Questions II

As I mentioned in last week's post, we held a "Question and Answer" weekend at St. Paul's recently, and Pastor Karen and I fielded written questions from the various congregations during our five weekly worship services. The questions we didn't have time to address are the subject of this Blog over the next few weeks. Here are a couple more questions:

If God is perfect, why did God allow sin and an angel to become Satan?

And related to that:

Does God forgive Satan?

The second question is a little like the questions the sophists asked during the Dark Ages: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? or Can God make a rock too big for God to lift?

Does God forgive Satan? Or put it in "Christian" terms, Does the redemptive power of Jesus extend even to Satan? Of course, the answer is unknowable. Could God forgive Satan? God can forgive anybody. What of the redemptive power of Jesus being able to bail Satan's butt out? Yes, I'm sure the redemptive power of the Christ Event could even redeem the devil. But beyond this wild speculation, we just don't know, nor do we need to. What we DO know is that God forgives any human who asks, and that the redemptive action of Jesus is able to transform anyone who desires for it to happen. The Bible is our main source for any information about God, and it does not address the question, Does God forgive Satan?

The first question, If God is perfect, why did God allow sin and an angel to become Satan? is much more interesting.

What do we mean when we say God is perfect? Are we using human understandings of perfection? Greek philosophical categories of perfection? The Hebrew descriptions of God in the Old Testament talk of a God who "mixes it up" with the human creation: arguing with Moses (and losing some of those arguments!); wrestling with Jacob; getting angry at Israel's lame-brain actions; and playing a game of "Survivor" with a guy named Job. This is not the "god" of Greek philosophy who is the "unmoved mover," or the Greek Gnostic construct of God who is so perfect and "pure" that God has to be in "a galaxy far, far away" from the human condition because God's utter perfection doesn't let God be any where near sin. While the writers of the Hebrew scriptures may be accused of overly anthropomorphizing God (applying human characteristics to deity), the reality of God's interactions with the Jews and which Christians through the coming of Jesus DO seem to demonstrate a God who chooses to relate to the human creation quite actively. I don't think we can say God is perfect anymore than the Bible does. The Bible talks of God's WAYS being perfect, although a better way to say it might be: "God's ways are perfected." Another text in the Psalms says "God's WORKS are perfect." Well, I would expect that God is pretty good at what God chooses to do. What, then, does the Bible say about God being "perfect"?

It says that God is LOVE, and that perfect LOVE casts out all fear. What is perfect about God is God's LOVE. Now that is something you can take to the bank. Perfect love "never leaves us or forsakes us." Perfect love is patient, kind, etc. Perfect love always holds out the offer of forgiveness and reconciliation, never jerking it back in anger or because, "Sorry, time's UP." Perfect love affords full freedom to its object--us and the creation. I often use the example of a loving parent as an analog for how I understand God being with God's children. A loving parent never stops loving a child; a loving parent provides lavishly for a child, while at the same time teaching the child how to be self-sustaining and productive; and a loving parent gradually gives a maturing child freedom to become the person she/he is to become, even when this seems fraught with risk. To protect, shelter, and coddle a child beyond the days of infancy and childhood becomes a form of abuse. "Helicoptering" parents are usually more selfish and controlling than loving, and may even cross the boundary to living vicariously through her or his child.

If God is a loving parent, God necessarily grants great freedom to the human creation. This freedom includes the ability to rebel, go in a direction in life quite counter to what is fruitful, or even safe, and to "sin with the best of them." Imagine if God had made us to automatically do the right thing, never free to "choose" our own directions and actions? Wouldn't we be automatons? Human robots? How much "life" would that be for us? And if God's purpose in creating us was to be able to have a relationship with us and to enable us to live abundant lives in this beautiful world God created, would this fulfill God's aim? Who wants to relate to something "programed" to love us and to be limited to a list of approved activities? What makes our most intimate relationships so fulfilling is that we choose the persons to whom we relate in this way, and they choose to reciprocate. Without the choice it is not a relationship but a contract, or maybe worse.

Jews and Christians believe in a God who does grant these freedoms and choices, and who invites us to follow, love and relate to the deity. Christians believe that God even "came down" among us in Jesus Christ to fully experience the human condition--especially the temptations of it--and to show us a better way of relating (there's that perfect love again).

Regarding the second part of the question--about allowing an angel to become Satan--we are back to some serious speculation again. The Bible says very little about this. Some of the extra-biblical literature talks more about the apocryphal understanding of Satan being originally Lucifer, a "top angel" who decided to stage a coup in heaven, and was banished to the earth. But if that is what did happen, in some cosmic drama, it would be for the same reason as why humans are "free." The few informational references we have about angels indicate that they are a created order--different from humans, which Psalm 8 says are God's crowning achievements. Angels have a defined job: they are messengers. As a created order, they don't share many of God's attributes, other than they are either immortal or at least have very long lifespans (we have no tales of angels dying, although there are apocalyptic references which talk of Satan being "thrown into the lake of fire," which sounds like capital punishment to me).

I find speculating about angels unfulfilling. I think there are angels, and in the Bible, they usually bear a message or a warning. Some of the descriptions of angels in the Bible make them sound like horrible looking, scary creatures. There is a reason why the first thing they say when they encounter a human is: "Be not afraid." If any of those "living creatures" surrounding the throne of God in the Book of Revelation are angels, well, good luck not freaking out when you meet one! Hollywood and Hallmark have given us our "nice" images of angels, and I'm OK with that, as long as we aren't too disappointed when we come face to face with a real one.

Let's summarize: God loves perfectly; God, in this love, creates us as "friends" and gives us a beautiful world in which to live and thrive; and God grants the freedoms necessary for us to choose how we will live this life and to whom we will relate. However, freedom allows for some bad choices and selfish living, just as it allows for affirming, joyous and "others-centered" ones. Let me finish on this note: I read recently that the motto of the Franciscans (a Catholic order following the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi) is: Engineering people for others. I like that. God's perfect love caused God to give us more freedom than this, but here is a group whose goal is to help put the crown on God's human creation by helping us become the kind of children that our Parent God would be very proud to have! Shalom!