By Selwyn Duke
Whether or not you
believe in the wrath of God, there is no question that the wrath of the ungodly
left is often on full display. As for the latter, evangelist Pat
Robertson got quite a liberal dose of it recently. The founder of
the 700 Club was placed in the crosshairs for suggesting that Ariel
Sharon’s stroke may be the result of his division of Israel, an imprudent act
incurring the wrath of God (Taking a gander at Sharon, it seems more like the
wrath of Twinkies).
No lone comment inspired
me to finally treat this issue. Really, this is merely the latest in a
series of culture war clashes involving traditional Christian judgements about
God’s judgement and the “non-judgemental” liberals’ judgements about those
judgements. You may remember the hue and cry that ensued after 9/11 when
Jerry Falwell implied that America was being punished for having abandoned
godly principles. More recently there were those – such as Alabama State
Senator Hank Irwin – who opined that Hurricane Katrina was a whirlwind reaped
by a gulf coast rife with vice and sin, prompting derision from even the likes
of Rich Lowry.
As for this man of
faith, I don’t know that any or all of these tribulations were visited upon us
by the Divine Hand. Likewise, however, I also cannot say that all of them
were not. What I do know is that this issue isn’t really about Falwell or
Robertson or “fundamentalists,” terrorism or storms or strokes, but something
far, far deeper. It is in fact about the spirit of the age and dogma,
both the religious and secular variety, that is.
Historically speaking,
the preponderance of the notion that God would never punish man is a relatively
recent phenomenon in the Western World. For most of the history of
Christendom – and the history of humanity, reaching back to the pagan
civilizations and primitive tribes of antiquity, for that matter – the wrath of
the supernatural was a given. When pagans sacrificed humans on bloody
altars, oft times the end was to appease wrathful gods and gain their
favor. If the rain didn’t fall upon thirsty crops and starvation loomed
on the horizon, a people’s thinking was often that they had committed a mortal
transgression against divine will and remedial expiation was in order.
And, while Abe Foxman of the Anti-defamation League said that Robertson’s
comments were “. . . a perversion of religion,” the Hebrew Scriptures are
replete with stories of God visiting quite a variety of torments upon the
enemies of Foxman’s ancestors.
Thus, this “dark ages”
idea was not some Christian shibboleth born of puritanical morality but was
simply the quite natural and instinctive perpetuation of what had always
impressed man as self-evident: that collectively we are quite sinful and
sometimes deserving of correction. What Christianity did reveal was that
God was a loving God who occasionally got angry, not an angry god who
occasionally was loving; he was not a god who was like them, He was the God
they were supposed to be like. Moreover, we are called to atone for
misdeeds through personal sacrifice, not the sacrifice of persons.
Regardless, Christian
tradition always held that, in typical Sodom and Gomorrah fashion, God may
punish peoples who descend into turpitude. This is why post-First Crusade
failure to roll back Moslem gains inspired medieval Christians to institute lay
piety movements all across Europe: they viewed the frustrated military campaigns
as a sign of God’s disfavor and endeavored to make themselves worthy of victory
over the menacing hordes.
In our time, though, the
enlightened set scoffs at such “antiquated” notions; they fancy themselves to
be far too sophisticated to believe that sin is real and punishment
justified. One of them, one Paul Levinson of the Fordham Media Studies
Department, weighed in on the O’Reilly Factor on January 6. He dismissed
Robertson as a man who is not very “modern” in his thinking (“Modernistic”
would more aptly describe what Levinson seems to espouse), as if that’s a grand
trespass. Transitioning from the hubristic to the completely idiotic, he
went on to liken the evangelist to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man
with a long terrorist past and possibly a brief and terrible future.
Levinson justified the equivalency by saying that the two were both
“fundamentalists” (lexicon note: a secularist who disagrees with a liberal is a
Nazi; a Christian who disagrees with a liberal is a fundamentalist).
Now, lest I be
misunderstood, I part company with Robertson on the etiological factors in
Sharon’s stroke. However, I would have a question for Levinson: is being
a fundamentalist inherently bad? If so, what if you're a liberal
fundamentalist? And I say this not merely as a rhetorical device.
After all, Levinson and his fellow travelers seem to exhibit a formulaic
devotion to their leftist creed, deviation from which is often treated as
heresy. And this, I will add, hearkens back to a pearl of wisdom from the
great philosopher G.K. Chesterton: “In truth, there are
only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept
dogma and don't know it.” Thus, having dogma isn’t
inherently bad. It is the nature of the dogma that determines its
goodness or badness.
Today’s prevailing dogma
states that God would never visit death and destruction upon us for any reason,
let alone in the exercise of a tool as clumsy as punishment. Why, God is
a loving God, you puerile fire-and-brimstone fundies. Moreover, when
devastation is wreaked and the carnage reveals both the wicked and the good,
the wizened and the budding babes, are we to call it justice? Would a
loving God so indiscriminately take life?
Without a doubt, in an
age in which Jesus is being portrayed as a milquetoasty hippie type (The Book
of Daniel), gussied up in the spiritual fashions of the day and completely
bereft of the depth and passion evident in the Bible, such a New Age position
may seem beyond question . . . much like dogma. And in the theological
universe of modernism it does fit like a conforming piece in a jigsaw
puzzle. The problem is that this belief’s adherents have the wrong
puzzle, ensuring that a traditionalist piece like God’s wrath will be grossly
incompatible.
Literally put, the
critics scoff when this element of orthodoxy cannot be explained within the
context of heterodoxy. They divorce themselves from any semblance of
traditional Christianity, embrace their modernistic mutation of it, then wonder
why anyone would think that the man’s limb would fit on the mutant’s body.
So now I will offer not
answers, but explanations. But I will preface my response by saying that
if you don’t believe in God, this will seem like much ado about fairytales to
you. I hasten to add, however, that the prevailing criticism here is not
to the effect of, “God doesn’t exist, therefore talk of God’s wrath is
silly.” No, the bulk of the criticism originates with people who
acknowledge God’s existence, at least tacitly. They just find this brand
of divine intervention unfathomable.
It is correct to say
that God would never kill. This is because He never does. He gives
us the gift of life, and when He takes us from this world we pass into the next
and inherit eternal life. There is no death. Moreover, if upon
liberating us from the shackles of the material, God takes us into Heaven, a
place where pain is unknown and peace and joy immeasurable, has He not done us
a good turn?
Another impediment to
spiritual understanding is a misunderstanding involving scientific
understanding. The ancients had no trouble believing that a storm,
earthquake or some other natural phenomenon could be an instrument of God’s
will any more than they had trouble viewing a sunrise or a baby’s birth as a
miracle. We, though, are quite different. We learn about barometric
pressure, tectonic plates and seismic waves, planetary rotation, conception and
chromosomes, and then the scope of our understanding of God’s creation changes
our understanding of God’s scope. Our burgeoning knowledge robs miracles
of their mystery, and then we think it’s a mystery that anyone would claim that
they’re miracles.
It really is a
fascinating phenomenon. It’s much like marveling at an intellect that can
ascertain a faraway star’s distance from the Earth, but then concluding it’s
nothing special upon hearing an explanation of triangulation. We are left
unimpressed because God hasn’t worked His wonders with the magical, but we
always forget that the magical fails to make us wonder once we understand
it. God had to create the world in some fashion, but had He done so in a different
manner, would we be more awed and faithful? Not if we could glean insight
into His methods, for it would always be the same old story. As Mark
Twain said, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
It’s ironic, if we were
too dumb to penetrate the outer layer of God’s handiwork, faith would not be so
elusive. Perhaps, though, our brilliance in the scientific realm is equaled by
our ignorance in the spiritual one.
We are children of God,
like Him in that we possess intellect and free will. Is it surprising
then that those made in the image of He who created the world would have an
ability to understand that creation? Would it make sense to grant these
creatures dominion over the Earth and enjoin them to subdue it without
providing them with a capacity to grasp its workings commensurate to that
task? The irony is that God gives us the ability to understand His world,
and then we can’t understand how the world could be His.
Thus, I wouldn’t scoff
at those who claim that God didn’t direct a particular storm at a hapless city
or visit a certain ailment upon a given man, but neither would I laugh at the
claim that, were we to incur His wrath, He might use the nature He created to
effect His will. Nor would I score those who don’t attribute a certain
terrorist act to divine retribution, but I always accept that His “permitting
will” may allow worldly agents to be the instruments of His justice.
Naysayers may mock such as fringe thinking. But if they expand their
frame of reference and tally the votes of all those who have existed from time
immemorial to the present, it will become obvious how they can identify those
on the periphery of consensus belief. They have only to look in the
mirror.
Then there is the fact
that punishment has become a dirty word. In another wholesale departure
from prescriptions based on the millennia of human experience known as
tradition, many among us eschew punishment, regarding it an ineffectual tool of
the unsophisticated. This is why we see the embrace of the euphemistic
“time-out” (which should be reserved for athletic contests), the enactment of
anti-spanking laws, parents who are unable to control five-year-olds, and a
judge who just sentenced a man convicted of continually raping a young girl for
four years to a mere sixty days in jail. Then, laboring under the
illusion that our errancy is enlightenment, we take a leaf out of the ancient
pagans’ book. Just as their gods were imbued with their own fallen
nature, we ascribe our characteristic failings – in this case pusillanimity,
the tolerance of evil, and gratuitous leniency – to God. We then fancy
Him to be more the divine therapist than the just judge.
Most telling about the
current state of Western civilization, however, is the fact that those who
claim God’s wrath are so roundly subjected to man’s wrath. And a lack of
piety alone doesn’t explain it, for a self-assured atheist would simply laugh
such assertions off as the superstitious musings of anachronistic minds.
No, there’s something else at work here: pride.
Christendom had long
embraced the humbling truth that we are sinners, most deserving of
damnation. It had simultaneously been buoyed by the uplifting truth that,
despite this, we’re not going to get what we deserve because Jesus already paid
the price. Now, in post-Christian America, we have done a 180 degree
about face. With our “I’m okay, you’re okay” attitude, self-esteem (a
euphemism for pride) conditioning in schools, and the New Age belief in the
primacy of the self, some of us prance about as if we had been immaculately
conceived. Thus, the suggestion that we may be deserving of a great
chastisement and, by inference, that we are proportionately corrupt, evokes
howls from corpulent egos.
And perhaps this is what
should truly raise the alarm. We can spend our time crucifying the
admonishers, or we can discover whether they are pretenders or prophets by
casting the probing eye inwards and seeing if the emperor really has no clothes.
And make no mistake, we would be best served by doing the latter. After
all, cultivating a collective pride that blinds us to our faults is a sure path
to oblivion.
Thus, the real problem
is not that we won’t believe we have been subject to punishment. Nay,
with a society that is quickly making the seven deadly sins a pastime as it
slays virtue, the real problem is that we don’t think we deserve it.
© 2008 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved
selwynduke.com 
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