God's Conditional Love

In the course of just a few days I heard the following from four evangelical preachers, three of whom are influential pastors of megachurches.

J. D. Greear (Senior Pastor, Summit Church, Raleigh) "In Christ there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, nothing I have done that makes You love me less."

Pete Briscoe (Senior Pastor, Bent Tree Bible Fellowship, Dallas) "There's nothing I can do to make him love me more, there's nothing I can do to make him love me less."

Andy Stanley (Senior Pastor, North Point Community Church, Atlanta) "Do you know what the root, the heart, the pull-back-the-layers is when it comes to following Jesus? This is uncomfortable, but it will change you. And it will change us. I think it will change the world. God could not love you more. And there is nothing you will do and nothing you could do that will cause him to love you less. And the corollary is this: Every person you're ever eyeball to eyeball with God could not love more. And there's nothing they could do to cause God to love them less. Nothing."

Lay Preacher (Name withheld, Chicago area) "His love for us is unprovoked by us. He loved us before we existed, and even the very best things we do will not increase the love that God has for us. God does not love us because of something we did, something we said, something we thought, something we felt... - he doesn't love us any more for that. God's love is not influenced by us. It has nothing to do with who we were. God's love for us has nothing to do with who we are. God's love has nothing to do with who we're going to grow to be. Our efforts, our constitution, our make-up, our behavior, whether we find it very loveable or very unlovable, is completely irrelevant when it comes to God's love for us. He doesn't love us because of who we are. And in that sense God's love is very unconditional...Our condition, our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, are irrelevant to whether God loves us or not."

I am withholding the name of the last preacher because he is not a vocational clergyman, has no seminary training, and as a layman was merely (and commendably) responding to an invitation to preach. So he is less accountable for his biblical illiteracy than the ordained ministers quoted above. In his case, the accountable ones are the pastors who allow him to address their congregation.

The source of the evangelical slogan, "Nothing you can do can make God love you more, nothing you can do can make God love you less," is, as best as I have been able to determine, Philip Yancey's 1997 book What's So Amazing About Grace? The original full quote is,

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder.

In the last 15 years, Yancey's formulation - or some abbreviated version of it - has achieved near creedal status among American evangelicals. It would be hard to overestimate the enthusiasm with which it has been received. Andy Stanley, pastor of the second largest church in North America, says above that it represents "the root, the heart" of following Jesus. I have been asked to recite it out loud with other parishioners in a Sunday morning worship service. While in the church I grew up in we would say together, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord...", nowadays we are much more likely to affirm, "Nothing we can do can make God love us more; nothing we can do can make God love us less."

Is it biblical?

I will wait, while crickets chirp, for proponents of this doctrine to go fetch their Bibles and find even one verse in its 66 books that supports it. I should make plain that the issue is not whether God's love is great, patient, deep, kind, forgiving, full of mercy, eternal, prevenient (precedes ours), or beyond imagination. I happily grant all that. The issue is whether there are any conditions or degrees attached to it. Does the Bible say anywhere that God loves us all the same no matter what we do?

No. It doesn't. I can save you hours of vain searching. Or, if you prefer, go verify my flat denial by reading through the entire Bible at your leisure as carefully as you can. In the meantime, here are some Scriptures that teach the opposite:

Psalm 5:4-6: You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the Lord abhors.

King David would not have recognized as his Good Shepherd a god who loved the righteous and the wicked equally, unconditionally, and without regard for their behavior. David's God, Jehovah, though bounteous in mercy and slow to anger and quick to forgive, hated those who did wrong, and abhorred bloodthirsty and deceitful men. Can you imagine David enduring for one moment a sermon where the preacher maintained, "Our condition, our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, are irrelevant to whether God loves us or not"? The shepherd king through whom Messiah came would have denounced such doctrine as a blasphemy against his holy God!

Psalm 86:5: You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call to you.

The Yancey doctrine would render this verse meaningless. How can the affirmation "God's love abounds to all who call to him" mean anything at all if God's love remains exactly the same whether you call to him or not? If nothing you do makes God love you more or less, then calling to him can have no connection whatsoever to his abounding love. The Yancey doctrine must regard this verse as odd as the assertion that the sun rises in the east on Tuesdays. Well, yes, I suppose it does. But why single out Tuesdays? The sun rises in the east every day. Chop off "on Tuesdays" and you have a meaningful sentence. In like manner, the Yancey doctrine needs to chop off "to all who call to you" in Psalm 86:5 in order for the verse to make sense.

Psalm 103:11: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.

More of the same. Here David is trying to make a point about God's love being connected to our fear of him, which the Yancey doctrine must blunt by correcting it to read, "...so great is his love, period," or, "so great is his love for those who fear him which is exactly equal to his love for those who do not fear him, because, as we all know, fearing him won't make him love us more or less."

Psalm 37:27-28: Turn from evil and do good; then you will dwell in the land forever. For the Lord loves the just and will not forsake his faithful ones.

I don't know how much plainer it can be. The Bible affirms that the Lord loves the just. To say that God loves the just and the unjust equally because his love is unconditional and nothing we do can make him love us more or less is absurdity to the point of farce.

Psalm 32:10: Many or the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him.

Note the words, "the one who trusts in him." That's a condition. Those who do not trust in him are not surrounded with exactly the same amount of unfailing love.

There are plenty of verses like this in the Bible's wisdom literature, verses that stubbornly resist being shoehorned into the doctrine that God's love is unconditional, cannot be affected by us, cannot be increased or decreased by anything we do. How can such a doctrine stand when confronted by texts like the ones below?

Psalm 146:8-9: The Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.

Proverbs 15:9: The Lord detests the way of the wicked but he loves those who pursue righteousness.

Pardon me for resorting to cliche, but this isn't rocket science. If you want God to love you, pursue righteousness. If you do wrong and become wicked, God will hate you (Psalm 5:5) and your way (Proverbs 15:9). It is right there on the pages of Scripture, again and again and again and again. Painful as it may be to acknowledge, the truth is that those who teach the unconditionality of God's love either do not read their Bibles or do not pay attention when they read them. This includes the vast majority of evangelical preachers today. I'm sorry, but someone had to say it.

Please do not think for a moment that God's love became unconditional when BC switched to AD and the Old Testament gave way to the New. The cross changed many things, but not this. The same affirmations about the conditionality of God's love are found in the New Testament:

2 Corinthians 7:9: God loves a cheerful giver.

These words can only be meaningful if God loves cheerful givers in a way or to a degree that he does not love grumpy givers, cheerful non-givers, or grumpy non-givers. I deny that this verse contains implicit qualifiers demanded by the Yancey doctrine: "God loves (exactly the same) cheerful (and grouchy) givers (and non-givers)." No, that is not right. The plain meaning must be allowed to stand and inspire many great and happy works of charity: Give cheerfully, and God will love you more.

Jude 21: Keep yourselves in the love of God.

This verse means, "Keep yourselves in the love of God."

An analogy might help. Imagine a commandment that said, "Keep yourselves fit and trim." We might not like that commandment, we might be fat and out of shape and want to stay that way - but there would be no doubt about what the words meant, and we would know exactly how to fulfill them. To keep ourselves fit and trim we must exercise and eat moderately. There would be things we would actually have to do and not do. But the Yancey doctrine must understand Jude 21 to be analogous to something more like, "Keep yourselves composed of atoms": an admonition to remain in a state from which you could not conceivably escape. And I think that's silly.

In this verse, Jude does not tell us how to keep ourselves in the love of God. But it wasn't necessary - his half-Brother had explained how to do that some years before:

John 15:10: If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.

Jesus did not say, "Whether or not you obey my commands, you will remain in my love." We remain in his love, or "keep ourselves in the love of God," by doing what he said. The condition is explicit and unmistakable.

Two more. In the following verses, Jesus expresses a cause-and-effect relationship between our doing something and God responding to it. The cause is our loving Jesus. The effect is God loving us.

John 14:21b: He who loves me will be loved by my Father.

John 16:27: The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

Again, there is no mistaking the condition. In these verses, God's love for us depends upon our love for Jesus. (It is also true that our love for Jesus depends upon God's love for us - see John 6:44, Romans 5:8, 1 John 4:10: these two truths complement rather than contradict.) And loving Jesus is not expressed as having a warm fuzzy for him, valuable as that may be. Jesus' love language is always obedience: If you love me, you will obey what I command...Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me (John 15:15, 21a).

Maybe someday I'll go to an evangelical church and rather than being asked to repeat, "Nothing I do can make God love me more," I'll be asked to say together with my brothers and sisters in Christ, When I obey Jesus, God loves me.

Amen.

What Did Jesus Mean By "Makes Her Commit Adultery"?

There are four passages where Jesus talks about divorce and remarriage: Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 19:3-9, Mark 10:2-12, and Luke 16:18. I give these texts in full at the end of this essay. Much has been written about them. It would take a book to begin to cover all the issues. My purpose here is modest: to explain just one phrase in those texts - "makes her commit adultery" - which appears only in Matthew 5:32. The verse reads,

But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

How could you make somebody commit adultery? And if you succeeded in making her do it, would she still be guilty of sin?

Context means everything here. The texts in Matthew 19 and Mark 10 show Jesus responding to a question put to him by the Pharisees: "Can a man divorce his wife for any reason?" (See Matthew 19:3 and Mark 10:2). The question was not innocent. An agenda of self-justification provoked it. Pharisees prided themselves on their obedience to the law. The law said, "Do not commit adultery," and no Pharisee ever wanted to be accused of cheating on his wife. But what if you're married and get tired of your wife and someone new comes along? No problem, said some Pharisees - just dump the first wife, give her a certificate of divorce (a legal document declaring her free to marry someone else), and then marry your second wife. That way you have not cheated on anybody.

Jesus said, in effect, No. You can't just dump a wife for no good reason and marry somebody else. That is still cheating. Even if you say, "But I gave her a certificate of divorce! She can go marry anybody else she wants, I don't care. I did the right thing by her." No, Jesus insisted, you have still wronged her. That's still your wife. Whether you slept with someone else while still married to her, or dismissed her with divorce papers and then took another woman - it's all the same. Either way it is still adultery.

I believe that is the essential point in all four passages.

But there are always complications. For example, what if the first wife wasn't innocent herself? What if she was sleeping around? Well in that case, Jesus said, the principle does not apply. You can divorce her. See Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9 where he says you can't divorce your wife except on the grounds of sexual immorality. In 1 Corinthians 7:15, St. Paul gave another exception - abandonment by an unbeliever: "If an unbelieving partner leaves, let him do so. The brother or sister is not bound in such cases." The Bible does not address other possible exceptions. For example, what should you do if your husband gets drunk all the time and beats you and the kids? Or what should you do if your wife tries to poison you or concocts false evidence against you so that you go to prison? I think in such cases we are expected to use the wisdom God gave us.

But then there are other kinds of complications. I believe the phrase "makes her commit adultery" - odd to our ears - arises in response to a linguistic complication.

At issue is the definition of the word "adultery." What exactly does the word mean? For us I think it usually means "cheating on a spouse" - sleeping with somebody while married to someone else. The potential problem with this definition is that it implies that the same act may be adulterous for one partner but not for the other. For example, if a married man sleeps with a single woman, this definition means that he has committed adultery but she has not. (What she has done is wrong, of course, but we would use some word other than "adultery" to refer to it.)

A wider definition specifies not so much the person but the act as adulterous. In this understanding, adultery is the act that takes place when a married person sleeps with someone other than his or her spouse - regardless of the marital status of the third party. With this definition, in the example above, both the man and his single paramour would be guilty of adultery.

In Jesus' day, did the word "adultery" refer to the person who was doing the cheating or to the act where cheating was done?

I believe that best evidence suggests that the word itself was in flux, and, by Jesus' day, was acquiring its present meaning of "cheating on a spouse." This is the way Jesus uses the word in Mark 10:11 where he says, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her." That is, such a man is essentially cheating on his first wife.

But for a precision-minded scribe or Pharisee, Jesus' point might lose force on the simple ground that that's not what the word adultery means! The original definition of adultery was wider in that it referred to the act but more narrow in that it was gender-specific. That is, adultery was the act that took place when a married woman slept with someone other than her husband. It didn't matter if that other man was married or not. He was an adulterer if he slept with another man's wife. In Leviticus 20:10 the death penalty is invoked both for him and the adulteress.

With this older definition in mind, a Pharisee might think, "But how could my second marriage be adulterous if my second wife was a virgin? Yes, I will have slept with two women, but in no case did I ever sleep with another man's wife. Even on Jesus' own terms, then, I'm still not an adulterer." (It must be emphasized again that we are not here contemplating the morality of the action but only what to call it. In the minds of some, if a married woman has not slept with another man, then - by definition - no adultery has occurred.)

I believe it was to accommodate this older definition and head off the objection it might provoke that Jesus said in Matthew 5:32 "makes her [the ex wife] commit adultery" rather than "commits adultery himself." The idea is that the abandoned ex-wife will surely remarry. When she does, then the older defining parameters of adultery will have been met: she'll be sleeping with someone other than her husband because her "real" husband, the first one, left her.

Does that mean that such an abandoned woman should never remarry, because by doing so she would become a true adulteress herself? No, that utterly misses Jesus' point. Jesus assumes that she will remarry. His point is that the guilt of this "adulterous" act is laid at the feet of her scoundrel ex-husband. He cannot finesse his way out of the charge of adultery by saying, "I never slept with another man's wife, so I am not guilty of adultery." Even if we grant the narrow point that he hasn't slept with another man's wife, he's still guilty of breaking the seventh commandment because of the situation into which he has forced his ex wife.

I believe the best parallel to this usage of "make," "force," or "make out to be" is found in 1 John 1:10, which says, "If we say we have not sinned, we make him [God] a liar, and his word is not in us." The Greek word here for "make" is the same in Matthew 5:32. Can anyone truly make God a liar? Of course not. God does not lie (Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18 ). What St. John means is that when we contradict God we make him out to be a liar - it is as though we were saying, "God lies." But we are the ones in the wrong, not he. We bear the guilt, not he. In exactly the same way, a man who divorces his wife for no good reason makes her out to be an adulteress, even though in point of fact she is quite innocent. He bears the blame, not she.

I hope this helps.

Full texts are below:

Matthew 5:31-32:
31 It was also said, "Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce." 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 19:3-9
And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

Mark 10:2-12
2 And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” 5 And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 7 ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 9 What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 10 And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

Luke 16:18
18 Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.

What Gays Should Have Done At Chic-fil-A on August 1.

I think my gay friends made a couple mistakes in pushing back against Christians who thronged to Chic-fil-A on August 1 in support of CEO Dan Cathy's opposition to homosexual marriage. The kiss-in on August 3 didn't work well - I think it was needlessly provocative, and the meager participation only contrasted with the committed show of force on the other side. Another misfire was a captioned photograph I saw of a long line at Chic-fil-A that read, "You'd never see that many Christians lined up to help at a food bank or homeless shelter." That strikes me as a frontal attack on a well-defended point. Food banks and homeless shelters are a staple of Christian charity, and thousands of Christians work at them and support them every week. Even the small church I attend (about 25 people) has prepared over 1700 lunches this year for day laborers - many of whom are poor and homeless.

So I am going to tell my gay friends what I think they should have done to counter what may have appeared to them like a conservative Christian onslaught. Yes, I'm handing them a club and pointing out a weak spot and inviting them to swing away.

Gays should have very politely passed out the following survey to every adult standing in the long line at Chic-fil-A on August 1:

I am conducting a survey of people who place a high value on moral purity. Your answer is confidential and anonymous. Please do not sign your name. Thank you for your cooperation!

Did you keep (or have you kept) your virginity till marriage, and, if married, have you had sex only with your spouse? Please check one.

1) Yes.

2) No.

3) I prefer not to answer.

Then having thanked kindly those who participated, all that my gay friends had to do was publish the results. For example (to make up data): "I handed out 100 of these surveys to people standing in line at Chic-fil-A. Thirty responded, and of those 30, 10 said 'Yes,' 10 said 'No,' and 10 said 'I prefer not to answer.' Of the 70 who did not return the survey, an unspecified but large percentage shifted about and looked uncomfortable. Only 10 percent of those who seemed to support Dan Cathy's disapproval of homosexual activity were willing to affirm that they themselves had observed Christianity's traditional code of moral behavior."

Try the shame approach. If you shout at a conservative Christian he'll probably shout back (he's only human). If you flaunt in his face behavior he thinks is wrong he may turn away in disgust and think he's better than you. But if you can shame him with the realization that he does not live up to the standards he professes he might just get very quiet and leave you alone. And if he's a good Christian he will thank you and go off to say his prayers.

I wonder if responding to such a survey would have stricken consciences and even gotten some people to leave the line at Chic-fil-A on August 1. Maybe not. But there is a story recorded in John 8 where some men bring to Jesus a woman caught in adultery, and they ask him about stoning her, and he says, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." One by one they all walk away, presumably thinking, Who am I to condemn in another what I am guilty of myself? (It must be said that this story is of doubtful authenticity because it appears in virtually none of the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and most Bible versions now rightly put it in a footnote - but no one disputes it is a good story!)

Even if the survey I recommend above would not have thinned the crowd at Chic-fil-A, maybe at least it would have set some Christians to thinking about the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:3, "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?" It is a good thing for Christians to consider whether they themselves have kept the teachings of Jesus. It is always better to look inward and grieve rather than outward and protest.

I am the first to acknowledge that Christian sexual morality is difficult, and that it is even - to the extent that our natures are corrupt - unnatural. Few people have lived their lives in consistent obedience to its rules, and even those who have managed to do so have found themselves stubbornly resistant to the will of God in some other area. But the difficulty of following Jesus Christ - the chafing, the going against our grain, the constant subjugation of our desires - should not surprise us. Jesus said that following him would be like picking up a cross daily and carrying it (Luke 9:23), and that anyone who was unwilling to do that was not worthy of him (Matthew 10:38) and could not be his disciple (Luke 14:23).

God alone knows how many true disciples of Christ waited for two hours on August 1 to get a politically-charged chicken sandwich. Their motives probably varied: some presumably saw it as a protest against gay marriage, others more as a support for Chic-fil-A in the face of the attacks it was enduring from politicians intolerant of Dan Cathy's convictions. But all the people in that line probably regarded themselves as Christians. And it is always fair for a Christian to be asked, by friend and foe alike, "Do you live by the standard you preach to others?"