A Commentary On A Good Article

I highly recommend this blog post from a PATHEOS site:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2013/03/the-lost-shepherd-and-the-amoral-love-of-god/

Hat tip: Kevin Tones

My commentary on this:
The writer is correct about the extravagant, and what I have called 'stupid' love of God. God's love, strictly speaking, doesn't make sense. It violates all our categories of reasonable behavior. I do not think it could speak to the full range of human experience if it did not do this. I recently wrote about the Apollonian, rationalistic approach to life and my own distaste for it (http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/09/decadence-and-pride.html). Evil is inviting in part because it breaks us out of the boxes others impose upon it. Sin, then, is a distorted, wrongly-directed affirmation of life. Similarly, St. Augustine said that all sin is misdirected love.

Christ's message, if it is to speak to the same depth of life that Niebuhr talked about when evaluating the Greek tragedies (http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/09/from-reinhold-niebuhrs-beyond-tragedy.html ), must reinforce our sense that we are being freed from something. It must reach beyond the simple rational consistency of the ethical. Kierkegaard, when writing about Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, spoke of the 'teleological suspension of the ethical', the meaning of life transcends the moral law. Christ's love, and the love of the God Christ taught us about, must reach beyond what is simply rationally consistent and in some way offend our reason. It must be a love beyond words if it is truly to appeal to the human spirit.

But there is something vital that the writer lacks. He is a Christian, but he writes more like a Jew than a Christian. Why? Because his analysis lacks a vital element: the cross. Kazoh Kitamori would say that this is the love of God without the pain of God. Kitamori cried out, "God let me never know your love without knowing your love rooted in your pain." The pain of God is beyond mercy and justice. It is the unspeakable reality that can only be spoken of in terms of the lesser 'forms' of mercy and justice. God's love and God's pain are not simple rational truths that can be formulated in precise terms. They reach beyond words, and can only be experienced or symbolized. The Cross is love, but it is also pain.

The threat to the meaningfulness of our actions, implicit in this blog post, is missing from the Gospels. The Gospels take right and wrong with the utmost seriousness, a seriousness that the writer at best gives lip service to in this post. What is never made clear, and perhaps can never really be 'made clear' is how this moral seriousness can coexist with the extravagant, senseless love that both confuses us and draws us in. The best way to understand this is through the image of the cross itself. The pain of God is expressed by us in terms of both mercy and justice. Those are the limited, imperfect human attempts at talking about the cross. What we do, right or wrong, may not ever rob us of God's love. God's love is amoral, this is true enough. But morality is not thereby robbed of it's meaning. In fact, it is given a deeper meaning. For whatever we do is visited upon the one who loves us. God's being, not His mind, is the source of our judgment.

What we do matters, it matters because God in His majesty has made Himself vulnerable to us. We hurt or help God with our actions. As I have said before: the pain of God is infinitely more important than my own personal destiny. If my sins hurt God, then that means my sins matter more than if they condemned me to eternal damnation. The fact of the matter is that the extravagant, 'amoral' love of God leads to a deepening of moral 'weight', for God's love leads Him to expose Himself to suffering. That suffering is the real substance of sin, and the only reasonable motivation for my running from sin. Alternatively virtue, the helping of God, has infinitely more value because God's loving vulnerability than it would if it were a 'stairway to heaven'. God's love is extravagant, and just as extravagant is the suffering of God. To know God's love without God's pain is to live not in mystery but confusion. To know both the love and pain of God is to stand before that mystery.