes to heaven. I, on the other hand, believe that everyone going to heaven is an outworking of mercy triumphing over judgment (James 2:13). I keep coming back to James because you invoked him in your original post.
I write none of this in defense of Rob Bell who seems to flirt with a truth he is unwilling to proclaim. Rather, I write in defense of the cross of Jesus Christ. Blessed be He who loves us and who released us from our sins by His blood!. Let us walk before Him in fear and trembling all the days of our lives that we might avoid His judgments in this life and not be ashamed in the one to come.
I have not said “judgment triumphs over mercy,” where did I say that in this post? Mercy comes from God’s being love as well. Because of the Incarnation (God taking on a human body), Jesus has made justice & mercy between human beings possible, between Jew and Gentile, between rich and poor.
You are taking James 2:13 out of context, using only the latter half of the passage, that mercy will triumph over judgment. In fact Mike, in the passages above this one part of the passage you are proof-texting without context, it is about God judging us, and about us using the royal law (God’s objective standard) for judging human behavior. So, when Christ gives commandments such as “JUDGE THAT YE BE NOT JUDGED”, he is telling us to not use our human standards, which is what those who would reject the Royal Law, or Golden Rule are doing.
In fact, James 2, proves my argument as a whole. In James 2:1, it encourages the church to not show favoritism to the rich and elite (uh oh), but rather to the poor (2:6), otherwise we are ruining the reputation of Jesus Christ (James 2:7). So no, my post is not over the map, it is the outworking of passages such as James 2.
Thank you for this discussion by the way, for helping me connect the sayings of Jesus, the Royal Law/Golden Rule, and Judge not that ye be not judged.
There is much that you say with which I can agree.
Thanks for this. Reminds me of a weekend workshop I once attended with John Dominic Crossan where he said, “love without justice is banality, justice without love is brutality.” God’s justice, surely, does not exist without God’s mercy (and vice-versa).