It it not possible for all of the following statements to be true:
God _loves_ all of God’s children
God _has_ vast power
God lets _nearly all_ God’s children, historical and contemporary, roast forever in eternal hellfire because they didn’t believe in Jesus in a way that accords with a particular dogma during their short mortal lifetime

The question is, which of these statements do Christians wish to implicitly abandon? They can never be harmonized through any degree of tortuous logic, nor any marshaling of Biblical texts.

The love that some Christians assign to God always sounds like narcissism. Among people, we consider the truest love to be that which loves another purely, for who they are, not because they love us back and flatter us. But this level of love, which even some human beings can achieve, is not considered attainable by God. This suggests God is a poor, pathetic creature with little more capacity for affection than a well-fed dog (not meant as an attack on dogs). Not a very inspiring deity. Since this version of God’s own followers themselves show little in the way of altruistic love–whether they intend it or not, the face they show to the world is one that cares for others only if they belong to one’s own cliche or are likely to join–it is no wonder that this God and this reading of the Bible are so unconvincing to people who have a richer faith in God’s love and a deeper trust in Jesus.

No matter how many Bible texts they cite out of context, or how much angry threat they invoke, it is just not possible for them to make me believe that God is such a loser, or that God would reject me for having _unbounded_ faith in God’s love.

@Jeff – The notion of after-life reconciliation is an interesting one to me – one that I discussed briefly in a biblio-blogger’s comments just last week. I personally don’t even believe in an afterlife, but I have a strong interest in universalism. after-life reconciliation is one plausible route to a Christian doctrine of universal reconciliation.

You have a fascinating weblog. I found it by following your trackback at Fr Stephen Freeman’s blog. Your perspective is very different from mine but you raise a lot of interesting issues and make good, substantive points about them.

I’d like to make a couple of points about this post, one exegetical and one theological.

The exegetical point is about your contention that the different books of the New Testament ought to be read on their own, without being forced into (a possibly false) consistency with one another. Certainly it ought always to be remembered that the Gospel of Matthew was written independently of the rest of the New Testament, as its author’s particular recollection and understanding of Jesus. Matthew almost certainly wrote his Gospel without any expectation that it would be collected with 26 other books into a larger book called the “New Testament” and venerated as Scripture. He simply wanted to record the Good News of Jesus as he had received it.

Nevertheless, what Matthew wrote was ultimately collected with other books into the New Testament and “published,” as it were, as Scripture. And while the Gospel of Matthew and the other books did not have a conscious harmony in the minds of their authors, those who actually did the collecting and publishing, and who began to venerate these books as Scripture, did have a coherent body of doctrine which they believed that they had received from Jesus through the Apostles; and they saw (or at any rate believed that they saw) that body of doctrine in Matthew and the other books which they came to recognize as “Scripture.” It is that core of teaching that gives unity to the New Testament, not any conscious intent on the part of its human authors (who probably had no idea at the time that what they were writing was going to be “Scripture”).

My point is that, however interesting and useful it is to treat the New Testament books individually, if we are going to deal with them as the source writings for normative Christianity, we will have to take account of the doctrinal standard which gives those books their unity. Otherwise we are dealing with those books simply as historical sources; sources which are hardly objective and dispassionate and are therefore, on a strictly historical level, not that useful.

So far my exegetical point. My strictly theological point is this: the word “belief” in the way that you are using it (e.g. “belief” is a nearly useless criterion for separating the sheep from the goats) is not what the Bible means when it uses the word “faith.” When we say that we are “justified by faith” we are not speaking of (in your words) essentially an intellectual function. “Faith” in this sense is not intellectual but relational. He who is justified by faith is not saved by assenting to a discrete list of historical and theological propositions; rather, he is saved by trusting and relying upon a person: Jesus Christ. To be sure, having faith (in the sense of trust) in Jesus Christ depends on believing that he is who he says he is and that he is still alive. That is, I am sure, what you meant by the “belief in” which must precede a “belief on” … Christ. Nevertheless, while propositional belief is important, it is not the same as the faith by which we are justified. “Justifying faith” must go beyond the propositional to the relational, in which we trust in Christ and “bet our lives” on him. Propositional belief is not enough, which is why James says that “even the demons believe, and shudder.”

Finally, I must dissent from one of your assertions: Nowhere does Matthew indicate that salvation can come through faith. On the contrary, in Matthew Jesus says Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole (Mt 9.22). While Jesus was speaking of the woman’s physical health, at the same time he was using physical health as a metaphor for salvation (as, a few verses earlier, he described his own salvific mission using the metaphor of the physician: They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick … For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance Mt 9.12-13). Quite often in Matthew Jesus pairs physical healing with the remission of sins, using the one as a metaphor for the other (e.g. For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. Mt 9.5-6).

Even if one doesn’t believe that he’s the savior, the words of Jesus are…just…so…fascinating, beautiful and cut-to-the-bone. Talk about your radicals!

If you’re talking about the Holy Bible, then, again, not only is it resolved but it’s non-negotiable.

Oh, I strongly disagree there, and can witness Christian sects that honor the Bible but resolve the disharmony I mentioned more in favor of Matthew and James and less in favor of the passage from John you bolded and other examples of Pauline soteriology to support my contention.

My personal view is that Matthew and James should each be read independently and that it makes no more sense to harmonize them with Pauline doctrine than it does to try to put Mill and Marx in the same volume and insist that they both mean the same.

But, I understand the variety of orthodox views that do take a harmonizing approach, and my point is that it is very reasonable to harmonize them in a way that takes the focus off of belief.

I’ll add that you are right – all Christian scripture insists that Christ is the one point of access to salvation (and as I stated yesterday that makes it more difficult to support a universalist doctrine from the Bible) – but there is no such Biblically unequivocal stance in favor of “belief” as the mode of salvation.

Yet it is still complicated, and there is certainly a strong Biblical witness in favor of justification by faith to set up against the Biblical witness against it.

If you believe the Holy Bible is the word of God, delivered via mortal man, then Christ is the one and true path to salvation.

John 3:16. (”For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”) and John 14:6 (”I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”) are pretty much non-negotiable.
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Of course, I’m only speaking as a Christian, but the entire premise of the New Testament is that eternal salvation comes ONLY through Christ. Jesus’ top two commandments (found in Matthew, interestingly enough) shows that love for God outweighs love for man. Well, ya gotta believe in God in order to love him with all your heart & soul.

It cannot be resolved Biblically.

If you’re talking about the Holy Bible, then, again, not only is it resolved but it’s non-negotiable.