You are not free to think of God in any other way than how He has revealed Himself

Recently I was reading through a little work entitled Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology by I. Howard Marshall (Emeritus Professor of New Testament  Exegesis and Honorary Research Professor at the University of Aberdeen). In reading I was struck by a passage concerning how we think about or understand God and what he does, particularly as concerns his justice in relation to the imagery used by Jesus in the parables. Marshall writes:

There would be universal agreement among civilized people that no human being should perpetrate horrors of the kind described in the parabolic imagery; those who do so are branded as war criminals and are guilty of crimes against humanity…

It is incredible that God should so act…But we can no longer think of God in that way, even if this is imagery used by Jesus. Our basis lies in a mind nurtured by the Spirit, the mind of Christ, which has taught us that such behaviour is unacceptable among human beings and that it cannot be justified in the case of God by saying that he is free to act differently from believers. True, we must leave vengeance to God (Rom. 12:19), but that does not mean that he carries out vengeance in this kind of way. For God to be a just judge means precisely that he is not like the human tyrants portrayed in the parables. We therefore have to say that while the parables warn of the inescapable reality of divine judgement, their imagery must not be pressed too far.

The big picture is fairly obvious: this is about decontextualizing Jesus’ parables to make their references to judgement more palatable to modern readers. Going into the details of Marshall’s argument, several flaws presented themselves as I asked various questions of the segment. Is the sanitized understanding of justice in the first paragraph’s earth-bound parallel anything more than theoretical, or say, in World War II was it just London that was blitzed, and not Berlin? Is it not presumptive to assume that the reader is “on the same page” by confidently asserting ‘we can no longer think of God in that way?’ Why can we no longer think of God in this way? Is it even appropriate for us to independently decide that we are free to think about God in this or that way depending on how we feel? God does not, he says, carry out vengeance in the manner in which Jesus says he does – really? We have proof of this? (Said proof will have to avoid the Old Testament, and God the Son Incarnate, the very Jesus who told the parables, being given up to die as a naked, butchered, crucified man to wash away the sinner’s filthiness and to satisfy the wrath of the Father). Is Jesus saying that God is like the human tyrants of the parables anyway…or is his point actually that God’s judgement is righteously worse toward unrepentant unbelievers – a ‘how much more then’ type scenario? I could go on, but suffice it to say I had questions. To be more precise, concerns. Really, to be fully honest, they were conclusions.

I was pleased to find that I was not alone, and someone had responded in a more scholarly fashion than my somewhat disorganized musings. The same volume contained an essay written by Kevin Vanhoozer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in response to Marshall. In it, he writes

Marshall wants Christians to get “beyond” genocide. So do I. But I am not prepared to say that God’s judgement of the world, or of nations, is “intrinsically wrong” if it involves killing people. Marshall is doing more than “reconsidering,” it seems to me, when he says that we “can no longer think of God in that way.” Unless we are prepared to jettison significant portions of the Old Testament (or to revise their meaning in the light of contemporary sensitivities), this way of going beyond Scripture has more of Marcion than of Marshall about it. For it really is not about numbers. If Marshall is to be consistent, he should say that God does not have the right to take a single life. After all, that is unacceptable human behaviour, and we cannot justify God “by saying that he is free to act differently from believers.” On the contrary, I think we must say that God is indeed free to act differently from believers. The Creator is bound not by the laws that he has imposed upon creation, but by his own nature. To confuse God’s love with our culturally conditioned imitations is to go beyond the Bible not biblically, but culturally. Finally, if we are shocked by images of judgement, what are we to make of the cross? Even after the fervent prayers of a righteous man in a garden in Gethsemane, the Father did not remove the cup of judgement.

Marshall’s decontextualization is really just a subtle form of the old liberal agenda of demythologization. The logical step from questioning God’s word to questioning God’s nature is obvious in the quoted fragment: it starts by questioning the profitable nature of the parabolic teaching on judgement and finishes by denying that God would actually judge people in the way represented in Scripture.

Such arrogance! But leave the world of theological academics for a moment. What about the way in which we view God, or any aspect of his revelation for that matter? To read the Bible with the ‘we can no longer think of _ in that way’ mentality is to elevate ourselves above God and his word, and to pass judgement on his work. This is even done subtly when we read his word and like to think that God is saying _ , or we feel that God is telling us _, or we are not sure we fully accept or agree with _, when in reality these thoughts and feelings are conjured up by ourselves in our own heads, or worse. There is even a link in all of this to the popular ‘God told me (insert something completely unfounded in and even contradictory to Scripture)’ line. If it is inconsistent with the Word, it might be asked:

Or, if you like a more head on approach:

There is nothing free about trying to bind the Word of God into the mold of your sensitive earth-bound existence. There is nothing liberating about lying - to others or to yourself - about who God is, what God does, what God says, and what he means when he says it. You are not free to think of God in any other way than how He has revealed Himself. Jesus did not say that by seeking the truth you will feel something to be true or you will think something is true. He said 'you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free' (Jn. 8:32).