CONSUMING
FIRE
Old Testament Reading: Isaiah
6:1-7
New Testament Reading: Romans
1:16-25
In his 1935 essay "The Revelation
of God's Wrath," Gunther Bornkamm wrote, "It is a generally observed fact
that in Romans 1:17f. Paul describes the revelation of God's righteousness
in the gospel and the revelation of wrath on all godlessness and
unrighteousness of men with parallel phrases: 'For in it the righteousness
of God is revealed through faith for faith... For the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men,' etc.
... But how, then, are the two apparently opposing revelations in vv. 17
and 18 related to each other?"
You may find Bornkamm's lucid and persuasive answer to that question
elsewhere in his essay if you wish, but as for me, when I read this, what
immediately sprang to mind was the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo
Thodol. (I am afraid this is the kind of sermon you are liable to get when
your pastor is studying New Testament and teaching Comparative Religion at
the same time!)
The underlying issue here seems to be the broad theological question of
the wrath or justice of God and how it relates to the saving love of God.
Is there a relation? Or do we just lop off God's love,
as in some old-time Puritanism? Or shall we eliminate the severity of God
as Liberal Protestantism has done? Or would you prefer that combination of
the two characteristic of revivalism with its cheek-by-jowl preaching of
Hell's horrors and a God who walks with you in the garden, whispering
sweet nothings in your ear? This is what someone has called "brimstone and
treacle."
I believe that the old theologians were right: God is essentially simple
and single in being. He does not bear the divine attributes like so many
necks sprouting from the body of the Hydra. The differentiation we see in
God is a result of what Shankara called the upadhis, or the conditions of
finitude. We see the whole and eternal God as if he were a finite being
analogous to ourselves, with distinguishable parts. We are really seeing
the clear light broken up by the prism of finitude into the color-bands of
the spectrum. But that is the only way we can see the light. And two of
those color-bands are God's wrath and his love.
How do we see them? How do we
become aware of them? Mostly, I think, we do not. We just believe in them,
or take them for granted. Not that they cannot be experienced. Indeed
there is a chorus of witness that testifies otherwise. And if for us their
experience is second-hand, I fear it will have to do until you and I
experience them for ourselves.
When you compare the reports of mystics and prophets through the ages, as
Rudolf Otto did, you find that they unite in the conviction that, as the
Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, "our God is a consuming fire."
That is, to face the Holy is a
terrifying experience, a soul-shaking trauma. How could it not be? We are
talking about an unimaginable Entity "before whom [as Shankara says] all
words recoil." God is that Power before whom the very nations of the earth
are as grains of sand.
Though we are made in God's
image, in another sense he is Wholly Other. Where we are finite, God is
infinite! If we are temporal, living for a miserable handful of years, God
is eternal! Where we are pitifully contingent, liable to be snuffed out by
a careening truck or a rampaging disease cell, God is gloriously absolute
and invulnerable!
To see him is to see the utter
contradiction of everything we are! One seems to face a destroying
tempest, and the only fit reaction is Isaiah's: "Woe is me! For I am
undone! For my eyes have seen the Lord of Hosts!" To glimpse that terrible
majesty, that limitless power which by its very nature threatens to sweep
us away, is to feel, as it were, the wrath of God.
Yet the revelation of his wrath
is also the revelation of love divine, all loves excelling! Love from
heaven to earth come down! Because in that vastness, that ocean of being,
that plenitude of life, we find precisely that which we in our finitude
and our misery lack! There is the fountain of life! If only one might
bathe in it! Oh to be baptized in that Spirit!
So at one and the same time we
see revealed the wrath and the love of God! For they are the same! They
are simply the consuming fire that is God! And here is the great secret:
"It purifies or destroys according to the proportion of chaff there is in
you to be burnt away!"
I am saying that whether the fire
of God is wrath or love lies largely in the eye of the beholder. And I
suspect that this is nowhere better said than in the Book of the Dead.
Perhaps you know that this once-secret scripture of Vajrayana Buddhism is
a guidebook to the beyond, read by a priest to the about-to-die or the
newly dead. It purports to provide a blow-by-blow description of precisely
what one will see on the other side, so as to facilitate safe passage to
salvation. As Paul Tillich lay dying, Hannah read to him from this text.
At a certain point one is warned
that one is about to meet up with a series of visions of the Peaceful and
then the Wrathful Deities. These are the great celestial Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas seen under two aspects. At first they will seem benign and
Olympian, then demonic and hellish. You are urged:
O nobly born, whatever fear and
terror may come to thee ...
forget not these words; and,
bearing this meaning at heart, go forwards: in them lieth the vital
secret of recognition:
Alas! When the Uncertain
Experiencing of Reality is dawning upon me here,
With every thought of fear or
terror or awe for all [apparitional appearances] set aside, May I recognize whatever
[visions] appear, as the reflections of mine own consciousness;
May I know them to be of the
nature of apparitions in the {Intermediate State}:
When at this all-important moment [of opportunity] of achieving a great
end,
May I not fear the bands of Peaceful and Wrathful [Deities], mine own
thought-forms. The deities ... are not come
from somewhere else: they exist from eternity within the faculties of
thine own intellect. Know them to be of that nature.
They wear the clothing you put
upon them! They seem wrathful or peaceful according as to whether good or
evil karma predominates in you! That is, your own life has set a pair of
spectacles of a particular shade on your nose, and through them you will
see the deities under a peaceful or wrathful aspect. If you see wrathful
beings, it is literally your evil deeds coming back to haunt you!
Even so, I suggest, God is being
revealed to you in the gospel, but whether it comes to you as divine wrath
or divine love depends on you and what you bring to that moment.
And really I think it is less a
matter of moralism, the good guys versus the bad guys, than it is a matter
of greater or lesser "maturity".
Have you ever heard of Kohlberg's
theory of the stages of moral development? He maps out how moral reasoning
evolves as one grows up ("if" one grows up!). In the early stages, we do
what our parents tell us because we want a hug or a cookie, or because
Santa Claus is coming to town. Morality is dog school obedience. We're in
it for the Milk Bone, and that's all. Later, in the MTV stage, we define
right and wrong by the behavior of the herd, our peers.
Without going through the whole
schema, let me just say that one of the earlier stages is that in which
fear of punishment is the chief motive for morality. Much conventional
Christianity never
grew beyond this stage, what with all the threats of hell.
Many people have been converted
under "turn or burn" preaching -- and then, thank God!, matured to one of
Kohlberg's higher levels, that on which one does what is right simply
because it is right, or simply out of gratitude toward God -- because one
loves God.
One of my favorite glimpses of
the early church is that of a debate between Tertullian and Apelles.
Tertullian believed in hell; Apelles did not. And Tertullian just could
not understand this! No hell? he asked Apelles. Then why not kill? Why not
steal? All Apelles had to say in reply was "God forbid! God forbid!" Of
the two, Tertullian is the one whom Church historians call "orthodox," but
the "heretic" was the one more morally mature.
It is the religiously immature
person for whom God is primarily an object of wrath and fear. The impious
person cares nothing for God's law, but by the same token, neither does he
fear the "judgment" of God! It is the one whom Paul called the "weaker
brother" who lives in fear of the God he worships.
He has not yet, as John puts it,
come to trust the love God has for us. In his heart love has not yet been
made sufficiently perfect to cast out all fear.
God is a fire that consumes the
chaff, that smelts out the impurities. And do you know how he does this?
By forgiving and loving the sinner with a rehabilitating love. A love that
gives such a confidence of love that the son or daughter will never think
to turn prodigal again.
Not that we ever lose that
dialectic: God for us must always remain an object of awe. Any true
glimpse of him will remind us of this! We can not have a pat or
comfortable "buddy" relationship with God. That is the familiarity that
breeds contempt.
Indeed if we lose sight of his
terrible holiness, we will lose sight of his love, too. For we will forget
the great immeasurable abyss his saving love had to cross.
So what of Bornkamm's question?
How to relate the revelation of the righteous wrath of God and of the
saving love of God? As his love, shown in Jesus Christ, saves from his
wrath, his wrath becomes the raging fire of his love. Because in Christ he
has opened our eyes to recognize that what we thought was his wrath was
ever but his love, which once we feared.
Robert M. Price
Copyright©2004 by Robert
M Price
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