[good]

Does believing that God is good mean that you have to disconnect from all rationality and a common definition of "good"?

Do you have to make excuses for your understanding of grace, the way some women defend an abuser? "Sure, he acts badly, he talks badly, but he really doesn't mean it. He's really good, you just don't understand him!"

I am struck by the lengths we'll go in order to protect our ideas, no matter how irrational they seem when checked against our other ideas. I've already written about my suspicions growing up that something didn't mesh with Strict Calvinism and Love, but what I'm struck by tonight is the disconnect between what we say God is like and the way we identify "his" actions.

"God is good, but he sends everyone who hasn't heard to hell, and you just have to disconnect those two things and let them coexist." Now, this is understandably the gross simplification of hundreds of well spoken, well intentioned people. But that's how it boiled down in my heart a little over a year ago. That's the reason I've seen intelligent people reject Christianity. This is the reason hurting people run from the very crowd who should be offering them hope and love and acceptance with riotous fervor.

I believe our human moral compass isn't perfect by any means. We justify and rationalize and selfishly protect. But we can also recognize some goodness across cultures. We differ on a few particulars, but not on the core. Why would we raise what, by definition, appears to be the opposite of all other definitions of goodness above the rest? (ie, say that God is good, but then connect all sorts of not-good things to him in order to protect his "sovereignty," and suddenly need to redefine "good.") Our understanding is less than than Ultimate Truth in many areas, but Ultimate Truth does exist as a concept that can be known in shadow. And when something would be reprehensible in human relationships, why are we so quick to assume God would act like that?

If a good parent wouldn't be dismissive, unwilling to listen to circumstantial evidence, non-controlling, or abusive, why do we claim God does these things and then excuse his bad behavior?

I've never been a Rob Bell-ite before, but I love the way he recognizes the dischord in the Evangelical Short Version Gospel. Speaking in New York this weekend, he said:
First off, millions and millions and millions of people, the fundamental way they were told about Jesus was, God loves you, God has a wonderful plan for your life, God loves you so much that God sent Jesus because God wants a relationship with you, and all you have to do is accept, trust, believe. If tonight, you reject what I’m saying to you right now, and you are hit on the car being home – which is, as Kanye West would say, an awkward way to start a conversation – but God would then have no choice but to punish you eternally with torment and fire in hell. So God would, in that split second, become a totally different being. If there was an earthly father who was like that, this one moment, this the next, we would call the authorities. Correct?

If God adopted me because he's good, if he delights in my playing and growth and love and study, if he comforts me in my pain and rescues me at personal cost, does he ever fly off the handle and change his mind because I mess up or even willfully disobey? Does God's love stop the moment you die if you haven't said the right things or listened to the right people? Does God change his mind about people that fast? Is that the kind of God I can trust?

I am a child, I want to be a child, and I need a dad I can trust.

Why are we unwilling to see any disconnect there? Why are Evangelicals defending this position so resolutely, when it does not make longitudinal sense? Why focus so much on the doctrine of Hell-as-a-place-of-fire that you lose people who would be attracted to a fulfilling-abundant-life-free-kingdom?

Jesus' critiques and culturally apocalyptic statements were never about sinners, but about those who claimed to know God, but were using their own goodness and oppression of others to hold him captive.

Bell continues: And my experience as a pastor, answering real questions from real people, is that lots of people have really really really toxic dangerous, psychologically devastating images of God in their head. Images of a God who’s not good. So my experience has been, lots of people go to church, they sing the songs, they hand out the pamphlets, they really want…but to be honest, deep down they have profound ambivalence about God. So we can talk about the Bible, we can talk about Heaven and Hell, we can discuss all this, but at its core – the question behind the question behind the question, the mystery behind the mystery behind the mystery – they have a view of a God who is terrible, that they can’t even imagine being loving, or wanting anything to do with.

And over and over and over again, I’ve interacted with people who, sort of, “Okay, I realize you brought me this question, but what do you really think is behind this? Who is the God behind?” You end up with them saying, Actually, I think the universe might be a really awful place. It might be terribly unsafe. God might be like my abusive father.” So I think it’s really important that we talk about this because what happens is, sometimes people are talking about good news, they’re talking about Jesus, and yet you’re smelling the God behind it, going “Whatever you're talking about, the God behind that, I can’t trust, is not good.” So in some senses, God being good is such a fresh, radical, new idea.

God being good, truly good, absolutely trustworthy, is a radically new idea to me. And I've been a saved-from-the-fire-prayed-the-prayer-baptist since I was four. That's one of my earliest memories. And I don't remember being guilted into committing my four year old self and understanding to Jesus. I remember the shape of the bunkbeds, the sound of the rocking chair that creaked even on carpet, sitting in my mom's lap, my feet up on the railing, and in a tiny, four year old heart, I remember love.

The guilt and panic and saying the prayer at every church event, with every invitation at the end of Christian videos, and whenever I was bad, that came later. But that earliest memory of me and God was happy, safe, and realizing I wanted more love. I wanted to love back, because I felt loved.

Please don't misunderstand me. I have not given up on theology, faith, or study; I have blown my definition of God wide open to a great increase in all of those things. My feelings about God aren't God. My heard doctrines about God are not God. I have not made my feelings or doctrines my god. God is complex and mysterious to a large extent, but also knowable and relatable on many levels. This is what Jesus came to show humanity: Who God Is. And my feelings about God reveal who I think God is and give me opportunity to adjust my feelings to HIS reality.

I need a logical, lovable God. Not a weak one who ignores the need for consequences, but one who takes the consequences himself. I need Jesus. He's the only kind of God I could trust with my life.

I don't understand much, but I understand good when I see it in this world and I love the God who is all that and more. I don't believe in a God who is vindictive or who turns away willingness or ignorance; I believe a God who is trustworthy to be good far beyond my view. When I suspect not-goodness, when I feel that tightening in my chest of disbelief or anger about tragedy, I know sin and evil and choice caused it, not God. God will get involved to redeem it, because of his great love. But he didn't cause it, he set up a world where it was possible, because that's what love requires. I don't have to suspend definitions to tell what God is like. I use my common understanding of morality as a sign to see what is God and what is not.

Seeing him like this is totally new. And totally abundant-life-giving. Total freedom to throw myself passionately into active Love.

I'm a real person with real questions and I had a devastatingly awful view of God. I hadn't believed Good News, because I didn't know it. I called Bad News Good News, and this was an error. The Good News isn't about who's in and out, it's about a world turned upside down by pain and compound selfishness being righted. It's about the Good I can join in right now that will exist into eternity. It's about choices and chances.

It's about our good, gracious, trustworthy Dad, who is working to set all thing right for the sake of Love.