God loves you.
This is probably one of the most comforting sentences Christianity has ever produced. The creator of hundreds of billions of galaxies knows that you exist. He knows your fears, your hopes, your failures and presumably where you left your keys. More importantly, he loves you with a depth that no human being could possibly match.
There is, however, some paperwork.
Christians often describe God’s love as unconditional. Yet depending on which Christian tradition you encounter, salvation and your relationship with God may come with conditions concerning belief, repentance, sex, marriage, baptism, forgiveness, church membership, sacraments and obedience.
Failure to satisfy the relevant conditions can have consequences.
In some versions of Christianity, those consequences last forever.
Human beings normally have another expression for love accompanied by the threat of permanent punishment. We rarely call it unconditional.
The most unconditional conditional love imaginable
Christianity repeatedly describes God as loving humanity. The Gospel of John contains perhaps the most famous expression of this idea: “God so loved the world” that he gave his Son.
Christian theology has developed this idea enormously. God’s love is perfect. God’s love exceeds human love. God loves sinners. God even loves people who reject him.
So far, excellent.
Then comes salvation.
Christian traditions disagree considerably about precisely how salvation works, but many maintain that something about the human individual must change. Faith may be required. Repentance may be required. Baptism may matter. Good works may matter. Participation in the sacraments may matter. Perseverance may matter.
The details have occupied theologians for centuries.
Apparently, unconditional love required one of history’s longest terms-and-conditions documents.
God loves atheists too
Christianity does not necessarily teach that God stops loving an atheist.
The theological claim can actually be more interesting than that. God may continue loving the unbeliever completely while nevertheless allowing—or condemning—that person to an extremely unpleasant eternal destiny.
This creates a fascinating definition of love.
Imagine a father telling his son:
“I love you more than you could possibly understand. My love for you is infinite. Nothing you do will make me stop loving you. However, unless you develop the correct opinion about me before you die, our relationship afterward may involve considerably more fire.”
The analogy is imperfect, as theological analogies usually are. Christians have developed sophisticated arguments about hell, freedom, justice and self-exclusion from God.
Yet the basic philosophical problem remains.
At what point does a consequence become so severe that describing the underlying relationship as unconditional love starts sounding peculiar?
Believe or else
Belief presents an especially interesting problem because human beings cannot simply choose beliefs at will.
Try believing that Paris is the capital of Japan.
Not pretending to believe it. Actually believe it.
You probably cannot.
Evidence, experience, upbringing, personality, reasoning and countless other influences shape what we find convincing. A person can investigate Christianity. He can read the Bible, attend church, study theology and desperately want Christianity to be true.
He still may not believe it.
If salvation ultimately depends upon believing particular propositions, God has attached an enormous consequence to something humans do not appear capable of controlling directly.
The situation becomes stranger if God is omniscient.
God would know exactly what evidence would convince every atheist on Earth. He would know precisely why each skeptic remains unconvinced. He would know every psychological obstacle, every intellectual objection and every piece of evidence that person has encountered.
He could presumably provide the missing evidence.
Instead, according to many forms of Christianity, faith remains tremendously important.
The omniscient examiner knows exactly why you got the answer wrong, possesses unlimited ability to explain it differently, and may nevertheless allow the examination to determine your eternal destiny.
You are loved exactly as you are – now change
Modern Christianity often uses another beautiful phrase: God loves you exactly as you are.
Again, some qualifications apply.
You may need to repent.
You may need to abandon particular sexual relationships. You may need to change your priorities, your behavior, your beliefs and perhaps almost your entire conception of yourself. Depending on the church, you may also need to reconsider contraception, divorce, premarital sex, homosexuality, gender roles, alcohol, entertainment, clothing or what you do on Sunday morning.
God loves you exactly as you are.
He would simply prefer a substantially revised edition.
Of course, Christians can reasonably answer that love does not mean approving everything somebody does. Parents love children while correcting destructive behavior. Friends sometimes confront each other precisely because they care.
That argument works perfectly well for genuinely harmful behavior.
It becomes much more controversial when the prohibited behavior consists of two consenting adults loving each other, failing to participate in particular rituals or reaching the wrong conclusion about an ancient theological dispute.
The question is not whether love permits moral standards.
The question is whether every alleged divine standard deserves to inherit the word “love” merely because religion places God behind it.
The sexuality department is particularly busy
Few areas reveal this tension better than sexuality.
Traditional Christian sexual morality imposes substantial restrictions. Historically, sex belongs within marriage, and marriage traditionally means a union between a man and a woman. Adultery is forbidden. Lust is condemned. Many denominations reject homosexual sexual relationships. Catholicism also opposes artificial contraception.
Christians can consistently argue that God loves gay people while prohibiting gay sex. Within that theological framework, attraction itself need not be sinful; behavior is what matters.
But consider what this means for a gay believer who accepts traditional doctrine.
A heterosexual Christian may fall in love, marry the person he desires, have sex and build a family while remaining perfectly consistent with his religion.
A gay Christian may be told that God loves him equally but that the corresponding relationship available to his heterosexual neighbor is forbidden to him for life.
Equal love has produced remarkably unequal terms.
Some Christians embrace celibacy voluntarily and find profound meaning in it. That deserves respect. The difficulty begins when lifelong celibacy is presented not as a vocation freely chosen but as the only morally permissible expression of somebody else’s sexuality.
God loves everyone equally.
Some customers simply receive a different contract.
Fortunately, Christians agree about the conditions
There is another small complication.
Nobody seems entirely certain what the conditions are.
Christianity is divided among Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Anglicanism and thousands of Protestant denominations and independent churches. These traditions disagree about baptism, communion, salvation, predestination, free will, church authority, confession, saints, sexuality, divorce, ordination and numerous other questions.
Some Christians believe salvation comes through faith alone. Others insist that reducing salvation to intellectual belief badly misrepresents Christianity. Some baptize infants. Others believe infant baptism is invalid. Some regard the Eucharist as literally becoming Christ’s body and blood. Others regard it primarily as symbolic.
Fortunately, your eternal destiny is at stake.
Please choose carefully.
The geographical dimension makes this even more interesting. A child born in Saudi Arabia, India, Utah, rural Poland or secular Czechia begins life surrounded by radically different assumptions about religion.
If eternal salvation depends substantially upon religious belief, birthplace becomes an extraordinarily consequential lottery.
An omnipotent God apparently created a universal truth and then allowed humans to distribute access to it through geography, family and culture.
Hell makes the problem considerably worse
The tension between unconditional love and divine conditions would be philosophically interesting even without hell.
Hell turns it into something much more serious.
Christian views of hell vary substantially. Some Christians defend eternal conscious punishment. Others understand hell primarily as separation from God. Some support annihilationism, according to which the unsaved ultimately cease to exist. Christian universalists believe that everyone may eventually be reconciled with God.
These differences matter.
The traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment creates the sharpest problem. A finite human life—perhaps seventy or eighty years—can supposedly result in punishment without end.
Not ten years.
Not a million years.
Forever.
Even human legal systems generally accept some concept of proportionality. We distinguish theft from murder precisely because different offenses deserve different punishments. Infinite punishment eliminates that distinction mathematically. Once punishment never ends, another trillion years changes nothing.
The person has still only begun eternity.
Calling such a system perfect justice requires a definition of proportionality unavailable in ordinary moral reasoning.
Calling it perfect love requires even more theological creativity.
“You chose hell”
One popular response avoids saying that God sends anyone to hell.
People choose it themselves.
C. S. Lewis famously developed a version of this idea, and modern Christian apologetics frequently portrays hell as self-exclusion from God. God respects human freedom so profoundly that he permits people to reject him forever.
This is certainly philosophically more sophisticated than imagining God enthusiastically throwing unbelievers into a furnace.
It does not completely solve the problem.
Suppose a person rejects Christianity because she sincerely finds its evidence insufficient. She is not necessarily rejecting goodness, love or God himself. She may simply conclude that the Christian description of God is probably false.
Calling that an informed decision to spend eternity separated from God stretches the ordinary meaning of “choice.”
If someone walks through an unmarked door and falls from a cliff, we normally investigate whoever designed the building.
We do not praise the architect for respecting freedom of movement.
God knows the outcome before creating you
Omniscience introduces an even more uncomfortable problem.
If God knows the future perfectly, then before creating a particular person he already knows that person’s eventual fate.
Imagine that God creates Sarah while knowing with absolute certainty that Sarah will live for 74 years, remain unconvinced by Christianity and then experience eternal punishment.
God could refrain from creating Sarah.
He could create different circumstances.
He could provide evidence that would convince her.
He could construct a universe without eternal punishment.
Yet he creates precisely this universe while possessing complete advance knowledge of the result.
The usual appeal to free will does some work here, but not all of it. Sarah may freely make choices within the world, but God supposedly chooses to create the entire world while already knowing every one of those choices.
An omniscient creator cannot be surprised by the ending.
Human parents would have difficulty defending this
Christianity often compares God with a loving father.
That comparison invites an obvious experiment.
Imagine parents possessing unlimited power to prevent their child from suffering unimaginably. They know exactly what will happen. Preventing the suffering costs them nothing. They can intervene without harming anyone.
They nevertheless permit the suffering forever because the child violated their conditions.
Would we call them perfectly loving parents?
Probably not.
We would call social services.
The theological response is that God is not simply a human parent. God is perfectly just, infinitely wise and possesses an understanding inaccessible to humans.
Perhaps.
But this creates another problem. If divine goodness bears so little resemblance to what humans ordinarily mean by goodness that behavior we would consider monstrous in humans becomes perfectly loving when performed by God, what information does the statement “God is good” actually convey?
Words must retain some connection to their ordinary moral meaning.
Otherwise, “God is perfectly loving” risks becoming unfalsifiable by definition.
Whatever God does simply becomes what perfect love means.
Jesus makes things both easier and harder
The teachings attributed to Jesus contain extraordinary expressions of compassion.
Love your enemies. Forgive repeatedly. Care for the poor. Help strangers. Do not become consumed by wealth. Treat others as you would want them to treat you.
These teachings have inspired enormous amounts of genuine human goodness.
Christian hospitals, charities, shelters, humanitarian organizations and individual believers have translated them into actions that have improved millions of lives.
Yet the New Testament also contains severe warnings about judgment.
Jesus speaks about Gehenna, exclusion, destruction and judgment in language that Christians have interpreted in different ways for centuries. The gentle Jesus invented entirely by modern liberal imagination is no more historically adequate than the permanently furious Jesus sometimes presented by fundamentalists.
Christianity therefore inherits both traditions: radical love and terrifying judgment.
Reconciling them became theology’s problem.
Two thousand years later, theologians are still working on it.
Unconditional love should mean something
None of this demonstrates that Christianity is false.
The philosophical problem is narrower.
If God’s love is described as unconditional, Christians need to explain what “unconditional” actually means.
Perhaps God loves everyone unconditionally while salvation is conditional. That is logically possible. Love and consequences are not necessarily contradictions.
But as the consequences become more extreme, the distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain intuitively.
A mother can love her son while allowing him to spend a year in prison for committing a serious crime.
That makes sense.
A mother who possesses absolute power over the legal system, knows her son will commit the crime before giving birth to him, deliberately creates the circumstances in which he commits it, could rehabilitate him instantly, and nevertheless orders him tortured for eternity presents a somewhat more complicated example of maternal affection.
Adding the adjective “perfect” does not automatically resolve the contradiction.
The divine terms and conditions
Perhaps Christianity should simply retire the advertising language.
“God loves you unconditionally” sounds wonderful, but much traditional Christian theology describes something considerably more complicated.
God loves you, but actions matter.
God loves you, but repentance matters.
God loves you, but belief may matter.
God loves you, but your relationship with him matters.
God loves you, but judgment exists.
Those propositions may form a coherent theology. Christians have spent centuries constructing sophisticated philosophical systems to reconcile divine love, justice, freedom and punishment.
But they are not what most people ordinarily imagine when they hear the words “unconditional love.”
The satire almost writes itself.
God loves you infinitely, knows everything about you, created you exactly where and when you were born, understands every reason you believe what you believe, and possesses unlimited power to save you.
He just needs you to accept the terms and conditions.
And depending on the denomination, nobody is entirely sure which box you are supposed to tick.
Leave a Reply