Easy Answers

Recently a friend of mine has been wrestling with the question of how the God of Christianity, a God of love who looks upon all of mankind as His children, can ever abandon any of those children, ever send them to Hell.  As a father he says that nothing that his children do could ever make him abandon them and reasons that as God is a better father than he is such is unquestionably true of Him.  As I considered this issue it caused me to take a second look at why it is that Christ does and will rain such terrible judgment on the very ones that He died to take their punishment away.  It seems to me from the Prophets that the sins that chiefly anger Our Lord are when we harm our brothers and sisters, His other children.  And so I rephrased the question that has been so much on Al's mind.  How could a God who loves His children so much, ever forgive, ever fail to avenge His children on those who hurt them?  If one of your children, your beloved children, rose up as a Cain and slew another as much beloved, where does that leave you?

I have written about Cain and Abel before, but it seems that I neglected to consider it from a crucial point of view, that of Adam and Eve.  The parents who can never stop loving Cain are also the parents who can never stop loving Abel.  When God banished Cain, sentenced him to be a fugitive, who do you think the instruments of that divine justice were?  It must surely have been his parents.  They drove out the child, the firstborn of all humanity, that they had had such hope for.  They made their first son the first villain.  This, I think, is the abyss that God, that Christ, finds Himself always staring into.  I won't bother proving to you that we are all Cains, that the anger God feels towards you and I is the same that Adam must have felt towards Cain.  We must take that as a given if we consider the lofty duties we have to our brothers and our behavior towards them.  He calls us the apple of His eye and swears that He will not forgive those who hurt us(Zechariah 2) and will He Himself do us the greatest harm that anyone could do another, that is eternal damnation?  I said that a parent in this situation is staring into an abyss and I was going to say that I hope that we don't ever find ourselves in that situation, but that isn't true.

For as long as I can remember I have had all of the answers.  Answers have always come easy for me, including answers to religious questions.  I received a pretty full and complete faith from my parents, my grandparents, and numerous teachers of all sorts.  I never had questions about how God could send sinners to Hell because I knew all of the proofs of it in the Bible.  I believed all of the right things because I was afraid if I didn't I would go to Hell.  But what if Christianity isn't about the right answers or the right responses?

I can think of one man who would have understood Adam's pain immediately and deeply, the prophet Hosea.  Hosea watched his wife going out whoring(whether sexually or through idolatry makes no difference in this context), He must have begged, pleaded, and threatened; must have used everything he had or was to try and straighten her up.  And, if I have read his story rightly, there came a day when He had to watch her leaving, and what's more taking the children with her.  I don't know what kind of a man, what kind of a husband or father, Hosea was, but can there be any doubt about the distress he must have felt at the thought of his children being raised by a crack whore mom in the religion which had brought her to that place?  He must have felt that the day would come when his children would be unrecognizable to him, and perhaps unrecognizing of him.  I can't draw a picture for you of the anguish he must have felt at the thought of the boy he named "Not my son" no longer being his son, of the thought that next time he saw his daughter "No mercy" he would not have mercy on her because of what she had become.

Hosea understood Adam's pain, but more to the point He understood Christ's pain.  And that is the point.  The answers have come too easily to us.  We have reached the zenith of religion.  We have had faith because only faith could guarantee our acceptance.  We have gone beyond faith, to it we have added on top Calvinism or speaking in tongues, great knowledge of the Bible and church history, we have added our stupid works.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of religion but faith is not.  Faith is the end.  In 100 years of true devotion, Abraham got no further than faith, barely found faith.  To believe in the resurrection of the dead, of Isaac, is the farthest he ever got, yet it is where we are told we must begin.  We have received the content of our life ready made from our parents, without the dread, the fear and trembling, that Adam and Abraham and Hosea knew so well.  Why did these men have to go through so much?  Because they were elect, beloved of God, as you and I are.  Because it is the only way to KNOW God.  I find in Hosea's words a more beautiful understanding of God than is anywhere else recorded, and it only came through the horror of staring into Hell.

And she conceived again and bore a daughter. Then God said to him:

“Call her name Lo-Ruhamah(literally No Mercy),
For I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel,
But I will utterly take them away.
Yet I will have mercy on the house of Judah,
Will save them by the Lord their God,
And will not save them by bow,
Nor by sword or battle,
By horses or horsemen.”

Now when she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she conceived and bore a son.Then God said:

“Call his name Lo-Ammi(Not my Son),
For you are not My people,
And I will not be your God.

“Yet the number of the children of Israel
Shall be as the sand of the sea,
Which cannot be measured or numbered.
And it shall come to pass
In the place where it was said to them,
‘You are not My people,’
There it shall be said to them,
‘You are sons of the living God.’
Then the children of Judah and the children of Israel
Shall be gathered together,
And appoint for themselves one head;
And they shall come up out of the land,
For great will be the day of Jezreel!

Say to your brethren, ‘My people,’
And to your sisters, ‘Mercy is shown.’

“Bring charges against your mother, bring charges;
For she is not My wife, nor am I her Husband!
Let her put away her harlotries from her sight,
And her adulteries from between her breasts;
Lest I strip her naked
And expose her, as in the day she was born,
And make her like a wilderness,
And set her like a dry land,
And slay her with thirst.

“I will not have mercy on her children,
For they are the children of harlotry.
For their mother has played the harlot;
She who conceived them has behaved shamefully.
For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
Who give me my bread and my water,
My wool and my linen,
My oil and my drink.’

“Therefore, behold,
I will hedge up your way with thorns,
And wall her in,
So that she cannot find her paths.
She will chase her lovers,
But not overtake them;
Yes, she will seek them, but not find them.
Then she will say,
‘I will go and return to my first husband,
For then it was better for me than now.’
For she did not know
That I gave her grain, new wine, and oil,
And multiplied her silver and gold—
Which they prepared for Baal.

“Therefore I will return and take away
My grain in its time
And My new wine in its season,
And will take back My wool and My linen,
Given to cover her nakedness.
Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers,
And no one shall deliver her from My hand.
I will also cause all her mirth to cease,
Her feast days,
Her New Moons,
Her Sabbaths—
All her appointed feasts.

“And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees,
Of which she has said,
‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me.’
So I will make them a forest,
And the beasts of the field shall eat them.
I will punish her
For the days of the Baals to which she burned incense.
She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry,
And went after her lovers;
But Me she forgot,” says the Lord.

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Will bring her into the wilderness,
And speak comfort to her.
I will give her her vineyards from there,
And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope;
She shall sing there,
As in the days of her youth,
As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.

“And it shall be, in that day,”
Says the Lord,
“That you will call Me ‘My Husband,’
And no longer call Me ‘My Master,’
For I will take from her mouth the names of the Baals,
And they shall be remembered by their name no more.
In that day I will make a covenant for them
With the beasts of the field,
With the birds of the air,
And with the creeping things of the ground.
Bow and sword of battle I will shatter from the earth,
To make them lie down safely.

“I will betroth you to Me forever;
Yes, I will betroth you to Me
In righteousness and justice,
In lovingkindness and mercy;
I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness,
And you shall know the Lord. Hosea 1:6-2:20

In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be … going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows … except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further...

To be sure, Mary bore the child miraculously, but it came to pass with her after the manner of women, and that season is one of dread, distress and paradox. To be sure, the angel was a ministering spirit, but it was not a servile spirit which obliged her by saying to the other young maidens of Israel, "Despise not Mary. What befalls her is the extraordinary." But the Angel came only to Mary, and no one could understand her. After all, what woman was so mortified as Mary? And is it not true in this instance also that one whom God blesses He curses in the same breath? This is the spirit's interpretation of Mary, and she is not (as it shocks me to say, but shocks me still more to think that they have thoughtlessly and coquettishly interpreted her thus)–she is not a fine lady who sits in state and plays with an infant god. Nevertheless, when she says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord"–then she is great, and I think it will not be found difficult to explain why she became the Mother of God. She has no need of worldly admiration, any more than Abraham has need of tears, for she was not a heroine, and he was not a hero, but both of them became greater than such, not at all because they were exempted from distress and torment and paradox, but they became great through these...

If worse comes to worst, a doubter, even though by talking he were to bring down all possible misfortune upon the world, is much to be preferred to these miserable sweet-tooths who taste a little of everything, and who would heal doubt without being acquainted with it, and who are therefore usually the proximate cause of it when doubt breaks out wildly and with ungovernable rage.

-from S. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling