Heard something last night that I have been mulling over throughout the morning. And since it doesn’t completely make sense in my head right now, I’m going to barf some thoughts down on this forum to see where they take me.
What does it mean to say that “God is good?”
And how do we know that God is good?
I don’t know anyone who thinks that every conception of God is good. For instance, Christian’s don’t think Allah is good, but Muslim’s do. And Bhuddists don’t think Yaweh is good. And Jews don’t think Thor is good. And of course the list goes on and on. And just about every Christian I know thinks that God is good because of Jesus…because of his attributes…because of how he treats us…he is loving, self-sacrificial, powerful, kind, merciful, etc. (We love him because he first loved us…)
But isn’t saying that God is good because of his attributes or the things he does just another way of saying, “Hey, we all have a moral standard in our head of what good is…and this certain conception of God lines up with that moral standard of goodness better than another?” Don’t we all know, deep down, that self-sacrificial love is good and selfish love is bad?
And yet my Calvinists friends are often quick to say that “we” don’t get to define what love and goodness is…only God can do that. And yet they are perfectly comfortable saying that the God, Allah, portrayed in Islam, is not good and that Christ is. So in a sense, they are all very comfortable making judgements about various conceptions of God and what is good and what is loving, and are quick to separate the good conceptions of God from bad conceptions. Furthermore, if one is to come along and say that they think the Bible teaches that God will save everyone someday and that no one will spend eternity separated from their creator, they balk and say that this is just wishful thinking and that while that may “seem” good to us, it is not in fact true, and again the line comes…“we don’t get to define what good is…only God can do that…”
But it never stops there, does it? Generally these Calvinist zingers are followed by a rational defense for why we “need” a just and holy God who will punish sinners in hell forever. Why that sort of punishment has to exist or the whole paradigm falls apart. Why it is not just possibly true, but why it is necessarily true. If any of you read the Gospel Coalition website very often you know what I mean.
But need? We need a God who will punish people forever?
How is that possibly any better than the Christian who embraces an ultimate universal reconciliation, who says that we need a God who is powerful enough to save all things–all of his creation–and desires to do so? Surely, if we humans need something to be true in an absolute sense it is the latter.
But I guess my point in all of this is that everyone–despite their pretending not to do so–relies upon their own moral reasoning to determine the correct conception of God. And when our conceptions don’t line up with what we read in scripture, we either work to reconcile the tension by explaining away or minimizing one side of the coin or another, or we throw up our hands and say…“Well, God is good…I’m sure it will all make sense someday…”
In other words, someday we’ll understand why God chose not behave in a way that we would call good. And we’ll understand in that moment because it will line up with the conception of goodness that we have now in the same way that the other parts of God’s character line up with our current conception of goodness.
And in that way, we are all basically doing the same thing. We all believe God is good. Not a person on the planet wants to worship a bad God or a mean God or a sadistic God or an aloof God. We want to worship a loving, powerful, personal, mighty-to-save God. Because we need a God who is better than us–who loves better than us, reconciles broken relationships better than us, sets up criminal justice systems better than us, parents and creates better than us…
And that’s why I’m not waiting till heaven to say that God is good. I’m not waiting to find out why God is so sadistic sometimes. I’m simply don’t believe that he is. I’m worshipping the God who is reconciling all things to himself now. I have enough verses and reason and Christian hope to hang my hat on. And I’d rather experience the hope and peace and joy that comes from a belief in this God now than to think worse of him, only to be pleasantly surprised on my death bed. And that, I think, is why I am a dogmatic Christian universalist, not just a hopeful one.